I am the color

Alfredo, my grandparent. Each portrait is paired with original documents, tracing both identity and memory. The colour marks my presence: a bridge between past and present, between my ancestors and myself.

The work is created entirely in digital form, although it draws on authentic family materials: original photographs, some dating back to the late 1800s, and official documents from 1870 to the present day. Each “card” is dedicated to one of my relatives – my mother, my grandparents, my great-grandparents – and brings together a fragment of their existence: a birth, marriage or death certificate paired with two portraits taken at different times of their lives. These photographic collages are entirely real, not the result of artificial manipulations, but a reconstruction of memory through what has survived over time.

The colour I add to their faces is my personal intervention: it is my presence within the family tree, my gaze resting on the past, my attempt to connect with those who came before me. Colour also stands for today – for vitality, for continuity, for the act of remembering that is never neutral but always situated in our own time. The hues I apply are not random: they are extracted from fragments of street art found in my city, contemporary signs that echo against the silence of archival papers.

This project is therefore both intimate and universal. It is the story of my family, but also a reflection on memory, origins, distance and mourning. By reconstructing my genealogy in visual form, I seek not only to give faces back to those who preceded me, but also to show how the past and the present can live together in the same image – how our lives are never isolated, but always woven into a larger narrative that spans generations.