Edited by Margherita Pisano
Archival photo-narrative
When one watches a stray piece of home film from an amateur film-maker, especially those in the HomeLess archive from the most disparate provenance and anonymous authors, often one immerses oneself in fragments of distant lives, both spatially and temporally, of unknown people. There is often the occasional exceptionally evocative frame which captures the attention and fires the imagination, which fixes itself in our mind and causes us to construct imagined stories weaving together the people and places fixed onto the film. The frame is a fragment of the total film, just as a home movie is just a fragment of a whole life, a holiday, a particular moment. What would happen if, instead of first watching the whole film we allowed ourselves to jump off from the vision of a few instants, the extrapolation of a few frames seized from the cinematographic flow, without watching the entire film? What would happen if from this starting point we constructed a possible story? And what if we put this story down on paper? Using these questions as a starting point, along with the desire to explore new ways to reuse and redeploy images from the archive, the idea of archival photo-narrative is born, summoning authors to adapt and dramatise a story starting from a limited selection of frames.
The first in the Archival Photo-narrative series was published in issue 28 – 2024 of the journal Erbafoglio:
La luce appare dove non splende il sole (“The light appears where the sun doesn’t shine”), by Matteo Incollu
