I Won’t Let You Leave My Love Behind

Project details

Year

2022

Programme

photography

Practices

social

Minor

Power Play

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My name is Costanza, I am 24 years old, born in Rome and raised in Italy and I am a photographer and multimedia artist. I always place at the center of my study and my art the search for intimacy with the subject I portray, constantly questioning the moral implications of representing somebody with a photograph.

Observing and transmitting emotions is essential in my artistic research.

I am graduating from Willem De Kooning academy with “I Won’t Let You Leave My Love Behind”, a multimedia installation dedicated to my father, who passed away in 2021.

I can only speak for myself but it channeled all of my confused and sad feelings into a focused purpose. I cried my way during the majority of creating this series but I also laughed and remembered stories and moments I may not have otherwise.

Jennifer Loeber

It is well known that art has the cathartic capacity to transcend reality —even the most atrocious one— but the ways in which it does are perpetually surprising. I wanted to work precisely on this element of transcendence and transformation of the terrible reality I was experiencing.

While documenting the stories and memories of those who loved and knew my father, I try to capture their emotions through intimate portraits and recordings, inviting therefore the viewers to reflect on the complex process of grief.

It was right before my birthday, and with dad we decided to meet in the city center, in one of his favourite places. He really loved the city center, all those squares…We went walking together in Piazza Navona, and as he would always do he started talking about the past, the memories…

Martina

He has enriched my life from every point of view. He is an educated person, with a completely different background from mine, with a completely different family from mine. A person who opened his world to me and accepted my world. He entered my world with incredible naturalness.

Elsa

The core meaning of this multimedia installation goes beyond sharing with the public private stories about my father, but rather showing an echo of his presence through this chorus of voices that becomes the testimony of his past and recent life.

I present a single image of my father, printed through the ambrotype technique, a photographic process used to impress the image on glass. Using glass as a material, I wanted to emphasize the metaphor of the fragility and evanescence of memory.

The installation has also become a testimony of how I grieved throughout these months, always aspiring to use creativity as a medium for processing the pain I felt.

Memory is what remains after death, it is not stable and strictly subjective, but what matters is the trace one has left in other’s people lives.

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_{Find the full sound installation on my website}