ORIGINI
The Photographic Archive as a Space Between Memory and Imagination
Sardinia, 2019–2026
Every archive preserves what was and what might have been.
Origini is an ongoing photographic project by Melissa Marcello that explores the cultural memory of Sardiniathrough the reconstruction of an imaginary photographic archive set between 1900and 1950. Born from theartist’s personal research into her own roots, the project expands into an investigation of collective identity,cultural heritage, and the ways in which the past continues toshape the present.
Through ethnographic and anthropological research into Sardinian customs, traditions, clothing, andeveryday life, Marcello constructs photographic scenes featuring contemporary people,evoking the visuallanguage of another era. Through carefully staged compositions, gestures, settings, and costumes, theartist creates images that appear to belong to a historical archive, whileremaining suspended betweendocumentation and fiction.
These photographs are neither historical documents nor mere reconstructions of the past. They inhabit anambiguous temporal space: their apparent authenticity invites viewers to believe whatthey see, while theawareness of their constructed nature leaves room for doubt. The archive thus becomes a place wherehistory and imagination coexist, and where the boundary between whathappened and what might havehappened remains deliberately undefined.
Moving between ethnographic observation and contemporary artistic practice, Origini uses photography asa means of investigating how cultural memory is preserved, transmitted, andreinterpreted. Sardinia is boththe geographical setting of the research and the starting point for a universal reflection on belonging, thepassage of time, and the desire to rediscover a past thatcan no longer be fully inhabited.
The project evokes a particular form of nostalgia: not for a time experienced firsthand, but for a timeinherited through stories, images, traditions, and fragments of collective memory. Viewers areinvited toencounter the past not as an immutable reality, but as something that continues to be reconstructedthrough the present.
Origini is an archive that never existed, yet could have existed. A contemporary vision of the past, in whichphotography does not merely preserve what was, but opens up a space in which toimagine what remains.
