To understand Alessandro Vicario’s Domestic fragments between memory and oblivion ― in order, for instance, not to see them merely as a representation of forms, extracted from the banality of everyday life and dignified by photography ―, it may be useful to begin with the profoundly autobiographical origins and motivations of this work. The author, born in 1968, lived for a long time with his paternal grandmother, Jole: through his childhood and adolescence, he spent a month each year with her in their summer house in Chianciano; later, while at university, he lived with her in Milan, in her modest flat in via Sant’Abbondio, close to the Naviglio pavese. This shared life of a young man facing his first adult experiences and a woman already weakened in her health and conscious of the approaching end is surely unusual in our times; but it is maybe less surprising if that youth doesn’t mean just exuberance and vitality, but also a restless sensitivity, inclined to wonder seriously about the meaning of one’s own life and of the lives of others ― maybe also because of the daily contact with the experience of old age and decay, seemingly so distant and extraneous but brought close through the deep bond with a beloved person. These are also the years when the author, initiated in photography by his father, a skilful professional, begins to see in that fascinating magic a possible tool for self-expression and for the exploration of reality - though avoiding from the very start, thanks to the strict, demanding approach of his training, the easy traps of a rough amateurism. In 1999 his grandmother Jole dies, and her flat is sold and emptied of all that made it a well-known, reassuring landscape; two years later, the house in Chianciano is renovated. In these two occasions, one of which, the first one, is surely heart-rending (but the other one isn’t painless either), the author finds himself confronted for the first time with the disappearance of things that are such a big part of our lives, on whose apparently solid background we are used to projecting our own image and the flow of our vicissitudes. For the first time, he faces the experience of leaving behind a life phase that will never return again. From this situation the need, the imperative even, arises in him of retaining some scrap of what is about to leave the stage of visible and to dissolve in the flow of memories. To this need, which is at the same time intimate and endowed with objective power, he, a graduate in History and thus familiar with its “indirect, presumptive, suppositional […] knowledge”[i], finds an answer in photography as a mean “to find clues” and “evidence in the historical process”[ii], as extraction and organisation of traces left by things with the intermediation of light: in this case signs, clues, evidence left behind by a beloved person’s life and by his own, in two houses whose aspect will soon radically change. And, like in history, in archaeology or in the transmission of texts and artworks, where what can be preserved and remembered is always far less than what it used to be, and to make up for the loss one tries to reconstruct a meaning by binding together the scattered remains - so in the case of this private archaeology it is possible, too, to save only part of a whole forever lost, i. e. some domestic fragments to be won for memory and delivered from oblivion; and the gaps will be filled in with the meaning suggested by the combination of fragments in the spaces of an installation, allusive of physical spaces (and life habits, relationships, affections…) that the onlookers will imagine and recreate on the basis of their own experiences and personal archaeologies. This work is the expression of a modern pietas in which, though, “all intimacies are sacrificed to the illumination of detail”[iii]; it derives from a great intensity and emotional urgency, that the author is nevertheless able to control with the rigour of the method and rules he imposes on himself, as if to stem his grief and compensate symbolically for chaos and decomposition with the order and precision of forms. The images are always frontal reproductions of two-dimensional or almost two-dimensional subjects, executed with an optical bench camera permitting the maximum control over geometry and depth of field, printed at a one-to-one ratio with the subject and mounted on rather thick panels. But the austere technique is not just self-control, and the minute restitution of the subjects is no illusionist game: the images, offering themselves to the onlookers with a physical presence that brings them close to the real things, suggest they should be looked at as at finds saved from destruction and recomposed, even though fragmentarily, in a space evoking their lost context. Here the author finds himself in syntony with a number of artistic researches of the last thirty years[iv]. Setting out from a personal exigency, he relives and appropriates on impulse the rich history of experiences and reflections that in the 20th century - between avantgardes e neo-avantgardes, theorists of the Twenties-Thirties and of the Seventies-Nineties (with behind them the birth of semeiotics at the beginning of the century) - unrolled around the idea of the photographic, i.e. the idea of a peculiar image that suggests not only a representation but also a presence; not just an icon or resemblance of reality but also an index or trace of it[v]; not so much reality reproduced by our hand as reality producing itself before our eyes. An idea that, becoming more and more explicit as it progresses from the handprints of prehistoric caves to the classical myths of Narcissus and the maiden of Corinth, to the medieval legend of Veronica and the modern obsession with a self-painting or self-drawing representation, ripens at last in that “drawing produced by light” that is photo-graphy, and from there is relayed further in much contemporary artistic practice[vi]. This result, though, is strictly connected not just with a long vicissitude of the past, but also with a specific condition of the present: in the capitalistic present, relationships between people appear as relations between things, and things are in their turn subtracted from full perception by being reduced to goods, to the abstraction of the mere exchange value[vii]. Thus in the world of the universal reification, “all of our experiences end up in the ambit of the ‘unconsciously automatic’ […]. The object passes us by as if packaged; we know what it is by the place it takes, but we only see its surface”, and “life disappears, turning into nothing”[viii]. Hence the discovery of the value of art as opposition, with the goal of “restoring the meaning of life” and of “transmitting the impression of the object as ‘vision’ and not as ‘recognition’”; a goal it achieves through “the process of ‘estrangement’”, that is “the transposition of the object from its usual perception to the sphere of a new perception, […] delivered from automatism”, because there “the […] ‘vision’ […] is created ‘artfully’, in a way that makes perception linger over it, thus reaching its highest possible force and duration”[ix]. So the paradox comes true that, just through the rediscovered adhesion to perceptive materiality, to the here-and-now of things, art refers “to something else […] than what is immediately expressed by single tangible forms, but, at the same time, to ‘another’ content within the same forms”[x]; it hints at a transcendence that is wholly earthly, and yet alternative to the pretension of capitalistic reification to present itself as the only possible world. This is the art that carries out “the salutary estrangement between man and his surroundings. It gives free play to the politically educated eye”[xi]: the eye that knows well that, in a reified world, “everless a mere restitution of reality tells of reality”, because that reality is by no means innocent: to regain a relationship with it, one must instead “construct something, something artful, arranged”[xii], and this is what “photographic construction”[xiii] does, with its extracting and recomposing, decontextualizing and recontextualizing fragments of reality. This kind of photography is centred on things, not to invite us to exchange them and consume them, but to re-educate our gaze by estranging it, by releasing it from the automatism of exchange and consumption, by showing us the possibility of redeeming those same things as presences charged for us with significance, with human relationships not reduced to wares. This is for me the meaning of Domestic fragments by Alessandro Vicario, and of the consistent progress of his research through Screpolature. Dal muro di Berlino (Cracks. From the Berlin Wall, 2003), Paesaggi d’assenza. Sulle tracce di Lalla Romano (Landscapes of absence. In the tracks of Lalla Romano, 2003), Borghi abbandonati in Val Borbera (Abandoned villages in Val Borbera, 2005)[xiv]: all works where the collection of photographic traces of things leads to the more than ever present problem of memory, never before so denied or abused and never before such an unavoidable, historical, ethical and esthetical question, where the reasons of autobiography acquire a “hidden political significance”[xv], that of the story and the choices of us all.