News and images multiplying on top of each other, then dissolving into a confused, restless vortex. Faces that speak to us and yet remain indifferent, ready to disappear from our memory in a flash. Background noises amplifying until they cover every single bit of silence. Our society moves rumbling forward, as if outstretching to swallow the past, experiences engraved in time, small memories, affections that cannot be turned into profit. And still, in no other time contemporary art – as if crossed by a stubborn desire of resistance – has so often insisted on memory and committed itself to the recovery of the past, to the creation of silent spaces where one can hear again the humming of things, even of the seemingly more trivial ones. Inside the magical, protective circle of this art, clamour and haste seem to be banished, time suspended. And there’s room again for ancient, outdated questions such as: “How can we cope with the loss of a beloved person? How can we preserve the memory of his/her life after his/her death?”. Alessandro Vicario asks himself these questions and discovers that the material trails left by the life of his beloved grandmother, who recently passed away, are bound to vanish soon: the house in Milan, where she spent her last years, is about to be sold and taken over by new tenants, and the old summer house in Chianciano, where he spent long summer months with her, will also soon be renovated, whitewashed and cleaned. Thus, before it’s too late, Alessandro Vicario returns to those two houses, by now bare, almost completely emptied of their furniture but not yet of the traces of a life and of time, deposited on the walls, on the floors, on the doorposts. With care and patience he observes objects, signs, shadows once partially hidden by use. There, on a wall painted in light-blue, he discerns the mark of a painting that has been taken down; on the entrance door, he notices that time has almost imprinted his grandmother’s surname into the wood … In the softened silence of the desert house, he photographs with meticulous care these small traces of a beloved existence, in an obstinate attempt to fix every memory, every trace of what she has lived through. His accuracy, his attentive, scrupulous gaze, make his art of photographing akin to Ishiuchi Miyako’s, the Japanese artist. In her work Mother’s (1), this author takes a series of close ups of her mother’s body and, after her death, matches them with the objects that belonged to her, taken one by one: a petticoat, a hairbrush with some hairs still tangled in it, a pair of worn-out shoes, a set of false teeth, a powder-compact, an almost consumed lipstick … Objects which Ishiuchi Miyako, like Alessandro Vicario, frames in an analytical way, with extremely accurate, frontal foregrounds, much like portraits. Perhaps this need (expressed by some contemporary photography) to become a tenacious instrument of connection knows no borders, since both, the Italian and the Japanese, use photography as a means of capturing reality, with the aim of not letting any of the memories hidden inside objects slip away. Neither of them seems to be interested in a descriptive, comprehensive vision, or in creating images where subjective interpretation prevails, but rather in photography as reception, proximity, closeness. Composed by images that are almost fragments, their works are able to transform what they portray in an intense presence, mute and eloquent at the same time. A presence which narrates not just the contingent history of a single life or house, but imposes itself instead as shared memory of a generation’s past. Ishiuchi Miyako’s work restores, for instance, her mother’s figure, but also the memory of a woman who has collected the stories and thoughts of those who have lived through the turmoil of post-war Japan. “By recounting a personal loss, Ishiuchi leads us to share it as a collective loss that echoes inside us, immersed as we are in the hardness of the present, thus sowing the seeds of memory” writes Kasahara Michiko, curator of the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art (2). By showing us the houses marked by his grandmother’s presence, Alessandro Vicario intensely evokes, more than with any words, the story of a strong bond of affection. Just looking at the series of images faithfully reproducing a doorpost where his grandmother used to record, year after year, the height reached by her young grandson, is enough to make us perceive the intensity of their relationship and, at the same time, to lead us back to our childhood ties. The grandmother’s house itself, so humble and not in the least interested in looking like the interiors shown by indoor architecture magazines, reveals itself in every detail as a place capable of reflecting the story of its inhabitant. A story that’s also the history of a time when consumism hadn’t yet appeared, when the custom was still in use of protecting even simple, humble objects with thoughtful care. “There was a thin paper,/ blue or red,/ and books were covered/ so they wouldn’t get spoiled”, Alfredo Tamisari writes for instance in his book Francobolli di tempo (Postage stamps of time) (3), in which he recalls his childhood during the Fifties and Sixties. Nothing was meant to spoil quickly, everything had to be lovingly preserved as long as possible. And those constant minding gestures also had the result of lifting the objects from their anonymity, turning them into presences carrying traces of the lives of those who used them. Even schoolbooks, thanks to their homemade covers, reflected the taste and skilfulness of each student (mine, for instance, were immediately recognizable by the slovenliness of the paper folds). In the same way, the house of Alessandro’s grandmother is filled with these small gestures of attention, referring not just to domestic wisdom, but also to the thoughtful soul: each window still has its pleated curtain, the kitchen walls are protected by a white wallpaper that fits with the tiles around the sink, the radiators are equipped with a matching evaporator to restore the necessary humidity... Alessandro Vicario observes the ‘grandmother’s houses’ like a body that carries engraved in it the traces of that life. With his caring gaze, where every object is seen frontally and transformed into an image with the same dimensions of the thing photographed, he imitates that same care his grandmother used to reserve to her world of home and affection. Moved by the desire of keeping alive a world made of objects and signs doomed to disappear, he gathers visual fragments like a persevering collector, pricking up his ears to listen to the silent humming of their voice. And because his gaze doesn’t claim to interpret what it is facing, one realizes that his granting visibility to things doesn’t conceal the aim of capturing them or to laying them bare, but just that of preserving them, of rescuing them from oblivion and indifference. Born in a state of concentration, from an exercise, as it were, of safeguarding and subtraction of self, his images, just because they are so close to the objects, so preoccupied with being their exact copy even in their proportions, manage paradoxically to guarantee their remoteness, to guard their mysterious language. The remoteness his images reveal is indeed not just mere distance but a sort of modesty, of care, even of respectful proximity, able to receive the silence that lies at the bottom of and around things, leaving them as though gently immersed in the slow, soft passing of time. “To me, writing always meant picking up from the thick, complex fabric of life some images, some sounds from the world’s noise, and to surround them with silence” writes Lalla Romano in her Nei mari estremi (In extreme seas) (4). In the same way, Alessandro Vicario recollects in the empty space of the house some “visual evidence”, isolates it and plunges it into silence, turning it into a sort of presence-absence that concerns us all. Because by simply transforming things into images, he causes a shift involving and upsetting our own experience. As Maurice Blanchot recalls, when “the object was there, we seized it in the living movement of a comprehensive action - but when it became an image, it became instantaneously elusive, unreal, impassible, no longer the object removed, but this object as representation of removal itself, the presence in its absence, seizable because of its being unseizable, appearing through its disappearance, the return of what doesn’t come back, the alien core of remoteness as the only life and heart of the object” (5). Released from the contingency of reality, objects become images open themselves to a paradoxical condition: they offer themselves as presences and, at the same time, they deny themselves to experience and appear as fleeting; they testify of a reality, but they send that reality back to the past; they are perfect copies of the real, and yet they act as metaphors where the visible becomes the presence of the invisible and the sound of life turns into an incumbent silence, an impersonal echo. Blocked as they are in a sort of interval that longs for life but can never reach it, the objects-images seem to lead a mysterious existence of their own, like an oscillating apparition. An apparition that transforms them in an enigmatical intensity field where anybody can wander, find the traces of their own past again and feel love and compassion for each thing in the world that is doomed to disappear, to die.