This series was commissioned for a publication celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Agriturismo Bergi, a family-run estate in Sicily. Rather than documenting the place itself, I chose to explore its memory through the objects that had quietly accompanied generations of daily life.
I asked the Di Garbo family to entrust me with the household utensils once used by their ancestors. Each object was carefully brought into my studio, where it was photographed individually using the nineteenth-century wet plate collodion process. Removed from its original environment and treated with the same attention reserved for a portrait, every utensil became a silent witness to time, labour and family history.
The slow, handcrafted nature of the collodion process reflects the values embodied by these objects. Every plate is prepared, exposed and developed by hand, producing a unique image whose materiality echoes the uniqueness of the object itself. Together, they preserve not only the physical traces of use, but also the gestures, traditions and memories carried from one generation to the next.
