L'unghia del leone
The incredible life and personality of my grandfather Michele Pierri were the reference point for my version of L'unghia del Leone.
Always remaining intimate, the first verses of the poet Michele Pierri, contained in the unpublished volume The Lion's Nail, have become the symbol of the observation of how much his figure has determined my gaze. As it progressed and became a visual work and subsequently a book, this reflection moved to place and memory as elements seen from both a personal and collective perspective. Through the evidence of the photographed object as such, particularly in family images, beautiful in their intimate utility and full of all the signs of time that this use has engraved on them in the scratches and dust, the fragments of memory crystallize to become a symbol of the current present feeling. It is a here-and-now that uses the past tense.
The use of light and cutting is aimed at bringing to the surface, not so much the memory of the moment that was, important and very particular, but the memory of the moment that gives shape to the present. These images work like mirrors, they are objects of use, they are places and memories seen as a function of history understood as historical 'perception'. The union of these objects in a physical place transforms it into a fluid space, historical but not nostalgic, descriptive but visionary.
“Begin, go out of the house, apply yourself to the Law of the Buddho; annihilate the army of death as an elephant upsets a hut of reeds. He who shall walk without distraction under the discipline of this Law escaping renewed births, will put an end to sorrow”. These words, transcribed by hand by my grandfather from a text by Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire - England 1914 - mark the back of a postcard from the 1920s which on the other side shows a self-portrait of the young poet in the guise of a Buddhist monk: this object becomes a fragment of memory that acts and is sculpted in the present as a reminder of the position to take in front of life.
I approached memory as a transmitted story and as a sort of appropriation of my grandfather’s life and poetry. I tryed to highlight how a memory can became the piece of a new life by shifting the nostalgic sense to the value of the action of a trace, so I rephotographed the images bringing out their being objects with their dust and scratches, passed from hand to hand trough the years and verses.
Archive photos, dried violet from 1926, digital prints, poetry, audio recording of the poet's voice from the 70s.
L'unghia del Leone is the name of Michele Pierri's first poetic excavations, and since 2012 it has become the title of the work and book by his niece Aminta Pierri. Created for Lina Pallotta's II master's course at the Roman School of Photography, the dummy was exhibited at La Pelanda Macro Testaccio Photobook in 2012, and subsequently published by Witty Books in 2014 and presented at the Paris PhotoBookClub on the occasion of the Off Paris Photo in the same year. The second edition was in 2016.
After various partial shows, the first exhibition was in Naples in 2021 at Magazzini Fotografici
L'unghia del leone special edition
