In 2000, immediately after being discharged from hospital, Giacomelli compiled Questo ricordo lo vorrei raccontare (I’d like to tell you about this memory) with photographs from 1997. This series and La domenica prima (The Sunday before) are the last Giacomelli made.
‘This is my precious critical confession about life’s adventure, a reflective outpouring born from my post-operation haze, and crystallised here as a flux of images between me and the world.’
‘It isn’t easy to explain my presence in these last photographs, it’s as if I entered into myself and re-emerged purified. So in these photographs I also included my face; like a jumper turned inside out, I wear my interiority on the outside. I enter on the inside and leave on the outside. But when I leave it’s as if I’ve been cleaned, […] purified, because I’ve experienced the joy of having been present, of having this memory.’
(Mario Giacomelli, in S Guerra, La mia vita intera, Bruno Mondadori, 2008)
