Médaille de bronze dans la catégorie « Photomanipulation / IA »

Margherita Guardi emigrated with her brother and sisters to America in 1923. Since then she sent some pictures and some letters which got lost because nobody was concerned about them, after that all her tracks were lost. This project collects photos of her family photo album, from her youth in Italy to her life in America when she became a photographer. These “photos trouvées” tell a story of emigration and emancipation and of courage of those who, in every time, cross the oceans to find better living conditions.

But Margherita Guardi doesn’t exist. She is a visual alter-ego inspired by a great-aunt of mine who left for America and we lost her tracks. After a research on the emigration of my region and on the different styles of photography and the various formats through the different epochs, I created faces, locations and details, with AI and I printed images on baryta paper in my darkroom. It's a mixture of antique printing techniques and contemporary technologies in order to make a journey through the Time from the Past to the Present and the Future and to reflect in our immigration history, our memories, our archives and family albums, all things we are losing.