Rewind
ELISA BUONOMO

I left Florence four years ago, excited about that choice for my life and my future: discovering another city, another place. The discovery of the new I believe always involves a rediscovery of the old. Rediscovery as a having new and different eyes with which to reevaluate the past.

Now that I no longer live with the spatial reality of my hometown, I experience mixed emotions when I retrace the places that have characterized part of my life: walking on roads, looking at landscapes, entering some store... all contain tiny moments of daily life, fractions of my identity. And it is exactly with those moments that the memory of a particular place is self-empowering. Certainly a place is exposed to change: morphological, structural, but in the best of cases this happens over a fairly long period of time to be able to grasp the major differences from how it was before the change. It is we and our perception that change, by how and how much they have affected us and with the detachment we have had from them, by choice or necessity. When we return, the sensibility has changed. In those places we circumscribed islands, ours alone, and fooled ourselves with the knowledge that they would never change. Like an island, lonely in relation to the continent and protected by the sea surrounding it, I retraced backwards places fundamental to the formation of my identity, trying to reconstruct my territories made up of ghosts, traditions, memories and relationships.Through the return I discover something different, something new, that has always been there but from which I had to move away to notice it again: I see new details, I perceive characteristic noises, I smell unmistakable smells that are probably just a reflection of the deep connection I have with respect to that place. Each one has always revealed small pieces of a puzzle that, belonging only to me, define who I have been and who I am today. It is the legacy of the past that never leaves us, and it is from this legacy that “Back, Return” develops. Representations of the past mingle with images of the present, creating perceptual alterations in which, always and everywhere, the memory and remembrance of the significant people who inhabited that space, making it a place, remains vivid. Physical displacement does not inevitably imply mental displacement as well as long as memories are vivid if we belonged to those islands. My island is many islands. My body is an island and as such is circumscribed in the temporary portion of space I inhabit. It is a defense mechanism ready to receive the tides. I land from one territory to another, radically nomadic without feeling belonging to anyone. Because if the islands remain the same, I am the castaway who changes without forgetting.
Elisa Buonomo