Memoryes Cutro, Photographic Autobiography
Memoryes Cutro is an auteur composition. Yes, an author’s photographic composition, by an author who immerses himself in his native places, who participates with emotion in the rediscovery of the time that was, where the birth of certain feelings was united with the awareness of tenderness and a sense of belonging. Nostalgia looms in the night, the soul acts automatically to point the way to rediscovery, to come to terms with what has been in order never to forget it.
How many things we carry within us that we no longer recognise! And yet one night is enough to feel that life is not only what we see, but also what we suddenly feel, and that it makes us remember other lives that identify us as human beings. And so we become witnesses of something fundamental to existence: artistic autobiographisation. And Francesco Mercadante with Memoryes Cutro works precisely on an autobiography in the sign of the relationship between nostalgia-lived life-art.
Images that give us back the native flow, the delicacy and the poignant intensity of moments that can only be enclosed in a human warmth of affection, and this without any rhetoric. Identity is above all what we carry in our souls, an eternal baggage of things that are thought to be lost but are in fact alive.
The photographic art marks the views, the old tracks, the historic centre of a Cutro that cannot be forgotten. It is a Cutro that speaks to us in the night: it is the spirits of the ancestors that have imprinted themselves among the old houses and the old streets, it is the passions of eternal lovers that met only in the nocturnal moonlight, it is the spirals of abandonment that lead us to verify the social transformations that have taken place.
Memoryes Cutro is therefore a photographic autobiography, but it is above all an anthology of the sense that an old town centre can and must have, a being of the things of the past that is so profound in its intensity as to pose us constant questions.
Today we need to feel the bosom of our roots, after all we are like trees, and we should remember this, in order to return to leap upwards to rediscover a wisdom and a feeling of conscious humanity. And Mercadante, with effectiveness, launches his photographic eye upwards.
Review by Condello Giuseppe
Memoryes Cutro
Via Principe
At nightfall, among the memories of a life, a deep breath,
and I return to my childhood.
A kiss, a hug, a hundred lire, a run, a smile, a fiesta and it was always a party.
The descents, the ascents, the sitting on the steps and behind the doors the light of those who have life to give you.
Dedicated to Nonna Raffaella
Poetry by Francesco Mercadante
