Graziella Romeo’s artistic research is situated within three fundamental macro areas: body, memory, and identity. Her work begins with an investigation into identity, where the self-portrait becomes a means to explore the mental processes that give rise to the concept of self. Consequently, the body represents a central element for manifesting personal experience and one’s way of being-in-the-world, drawing from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the lived body and living flesh.
The investigation into memory emerges at a later stage and currently constitutes the central core of Graziella’s research. Since memory is intimately linked to identity and individual experience, her projects address the complexity of remembrance, engaging in dialogue with neuroscience and the mnemonic dynamics of the human brain. In fact, only in recent decades has there been an unprecedented understanding of the biological underpinnings of memory. Thanks to contributions from cognitive sciences and psychology, neuroscientists have begun to study its biological foundations, focusing particularly on the relationship between the nervous system and mental processes, thereby contributing significantly to the understanding not only of how memory functions but also of learning and emotions. The photographic images that underpin this research are indissolubly linked to memory, influencing and shaping our perception of the past.
Home is an English term that indicates the place where we live, hence the house; it differs from the generic term house, which translates similarly but refers to any residential structure. Home thus becomes the title of this project, which features photographs from Graziella’s childhood, reworked through collage, painting, and finally, décollage. This process has allowed the artist to create an effect of wear and tear on the original image, with painted overlays and cancellations, evoking the sedimentation of memory.
Fragments is an installation where autobiographical images are arranged according to a composition reminiscent of a clock face. The counterclockwise reading was chosen to highlight the regressive mechanism of memory. It is a journey through time, filled with fragments of memory, but also uncertain and unpredictable future events, highlighted by the absence of the twelfth element.
The installation Playing with Memories invites viewers to play with memories as if they were spinning tops turning clockwise or counterclockwise, exploring memory as a continuous movement, capable of projecting into both the past and the future. In this flow, memory transforms into a dynamic mechanism: spinning counterclockwise opens to regression, bringing to light fragments of lived experiences, while spinning clockwise projects forward, generating new possibilities and perspectives yet to be lived. The metaphor of the spinning tops makes tangible the circular and sometimes labyrinthine nature of memory, opening a reflection on the non-linearity of lived time.
In “Reminiscence,” the relationship between memory and forgetfulness, between memory and oblivion, is highlighted—two seemingly opposing dimensions that together construct the idea we have of ourselves in a continuous process of addition and subtraction.
Currently, Graziella is pursuing a photographic experimentation that concretizes into hybrid visual works, balancing between documentation, memory, and representation. Through this research, she aims to confront the complexity of memory and remembrance through both autobiographical and collective work that can highlight the importance of memory in the construction of the self, starting from the reworking of memory and the personal experience that influence perception.
Graziella Romeo
Italy, 1994
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