Self-Portrait - “20.12.53 - 10.08.04”

Moira Ricci sneaks into the photographs of the past on the tracks of her mother, whose birth and death dates give the title to the series and indicate the time period covered by the images. The artist, in fact, digitally re-elaborates old photographs of her mother, next to which her inserts himself and turns her gaze, while remaining an external character, a sort of omnipresent phantom that is held at the edge of the image and events. The comparison with the photographs of the past does not respond to the need for a retrospective look: Moira Ricci looks for reality in an attempt to go beyond the space-time dimension, virtually meeting her mother in different moments of her life and before her sudden disappearance . Through the digital manipulation of the image, Moira Ricci suppresses the temporal distance and, through the photos of "family chronicle", turns back to the mother's past and at the same time to her present and her roots. Moira Ricci chooses those intimate and familiar photographs as subject of her work, instants that are fixed in the memory of each of us. As social psychologist Harald Welzer pointed out in his book Theorie der Erinnerung, it sometimes happens that these photographs replace, in our memory, the memory of situations actually experienced. Other photographs, taken in our absence, are nevertheless present and anchored in our memory, as if we had witnessed the facts they describe firsthand.