Memories Cutro

Via Principe As night falls, between the memories of a lifetime, a deep breath, and I return to my childhood. A kiss, a hug, a hundred lire, a run, a smile, a fiesta and it was always a party. The descents, the climbs, the sessions on the steps and behind the doors the light of those who have to give you life. Dedicated to Nonna Raffaella

Francesco Mercadante

MEMORIES CUTRO, PHOTOGRAPHIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Memories Cutro is an author’s composition. Yes, an author’s photographic composition, of an author who re-immerses himself in his native places, who participates with emotion in the rediscovery of the time that was, where the birth of certain feelings combined with the awareness of tenderness and the sense of membership. Nostalgia looms in the night, the soul automatically acts to point the way to rediscovery, to come to terms with what has been in order to never forget it.

How many things we carry inside that we no longer recognize! And yet one night is enough to feel that life is not only what we see, but also what we suddenly feel, and that makes us remember another life that identifies us as human beings. And then we become witnesses of a fundamental thing of existence: of artistic autobiography. And Francesco Mercadante with Memories Cutro works an autobiography in the name of the relationship between nostalgia-lived life-art. Images that give us back the native flow, the delicacy and the poignant intensity of moments that can only be enclosed in a human warmth of affection, and this outside of any rhetoric. Identity is above all what we carry within our souls, an eternal baggage of things that are believed to be lost and instead are alive.

Photographic art marks the views, the old paths, the historic center of a Cutro that cannot be forgotten. It is a Cutro who speaks to us in the night: they are the spirits of the ancestors who have impressed themselves between the old houses and the old streets, they are the passions of eternal lovers who met only in the lunar night, they are the spirals of abandonment which lead us to verify the social transformations that have taken place.

Memories Cutro is therefore a photographic autobiography, but it is above all an anthology of the meaning that a historical center can and must have, a being of the things of the past that is so profound in its intensity that it asks us constant questions.

Today it is necessary to feel the bosom of the roots, after all we are like trees, and we should remember this, in order to return to rush upwards to rediscover a wisdom and a feeling of conscious humanity. And Mercadante effectively throws his photographic eye upwards.

Review by Condello Giuseppe