[GLI OCCHI PRIMA DI MIA MADRE]
“Only through play can a person discover themselves.” These are the words of D. W. Winnicott, a British pediatrician and psychoanalyst who, in the 1950s, used play as a tool for therapy. His findings revolutionised child psychology and the way we understand recreational activities in general. For Winnicott, play is a negotiation between inside and outside, between the objective reality of the world and our subjective vision of it. In play, we explore our experiences and develop our identity, something that carries on throughout our life and is expressed in adulthood through the creative act.
Gli occhi prima di mia madre, a project selected from the BFF 2023 Photography Schools meeting (Antonio Faílde Art School of Ourense, Galicia), could be one of the exercises that Winnicott gave his patients of all ages. Emanuele Binetti takes on the task of organising and classifying a family archive, to encounter his childhood memories and reinterpret them with a modern perspective. The compositions –with photographs in which he plays with recurring, overlapping or connected images– become a process of rewriting memory, a dialogue with the past that produces a new version of his family album.
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Emanuele Binetti started out as a self-taught photographer and didn’t graduate in photography until the summer of 2023. Specializing in portrait photography, he devotes his time to various research and experiments. He’s drawn not only to photography itself but also to what lies behind it: the people and their stories. The project being presented, Prima degli occhi di mia madre, is his graduation project. A six-month stay in the city of Ourense, at the Antonio Faílde School of Art, under the guidance of Armando García Ferrero, was of great importance in achieving the final result. The project awakened the hidden child in the artist, which proved to be a great challenge and also an important discovery.
