Claudia Iacomino
Mnemosyne
13 April - 19 April 2021



On November 25, around on 23:00 pm, my father passed away. It was just me, my mother and Death breathing on us in the last five years. During all that time I wanted to take hold of his body that was slowly consuming itself like a mountain, but now I just want to hold onto his memory to avoid that all that existed will be swept away forever.

I just want to understand what memory is made of: how to practice it, how it has been powered, where does it go, what it has to do with the images, with the truth, with the memory itself, with the History per se and with the history of the community as a whole.

I scanned all his file recovering memories that don’t belong to me: youth, experiences, his views about things in general, interlacing the scannings with “collateral photographs”: pictures with a therapeutic and cathartic purpose, a study for exploration and reconciliation with oneself.

This job doesn’t follow a narrative progression and for this reason is fragmentary, sudden and unexpected, just as the memory is. The recollection is turnt into images, open-images in which one can find a story, far from being an individual one but more as a common, collective and recurrent grief.

The whole creative process has been a research on Memory and historical methodologies aimed at its literal unveiling. Mnemosyne, Greek Goddess of Memory and mother of the Muses, is also the title of the artwork by Aby Warburg from which this work takes inspiration from, especially for its historical-visual approach, favoring the idea that Memory is anything but something static that must be transmitted by ceremony, but rather an emotional activator capable of triggering powerful chemical reactions in reality. In other words, able of creating beauty


Claudia Iacomino (b. 1986, Naples, Italy) is an italian visual artist and photographer.

Her work focuses on the appearances and the human system of perception exploring the possible boundaries of visual perception and construction of experience. Even when she explores new media, she does not leave photographic semantics, choosing to exalt the static image as a metaphor for thought.

Claudia holds an MFA in Photography from the Academy of Fine Arts Napoli (Naples, Italy), where she presented her final dissertation about “Analysis of visual perception”. She also works as a teacher of Visual Communication and Photography, and her work has been exhibited in different institutions around Italy.