This series was inspired by Vincenzo Cardarelli’s poem Passato (Past). Giacomelli began working on it the year his mother died and continued for four years thereafter.
In this series, Giacomelli retraces the resonant places of his life. A young female protagonist, Giacomelli’s relative, inhabits these places with him. She is Giacomelli’s “alter-ego” in this intensely autobiographical series.
These photographs are charged with tension as Giacomelli seeks to turn disparity into unity: he elapses the temporal gap between events and elements that re-emerge from his past. The long flowing locks of hair and the bare tree branches from his earlier series Caroline Branson from Spoon River intermix in Passato with images of the protagonist. The locks of hair in both series bear a strong familial poignancy: they belong to Giacomelli’s daughter, Rita (photographed in the early sixties). The protagonist’s face and body repeatedly appear in the same form across the series via superimposition, sometimes merging with the scenes of Giacomelli’s past. The series is an echo chamber.
In the 1990s Giacomelli wrote: ‘language becomes the environment in which the image breathes. I have a vision for tenses where I feel like I’m inside them, I feel utterly inert, almost absent. An image is the product of a faceless interior force exploding in space. I alter reality to give sense to the subject. I decompose and recompose to make meaning.’
(Mario Giacomelli, writing in the 1990s, in Mario Giacomelli. Under the skin of real, ed. Katiuscia Biondi, Schilt Publishing, 2015)
