Nontiscordardimé / Forget-me-not

In an age where we encounter more images by midday than a 19th-century individual saw in a lifetime, does the image still hold significance? Can it still carry the weight of transformation, of revelation?

Francisco Macfarlane and Francesco Pennacchio explore these questions from two distinct perspectives, using imagemaking to confront absence and evoke rebirth. Macfarlane confronts the fragility of the human condition in an era defined by hyperconnectivity, where meaning often drowns in a sea of fleeting moments. Pennacchio, by contrast, reconstructs fragmented memories of his mother, who was lost to him in early childhood, filling the void with resonances of her presence.

Both artists are driven by ruptures - gaps in identity, memory, and belonging. For Macfarlane, absence emerges as a crisis of human connection in the digital era; for Pennacchio, it is a haunting presence-absence that demands reconstruction. Yet, through their individual exploration, they arrive at a shared understanding: the image is not merely a document or artifact. It is a vessel, capable of holding grief, summoning remembrance, and birthing something anew. 

Here, the works of the two artists engage in dialogue. Macfarlane investigates social behaviors, employing alternative photographic techniques to address themes such as our relationship with technology and personal healing. From a more figurative perspective, Pennacchio, tries to reconstruct memory and deal with a childhood grief through archival photographs, polaroids, and film photography. 

In their hands, the image becomes a site of healing, a space where absence is acknowledged, and rebirth is made possible. Sometimes, their images transcend the boundaries of space and time, collapsing the distance between what was, what is, and what could have been. They invite us to navigate memory and presence as fluid, interwoven dimensions, and they challenge us to rediscover the image as a source of transformation in a world saturated with visual noise. In the main room of the exhibition, the two artists, Macfarlane y Pennacchio, engage in dialogue through their practices. Macfarlane's plantogramms. Simplifying several steps of the traditional photographic process to represent the essence of the natural world. Through this procedure, the textures, shapes, and details of the plants are printed directly onto the paper. This method establishes a more intimate and organic link with the natural world, as it involves the act of walking the streets, collecting, and carefully observing the sprouts that emerge around him. These plants become protagonists and narrators, leaving an imprint on the paper that evokes at the same time the fragility and persistence of time. Pennacchio's Fragmented Memoirs. The artist juxtaposes the uninterrupted cycles of renewal in the natural world with the broken, fragmented family memories of his own, represented by frames from the family archive. His polaroids are presented as metaphors for physical building blocks in the reconstruction of his missing memory. This dialogue between new and archival images becomes an attempt to engage in never-had conversations, seeking to bridge past and present. His work suggests that memory is not static; it is alive, shifting and adapting as we nurture it. A perfect metaphor is the jasmine vine, here represented, that Pennacchio’s mother, Emanuela, planted and nurtured, and which continues to bloom each year, a living testament to her presence