COLONNA by Fabio Dibello

Colonna is a personal attempt which aims to reflect on what we inherit, on the relationship we have with the past. The author investigates and wonders how it is possible to preserve the memory of a place, of a past where we have not been protagonists but that it contributed to build the identity and the history in a profound way. Cogne and its mines are an indissoluble binomial, always conniving: a symbiosis that created the cultural and historical foundations that determined the town’s genius loci. Maintaining the necessary critical detachment, bearing in mind the difference between history and memory, the author, overcoming the documentary purposes of the photographic language, created an artistic project pursuing the objective of generating a story through images, capable of awakening in the observer the emotions that activate the post-memory mechanism. The term post underlines a temporal distance, therefore a type of memory that is not based on events but on representations where images play a decisive role in the process of recomposing memory. As John Berger suggests: “photographs are always a relic of the past, even if they were taken yesterday, their purpose is not to remind us something but to remind us to remember ”.