Ray, where have you been today?
(2025)
author(s): Pietro Fanti
connected to: Brera Academy of Fine Arts
published in: Research Catalogue
Is the reality perceived by someone with dementia less real than our own? Can photography give authority to this alternate reality?
This research, sparked by my newfound relationship with my dementia-affected grandfather Raymond, investigates the family album - often perceived as an unquestionable document - in order to uncover its ambiguities and to question photography in itself as the most trustful record of reality.
The inaccuracy of a medium that aims for objectiveness and is perceived as the bearer of truth, leads me to focus on three different ways of approaching the family archive (collection, editing and manipulation) and the relationship between mortality and memory. By using a mix of photography and photogrammetry, Ray's distorted memories - as he recounted them during his illness - became new images in order to materialise his present parallel truth. Alongside this dreamlike everyday, what has survived of Ray's past is contained in a briefcase: 254 photographs that have been transformed into postcards, travelling keepsakes, ready to be sent. If photography is in itself unreliable, why should the reality of a person who has lost his memory be any less real than our own?
Dialectics of Outside and Inside - A Sonic Study of Being through Illness and Isolation
(2021)
author(s): Mariske Broeckmeyer
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This essay and audio piece explore how the related experiences of illness and isolation problematize the clear spatial opposition of “outside” and “inside.” Adopting the dialectical models, proposed by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in his phenomenological study of outside and inside, I aspire to take aural notice on how the migraine sufferer’s sense of space shifts in sync with her sense of self throughout a migraine attack. Composed out of vocal sounds and domestic noises, recorded in and around the house, this piece merges the materiality of the room and voice in a conversation that balances on the edges of meaning. Juxtaposing one unto the other, both self and space get lost in displacement, matter melts and disappears into one roaring drone.
