BROKEN MEMORIES /archival mess: DISK_recovered_files 277,91 GB  All files broken.

INSIGHT

In 2020 my doubled archive hard drives died. I remember myself physically holding them in my hands with a feeling of deep despair.
I spent a lot of money and lost time trying to recover the files and I only obtain thousands of broken files many non-accessible, all compromised. All audio and video files are impossible to open. The professional technicians I paid could only divide the compormised files in folders and subfolders: aif, mp’, mp”, wav; ai, bmp, icns, jpg, orf, png, ps, psd, tiff…. 
This was my memory, the trace of my life as a photographer and a human being. An archive started in 2006. I finally gave up the useless efforts I made to recover them on a June night in 2020, after moths of experts at work, an Odyssey in itself.

Files are damaged, there is no way to have them back as they were originally. They had a name and an order. They were divided by years into different folders. I had professional projects, personal souvenirs, some brain-storming images and a huge family archive I scanned and organized in several months of work including vintage documents, ancient photographs, interviews, 8 mm films… I took the first big part of the images in Harlem, New York, where I used to live. There are photos from New Orleans, Paris, Chiavenna (my hometown in the north of Italy), Milan and many other places I visited for work or personal life. It is all lost, gone.

The funniest thing is that this huge digital mass of information became something else. The software for recovering files delivered odd images: pictures, sounds, texts and video files turned into something new, something that has its own beauty and a mysterious unit. I wonder how this can eventually happen. But yes, it happened.

Being a photographer, I often take more than a picture of the same scene or person: this action creates in the new life of my destroyed photos series. Strange repetitions occur and the corrupted images show different colours too.

FROM DESPAIR TO A NEW OBSERVATION


After being completely overwhelmed by the loss of all those memories and even more by the disappearance of a conspicuous part of my work, still in process and finished, I started to look at this experience differently.
I live in a digital era and this can happen. Actually, the obsolescence of the media is a huge issue of contemporary life. Moreover, the absence of any proof of the work I accomplished doesn’t erase the experience of making it and the knowledge I acquired. Aren’t them the real essence of life? The path and not the place we reach should be the goal, right? Then why did I feel so frustrated, lost, angry and sad? What shall I do?


Then I realized that the destroyed and fragmented memories characterised by chaos and uncontrollable visual associations question the power of photography and the need we feel to document things that often we will not look at. Those images also question my desire to create order, to organise and comprehend life through my art practice, giving a chosen point of view.
Thanks to this experience, I now know that digital images don’t last forever and this consciousness completely changed my approach to digital images, the process of taking and archiving them.

BOOK PROJECT


My goal is to make a book, including the largest amount of images I can still open printed on basic paper (such us newspaper' one). The random photographs will confront the reader to a mysterious diary in which nothing is clear and all is mixed up with no time line and no order. The simple layout and bounding will invite associations. Images pass from vertical to horizontal in different format all the time. The missing parts and damaged information seem to me a very interesting aspects, a quality of the self-generated files.

I have no real control: I am observing this fragmented flow of consciousness and printing only the files that the computer accepts to open. Am I still the author?