‘Flattened in Time and Space’ is a visual family novel, whose plot develops around the figure of Concetto, born in Scicli, Sicily, in 1921.
The photographs, extracted from family albums and re-assembled, were taken by his nephew, Angelo Vignali, by his family and friends. The sequence, which spans over fifty years, deprives the viewer of space-time coordinates and the identity of those who took the photographs, creating a new narrative.
FITAS is a portrait drawn from the relationships between people, places and events that animated the stage of Concetto’s life. A succession of glances from the window overlooks the countryside: the abandoned farms and petrol stations, the Sicilian dusty hills, the sky and the Mediterranean Sea. The magnificence of the monuments, which we observe only a moment later eroded by time, abandoned.
Only few background characters punctuate the landscape, up to that domestic interior, always the same, yet different in the most minute details: the house Concetto himself built, and where it still lives today.
Is there a ‘familiar lexicon’ in the way we look at and represent the places and people we hold dear – our history?
With a text by Ilaria Speri, book design by Federico Barbon