Curatorial text by Irene Alison

The theme of roots, the search for oneself across the time and space of memory, lies at the heart of the process we decided to undertake with our Homecoming cycle, conceived by Irene Alison for Rifugio Digitale and entirely devoted to contemporary photography. The third event of this cycle, the exhibition Memoire Temporelle by the British photographer of Indian origin, Kalpesh Lathigra, is curated by Irene Alison and Paolo Cagnacci, and is a voyage within the voyage. Indeed, if Homecoming, means an exploration of the concept of ‘home‘, in the precarious balance between global interconnection and the need to rediscover one’s own place in the world, that of Lathigra is a backward look, at the distant land that ties him to his ancestral culture. From England, where he was born, to India, where his parents came from.

Along the way – a return that has the flavor of a discovery – Lathigra experiences the existential condition of suspension between past and present, between identity and heredity, which is common to millions of second- generation immigrants in the world. In the markets, amid the crowds and mounded goods, surrounded by sacred cows and bare-torsoed wrestlers, dancers of break dance and pomegranate sellers and, at the same time, seeing with new eyes a country that binds him to a complex, unbreakable relationship. Is his fascination with India nostalgia for a life he never lived, or it is the feeling of belonging written in the blood and on the skin? Intimate, carnal, seductive, dusty, hot and colorful, the Indian metropolis unfolds lavishly before his lens, clinging always to part of its mystery, in the deep shadows, in the rustle of palm fronds, in the swaying rainbows of gold-fringed saris, in the horizons above Bombay, where the line between the sky and the sea appears indistinct on account of the smog and twilight, or perhaps because the eyes are dimmed by melancholy.