Francesca Spataro

Untitled

2022

My father died in the middle of the pandemic on July 7, 2020.

I was in charge of unraveling his entire kingdom, cataloging, throwing away, dismembering, and filing. As in the story of the ark and very far from the divine presence I had to choose what to save.

I immersed myself in that vault with the delusional feeling of making sense of all the files of more than 4,000 photographs, thousands of letters, telegrams, documents and postcards.

In those long months of freeing up space, I lost finding stories and won by losing others. A constant duality of memory and forgetfulness, public and private, presence and absence, of what is real and fiction….

The idea is to reformulate my family mythologies, establishing new narrative lines through creating games and puzzles that allow me to reinvent the partial stories that we are telling each other with confusion. Remember the good times and rethink those that hurt us. The idea is to play "the cards" and create new healing and generous stories.

It will be a tribute to my father, who rightly believed... that life is an invitation to enjoy and live with enthusiasm.