La linea d'acqua

La linea d’acqua explores memory through an intimate and metaphysical reflection on transience, loss, and trauma aesthetics. It seeks to mend the fracture between self and the external world, between individual and collective memory.

Sara Palmieri, a visual artist working primarily with photography, investigates the medium’s physical properties and aesthetic possibilities. She fragments and reconstructs spaces, questioning photography’s ability to reflect reality and preserve memory.

The project originates from the Polesine flood of November 14, 1951, the most devastating in Italian history, which marked a rupture in rural culture and left an indelible scar on people and landscapes. Palmieri examines the land’s ability to preserve traces, using the river, the landscape, and inherited stories as devices. The image itself becomes a perceptive surface where opposites meet: visible and invisible, past and present, submerged and emerged.

Memory’s inability to faithfully transmit history mirrors the landscape’s struggle to retain its marks. This generates matrices, portals, and shifting images—like echoes of a Morse code, a minimal system of gestures to extract fading traces from oblivion. At a metaphorical boundary, Palmieri creates a space where a short circuit can occur, from which a symbolic wave unfolds. The Po River itself physically participates, turning the image into a site of multiple relationships where submerged truths resurface.

The show is curated by Fiorenza Pinna