Silvia Bigi was born in 1985, in Ravenna, Italy. In 2009 she holds a bachelor’s degree at the University of Visual Arts in Bologna, continuing her studies with a Master’s degree at Centro Sperimentale di Fotografia Adams in Rome and a course at the International Center of Photography, New York. With her research she explores photography as a language, its boundaries, as well as its connections with other media. She usually works on crossed-media projects, including installation, video and sound. Her artworks have been exhibited in group and solo shows, nationally and internationally. The group show “Engaged, active, aware - women’s perspective now” which included her work, won the Lucie Awards as Best Exhibition 2018. She currently lives and works in Milan, where she is teaching photography.
Over the next months we will showcase the finalists and winners of Verzasca Foto Festival Awards 2019. Verzasca Foto is a festival taking place in the small village of Sonogno Val Verzasca, located in the Swiss Alps, from 5th to 8th September 2019.
Here it is "Cicatrici" by Silvia Bigi, one of the 6 photo series shortlisted for the award:
On August 10th, 1985, a plane crashes into the woods. A passenger wakes up and, despite serious injuries, decides to seek for help. The wife, the 9-year-old son, the 2 month and a half daughter, and other relatives - unaware of what happened - are waiting to see him in the sky. The passenger walks barefoot for hours, finding the way back. Everyone remembers the moment when he reappeared. Only the infant daughter has no memory at all, and she was able to know the story only thanks to her family. That baby girl, was me. Cicatrici arises from the need to shed light on an event that has profoundly marked my life, and of which, ironically, I have no visual memory. In the first months of life, indeed, the cerebral cortex is not developed enough to hold memories, even if somewhere, inside us, they continue to exist. So I decided to take a journey through memory and its inscrutable processes, and a real journey, aimed to rebuilt my father’s path of that day, looking for tangible traces in the present. The project consists of documents, testimonies, photographs and texts that revolve around a missing picture: the memory of my father who reappears in front of my eyes. Although came from an intimate need, this work has led me elsewhere. In fact, that day my dad was flying only to take aerial photographs of a specific spot. While I was ‘ flying over’ the same mountains by using Google Earth, I realized the profound transformation that images have undergone in these last thirty-three years. The wreckage into the woods come out from my personal history, becoming here relics of an ancient cult for photography today disappeared. Photographs are no longer the same, it’s true. Yet my journey reminded me of how they continue to play a primary role in our lives.
