Simile alle ombre o al sogno. Like shadows or like dreams

Like shadows or like dream explores the fragile space between dream and wakefulness. Using chemigrams and archival images, it reflects on imagination as a tool to unveil the unseen, capturing fleeting visions that dissolve into nothingness before waking

Like shadows or like dreams

Like Shadows or Like a Dream" takes inspiration from a verse in the Odyssey (XI, 207), where Ulysses, descending into the Underworld, encounters the shadow of his mother. Three times he tries to embrace her, but she slips away—no longer earthly, but like a dream: ethereal, intangible, mysterious. This moment becomes the central metaphor of the project, which explores the fragility of images suspended between dream and wakefulness, between the visible and the invisible. Like the shadows of the Underworld, these images inhabit an undefined space. Each frame is a fragment that reflects dimensions of time and space within the dream realm.

The project seeks to capture that latent moment between the end of the night and the beginning of the day when images imprint themselves on memory and sensations linger into wakefulness. These are visions that sometimes return, resurfacing in daily life as persistent memories. It is as if the world of dreams possessed its own architecture, its own "historical" memory, repeating itself night after night, where pieces of past dreams are continually dreamed again. (Fellini used to say he lived two lives: one awake and one in sleep.)

This dimension completely transforms the objects of the world. They could be houses, once inhabited, now altered, expanded, transformed. They could be places, no longer the same and yet unchanged—unsettling geographies of seas, mountains, or cities. Or objects, or parts of the body—double images, unsettling or reassuring, within those geographies where the dream transfigures everything, where everything remains hidden. More often, the meaning of these images eludes comprehension. Sometimes it reveals itself over time; other times, they return, understood even before words can explain them.

The construction of these photographs mirrors the layered nature of dreams. The images are created using chemigrams produced in the darkroom, where light, chemistry, and chance generate shadows and material traces. To these are added photographs drawn from archives—images of places, shadows, and silhouettes that incorporate collective archetypes, creating a dialogue between the personal and the universal.

This interplay between what is revealed and what escapes invites reflection on the very act of seeing and on imagination as a tool for illuminating what remains hidden. Like Shadows or Like a Dream ventures into this secret and intimate space that precedes awakening—a moment in which ephemeral images float for an instant in consciousness, only to dissolve into nothingness.