Claudia Iacomino – Mnemosyne

On November 25, around 23:00, my father passed away. It was just me, my mother and Death breathing on us in the last five years. During all that time I wanted to take hold of his body that was slowly consuming itself like a mountain, but now I just want to hold onto his memory to avoid that all that existed will be swept away forever.

I want to understand what memory is made of: how to practice it, how it has been powered, where it goes, what it has to do with images, with is the truth – with memory itself, with its history per see, and with the history of the community as a whole.

I scanned all his files, recovering memories that don’t belong to me; youth, experiences, his views about things in general, interlacing the scannings with “collateral photographs”: pictures with a therapeutic and cathartic purpose, a study for exploration and reconciliation with oneself.

This job doesn’t follow a narrative progression and for this reason is fragmentary, sudden and unexpected, just as the memory is. The recollection is turned into images, open-images in which one can find a story, far from being an individual one but more as a common, collective and recurrent grief.

The whole creative process has been researching Memory and historical methodologies aimed at its literal unveiling. Mnemosyne, the Greek Goddess of Memory and mother of the Muses, is also the title of the artwork by Aby Warburg from which this work takes inspiration, especially for its historical-visual approach, favouring the idea that memory is anything but something static that must be transmitted by ceremony, but rather an emotional activator capable of triggering powerful chemical reactions in reality. In other words, the ability to create beauty.

Claudia Iacomino (1986 Naples, Italy) is a photographer and visual artist based in Naples. Her research focuses on the appearances and the human system of perception exploring the possible boundaries of visual perception and construction of experience.

Iacomino works with photography reconsidering the state of the image, producing a particular moment that did not exist. This kind of approach to the image allows her to investigate photographic identity and its relationship with man, addressing different themes: from communication as a whole, from advertising to information to politics, up to death, in which the personal feeling make room between simulacra to investigate the systems of pain perception and memory.

Iacomino holds a Bachelor’s degree in Culture and Management of Cultural Heritage, Naples (Italy), and she holds a Master of Fine Art’s degree with honors in Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts Napoli, (Italy).