“Letters from childhood”
film photography
2014
In the series “Letters from Childhood, ” I am performing a subtle but radical deconstruction of the very structure of memory. Childhood here is not a nostalgic archive, but a battlefield between the fluid, elusive reality of the past and the obsessive attempts of consciousness to materialize it in the present. This is a study of digital uncertainty inside the human psyche: as vague emotions and fragmentary impressions (“foggy trace of presence”) they become the only “data” available to restore the lost world. Choosing a medium—format film is not just an aesthetic gesture. This is a strategy to resist the digital world. The analog process, with its chemical unpredictability and tactile materiality, becomes a fragile aesthetic refuge for memories that are too vulnerable to the purity of numbers. Visual effects (blurring, double exposure, graininess) obtained exclusively at the time of shooting are not defects, but the materialization of the memory deformation itself. They are like visible metaphors of how time and the psyche distort a clear sunny day, turning it into the unnaturalness of the familiar. The frames of the series are not photographs of objects, but photographs of processes: the process of remembering, the process of forgetting, the process of seeking refuge in the inner landscape. Scanning negatives and digital printing is a key conceptual step: it is the translation of an analog memory trace (film) into a digital code, emphasizing the fragility of the transition between worlds (real /remembered, analog/digital) and the inevitable vulnerability of any artifact of the past in the face of modern fixation technologies. “Letters from Childhood” is a dialogue with the fear of self—destruction. I create aesthetic shields out of light, shadow and the grainy texture of the film, trying to keep the “silence of childhood”. But these shelters are temporary and fragile, like a dream that melts at dawn. The project proves that childhood harmony is unattainable as a fact, but it is possible as an act of resistance — resistance to complete dissolution into the digital noise of the present through persistent, albeit obviously imperfect, embodiment of the ghosts of the past. It is a flashlight that highlights the dark corners of the psyche, where aesthetics becomes the last thread connecting us to the disappearing “I” of childhood.
