GENOA.- What is a Memory Box? It is a place to fix places, faces, bodies and feelings firmly in the memory, assimilate them and preserve them all forever in this imaginary and mysterious box. One can grant all these things their original shape and presence just by opening this box, an arcane mystery that stimulates the sense of awareness.

Photography is the magnificent accomplice of this Memory Box; right at the instant that the shutter clicks we have immortalised a fragment of our life.

Sandro Parmiggiani writes,” It can certainly never be overlooked that photography in that moment aspires to steal away a fragment of life and reality from the unstoppable rushing of time, in all reality the image is hardened like a bone and given to us, an irreplaceable splinter of time.”

It is clear with this photographic research that Bruno Cattani started some years ago based on his memories of his city of birth, Reggio Emilia, and then through the various thoroughfares of his life, that he wanted to achieve more than provide just memories. He hones in on the fragments, places, corners and streets that he has inhabited and moved around in his life with effortless mastery of photographic techniques, consummate sensitivity and mellow colours. He drifts around the games and toys of his childhood, his tricycle, table football, merry-go-round, the circus, Sundays in the park or summers at the seaside, football games and then school trips to museums.

He takes us right inside the misty landscapes of the Po valley, to the see-saws and swings and lonely, abandoned benches in the playgrounds, the cosiness of a bedroom and then to places seemingly stripped bare of any signs of the people who once lived there. He provides a feedback of the tensions and contradictions of our religion: crucifixes in the churches and vestries that might be abandoned, or placed above pin-up calendars in barbers’ shops. He prowls around crumbling ruins or the vacuous rooms of destitute buildings of an old psychiatric hospital, or the decrepit factories of Reggio.

By opening his Memory Box, Bruno Cattani allows us to open ours too and to browse through history through the filter of our memory. More than the forty pictures on show are the fruit of a ten-year long project, a trip through places that feature in our memory, places that we always carry inside ourselves. A trip down memory lane that thrives once again in the present time, where our personal and collective memories blend together giving us back the past experiences of our lives.

Sandro Parmiggiani goes on, “ .. taking photographs, we may add, is not a process of randomly grabbing a piece of reality that is identical to a presumed reality, but knowing how to give it back by means of a sort of transfiguration. It has much to do with the essence of something that is found in relation to the world itself and with a sentiment of a glance…This is the photography that stays, that which does not fear being held up against forms of artistic expression of much longer and solid traditions. This is the photography that is able to feed back to us and preserve over time the heartbeats of life and moments that are no longer there, via a fragment of reality.