Una memoria non mia / Una memoria que no es mía

The installation “Una memoria non mia / Una memoria que no es mía” is an artistic research project that explores operations of memory and the vernacular photographic archive.
It emerged from the discovery of a series of negatives taken in Argentina between the 1950s and 1970s, photographs that triggered a difficult process of reconstructing family memory.
The archive documents the experience of migrant Paolo Casalena, the author's grandfather, the birth of his two daughters in Buenos Aires, and his meeting with Jorge Luis Borges. 
Through the digital process of altering and creating variations of the archival image, the author questions the mechanism of remembering and conceals the original memory in a cloud of possible memories. 
Amidst this uncertainty the work takes the opportunity to inject a fictional narrative that expands on the facts of history, incorporating the figure of Jorge Luis Borges, whose fictional production in Argentina in those very years also focused on the mystification of reality, memories and the manipulation of plausible coordinates.

The installation consists of a single-channel video projection, three photo albums and a two-channel sound system. 
A quiet recording of a private conversation between Borges and Casalena is audible in a small portion of the space.

The multiplicity of documents, the variations among the archival images, and the suggestion of  “forking paths” produce in the viewer a sense of disorientation and uncertainty about “what really happened” and “what might have happened”.