Some images in the series are black and white, some coloured by hand
and some yellowed by time. We understand from this and numerous other
details that the photographs date from different periods, and from their
amateurish snapshot aesthetic that they all form part of a family album
featuring the same people in different situations and stages in their
lives. Another constant presence is the figure of a slim young woman
with long black hair, upon whom time seems to leave no trace.
Moira Ricci delves into the photographs of the past following the tracks
of her mother, whose dates of birth and death provide the series with
its title and indicate the time span covered by the images. Digital
processing of old family photographs enables the artist to appear beside
and observe her mother while remaining an extraneous figure, a sort of
ubiquitous ghost hovering on the edges of the images and events.
It
is not, however, in response to retrospective needs that Ricci
addresses these photographs of the past. She looks at reality in an
attempt to overcome its spatiotemporal dimension by meeting her mother
virtually in various moments of her life before her sudden death.
Digital image manipulation serves the artist to eliminate temporal
distance and use the photographs of her “family chronicles” to consider
her mother’s past and her own present and origins at the same time.
Moira
Ricci takes the intimate, family photographs lodged in the memory of
every individual as the subject of her work. As the social psychologist
Harald Welzer points out in his Theorie der Erinnerung (Theory of
Memory), while these shots can sometimes come to replace our memories
of situations we actually experienced, others taken in our absence
remain alive and fixed in our memory as though we had really been
present on the occasion shown.