This is a voyage of initiation.
It’s a story of the gradual acceptance of another part of the self, of the twin in mutation; in one word, it is about the new, in its manifold meanings.
The images were created on a singularly-focused journey that was undertaken to rediscover memories connected to the artist’s father.Through family photographs and his own dreamlike images, Camerini accesses his emotions and at the same time behaves like an archaeologist – the splinters of his own existence are buried in the deepest layers of his memory, and in order to reconstruct these memories, he travels again through the places of his childhood.
He climbs the same mountains that he used to visit during summer holidays; he sleeps in a tent, and contemplates these familiar landscapes; he collects fragments that shape themselves into unknown archipelagos; he has brief digital correspondences with his father, who – unaware of his travels – asks, as a parent would do, where he will sleep, what he will eat; he flies, and while flying helies on the precarious sides of his own self. The narrative is soft and delicate, and the rest of his family remains silent. To speak to his father, Camerini uses his camera, and the pictures become a whole new language, an attempt at explanation.
To quote Roland Barthes, “What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially", and as the childhood memory is indissolubly bound to those family pictures, Camerini uses this language to secure moments of his existence.
He registers the change within himself: he’s a man who creates a self-portrait, a mirror of himself.
This mystical experience – the ascent, the solitude – all become essential moments to his self-fulfillment. To fully understand, one has to challenge oneself; ascending, climbing, sweating, listening, showing, and exposing something private to the public. This story is everyone’s story, because growing up is everybody’s experience.
Will father and son meet again? Will you meet yourself?
The question is left open: relationships are evolving creatures in our lives.
Text by Giulia Ticozzi
