"Piccoli Baci" (Little Kisses) is an exploration of my constrained relationship to my father who I did not meet until I was 23 years old. My story is intertwined not only with the history of my nuclear family, but within the parts that are unseen. This project is seeking to unravel my relationship to my father while exploring ideology, family, memory, and identity.
In western society, we strive for a perfect family image, while subconsciously and consciously editing, deleting, and creating a visual of a family that does not exist. I am curious about the photographs we do not include in our albums. The cast aside, ripped, sealed in a box photographs that are still a part of who we are and yet cannot live in the ideal family album. I am curious about the stories behind them that are told in whispers between family members. The stories that unravel over many, many years and at times, never unravel at all.
"Piccoli Baci" combines family photographs, poems, collected keepsakes, intervention photographs, and my own photographs from our first encounter. The project is guided by letters that I wrote directly to my father. Through the work, I face my own suppressed memories in order to unfold complex emotions and explore themes of absence, childhood, fatherlessness, and difficult family dynamics. I tackle feelings of meeting someone who is biologically a part of me, but who I know nothing about.
The work is presented in a handmade book that includes a smaller separate zine in the back where certain parts of the book are translated into English from Italian. Please refer to last image in this project to see the book dummy.
I wonder where you are and
what you might be doing.
I wonder when the letters
started and why they stopped.
I wonder how my mother
first spoke of you.
How did she explain
who you are to
five-year-old me?
Did I understand?
I have very few photographs from
when you and my mother
were together.
Her memories of you
are faint and distant.
She used to say my hands
are like your hands:
long and thin,
and fit to play the piano.
And when I speak
my hands try to speak for me
just like yours.
Are they like yours?
Can I be like you when I did not
grow up seeing the way
your hands speak for you?
Can I be like you when I did not
grow up hearing how delicate
you are with your words?
Can I be like you when I did not
grow up learning how tender you
are with the world around you?
Still, you have always been there,
in the back of my mind,
Suppressed under layers of
dust
and time.
What is a father anyway?
I look for you in the faces of others.
There are many parts of you
that I do not know,
that I might never understand.
You have another family.
Do they know I exist?
Two sisters who have
my eyes
and your eyes
and your mother’s eyes.
I fear they will reject me.
I fear they will
I fear
I
My tears begin to fall
because there are many
parts of me that
you will never know.
Since I was very little,
I have been collecting
little pieces of you.
I kept tangible memories
from those few surreal
and summery days
when we met.
Sugar packets
and train tickets.
I think I needed to physically
hold onto those memories
we created together.
To believe it was all real.
Still, I don’t know you.
I don’t know if I ever cared to know you.
Maybe I am lying to myself.
I tried to meet you,
many moons ago,
across oceans and several countries.
I was 16 years old.
I was staying at a hotel in Italy when
I received a knock on my door.
My heart beat and beat and beat.
I opened the door to find the
manager of the hotel with a fax that said you could not make it because
your train broke down.
You left me questioning in my
hotel room if a fax was an
appropriate way
to declare that
you are a coward.
Many years went past before
we finally met.
Before I finally met my father.
It took 24 years to finally meet you.
On a summer day,
you were waiting
for me and my mother
at the exit of an airport in Italy.
My heart beat loudly.
My mother’s heart beat loudly.
She was also meeting you
after many, many years.
When I was a child, I used to wonder
what you would think of me
if we finally came face to face.
I was trying to grasp
onto something
that didn’t exist.
A stability I never knew.
Now I wonder if you ever thought
about what I would think of you
if we finally came face to face.
Still, I am afraid of who I will
become if I get to know you.
The day we finally met,
I saw myself in you.
That scared me the most.
It was strange to see
you and my mother
together.
It was strange to be
held as if you
knew me all along.
It was hard to see
you cry on the chest
of my mother as if
you were a child
yourself.
My tears are fading
the more I unfold
all of these
memories.
Maybe one day
we will meet again
where the earth crumbles
into the sea.
Where we cannot
hide anymore.
The next image is a selection of pages from the book dummy.
The entire book is 114 pages long and is hand-bound by the artist herself.
