Cicatrici (Scars) by Silvia Bigi

Memories from the very first years of life are fragile and lost. Yet they exist, somewhere. Those traces, in a mysterious way, create our identity. Cicatrici starts from a real story: a plane accident happened in the August of 1985 in Italy. Some photographers decide to fly over hills to take pictures. The plane crashes in the wood. A passenger, despite his terrible condition, walks barefoot for hours, finding the way home. The wife, the 9 years old son, the 2 month and a half daughter, and other relatives, are waiting for him. Everyone remembers the accident in a personal way. Only the infant daughter has no memory of that day. That baby girl, was me. Since my visual memory is missing, I turn it into a research: I created an identikit of my relatives memories. I mapped my father's scars. I did the same journey he did, just in the opposite direction. From the point where he appeared to us, to the point where he revived. I walked on the stones over he walked to come back to us, until I found the wreckage – still there, 33 years later. In the end I built up a visual form of that path, reconnecting two surfaces touched by the same fire that day: my father's skin and the plane he took on August 10th, 1985. This project starts as an attempt to investigate on something that had been a huge impact on my life of which, ironically, I don't have any visual memory. Eventually, it becomes a speech on the fragility of the sense of sight, and on our need to grab on to images to believe in something.