Dedicated to our grandparents and to the enthrallment we felt listening to them
Listening to the past, remembering, sharing memories… in order not to forget and be ready for the future. A space for remembrances, for all the old pictures and stories that are part of our lives. All the things that we remember or that lay hidden somewhere in our memory, or maybe in that of our forefathers. Our story, our origin… but even the picture of what we will become. The idea of memory comes from the sleepless nights I spent with Sonia talking about love and remembrances, looking at old pictures, discussing about the diseases affecting our flesh, with the precise intention of creating a basis for our future.
Lina Vergara Huilcamán
“Even if the world ended tomorrow, today I would plant another apple tree.”
Some time ago, I was asked to choose an adjective to introduce myself. I had no doubts: with my pen and my belly, I wrote: “I am a Partisan, for better or worse”. Today, I would write the same. The word “Partisan” itself evokes a strong and radical choice. A choice that doesn’t make my manner less sweet but imbues its meaning and guides me in directions I have to defend. Today more than ever before, I invoke Memory, a feeling of origin towards things, a personal memory mixed up with the collective one. And I evoke a memory through the pages of Illustrati, a personal or collective experience, because at the origin of all this there has always been the search for something which is lost and cannot be renounced. Something that needs to be looked at. Again and again. Pages of a memory will call for other memories. Travels will follow different paths investigated one after the other. Evoking images and perceptions. Remembrances that will produce effects, through memory. Sentimental geographies towards a journey in the places of the dust. Talking and writing about Memory is important for our existence, because we wouldn’t exist without it. Because by means of it we build the meaning of our relation with places, things and people. A relation which is necessary to re-establish a new contact with what we are and were, trampling on the prevailing oblivion by means of knowledge, in order to make sure that Memory, both individual and collective, is a shared feeling, a harmony, it is not nostalgic or sentimental. A feeling that we are part of the whole.
Sonia Maria Luce Possentini