Archiving can be a cold, methodical, almost bureaucratic gesture. But it can also become a necessary act, a way to give shape to grief and move through it without being overwhelmed. For Liquida Photofestival, photographer and visual artist Veronica Benedetti has created a project, Ofelia, that begins exactly here: transforming mourning into a visual process of acceptance, entrusting photography with the task of preserving, but also of letting go.
The work takes shape through everyday objects that once belonged to the artist’s grandmother. Simple, domestic elements are isolated and removed from their original context, then placed in an aseptic, almost clinical setting. The approach recalls forensic photography, where each object becomes a trace, a fragment of a story to be reconstructed. In this way, Benedetti creates a visual inventory that suspends sentimentality and stages a necessary act of cataloguing: not as a way to detach, but to move through memory with greater awareness.
The objects become keepers of memories and triggers of a memory that is never still. The act of archiving turns into a process of care, a way of giving form to absence and making it visible. The distance introduced by the neutral display does not erase emotion, but reformulates it, allowing the gaze to linger on the traces left behind by time.
Reinforcing this dimension of transience is the technique of anthotype. The images are created using plant-based pigments through long exposures to light, a slow and fragile process that makes the photograph itself destined to change and gradually disappear. The same light that allows the image to emerge is also what will erase it over time, evoking the fragility of memory and the need to welcome loss as an integral part of life.
The project is part of Veronica Benedetti’s broader research, which through experimental photography, analog processes, and installation explores memory, genealogy, and belonging across body, space, and matter. Working with family archives, self-portraiture, and materials exposed to change, the artist allows time to intervene directly in the image, revealing identities and stories as unstable stratifications.
Rather than holding on, Ofelia suggests the possibility of letting go. The images slowly fade, transforming loss into a visual gesture of acceptance, where memory is not something to preserve unchanged, but a continuous, fragile, and ever-shifting process.
