Giulia Ballarin - 'Of memory and belonging', 2022
Of memory and belonging reflects on the experience of migration and the emotional divide between two places — one lived, the other imagined or remembered. The project traces the deep attachment the artist holds to their place of origin, a landscape that shaped their sense of self through a constant relationship with nature. It is this bond that inspires a poetic identification: “the grass you lay upon on a sunny day.”
Through photography, the artist revisits this connection and questions how memory, altered by distance and nostalgia, reshapes the image of home. Nature becomes both subject and symbol, evoking the presence of a place no longer physically inhabited but still vividly alive in the mind.