In 2021, for Gregg Segal – whom we had already discussed here – a traumatic family event became the point of origin for the project The Sum of Us. When the artist’s brother lost his home in New York and ended up living on the street, the domestic archive ceased to be a neutral space and turned into a site of inquiry. Family photographs were reread through a new, almost obsessive gaze, in search of signs, fractures, premonitions of a mental fragility that at the time was not yet visible. But the images do not provide clear answers. Scenes are missing, transitions are missing, and the stories as they were told and passed down over time are missing.

From this absence, something new emerges: rather than simply looking at the past, the artist begins to reconstruct it. Archival photographs are dismantled, recomposed, and layered together with contemporary urban images – cracks in the asphalt, torn posters, paint stains, graffiti, worn surfaces. Elements that speak of precariousness and transformation graft themselves onto family images, generating dense, almost suffocating compositions that function as visual palimpsests. Drawing steps in to fill the gaps, to imagine what was never photographed, to give shape to a memory that is as real as it is constructed.

The result is a series of hybrid works, suspended between photography, painting, and collage, that do not seek documentary truth but something deeply emotional. The Sum of Us does not tell a single personal story; instead, it reflects on how individual identities are intertwined with collective ones, and on how lives overlap along genealogical lines that are often invisible.

In this process of visual excavation, creativity becomes a way of reckoning with origin, emotional inheritance, and the bonds that cut across time. More than a response to pain, the project takes shape as a meditation on connection: between siblings, between generations, between private memory and the urban landscape. A body of work that does not seek to close wounds, but to make them visible, accepting their complexity as an integral part of who we are.

cover image: Centrigual Force