The line of water explores memory as a shifting, fluid entity, where trauma is not just a wound but a catalyst for transformation. Through a poetic and metaphysical reflection on transience and loss, the project examines how the territory—both physical and emotional—absorbs, reshapes, and transmits traces of the past, generating new languages of remembrance and creation.
Sara Palmieri, a visual artist working primarily with photography, investigates the material and symbolic potential of images. Her practice extends into sculpture and performance, using experimental processes to explore how territory and personal narratives shape collective memory, questioning the ways in which images construct and deconstruct reality.
Inspired by the Polesine flood of 1951—the most devastating in Italian history—the project considers the territory as an archive of memory, where water, earth, and inherited stories act as living agents of transmission. The image itself becomes a perceptive surface where opposites merge: visible and invisible, past and present, submerged and emerged.
The impossibility of memory to faithfully pass on the history, fragmented in the narrative of those who remain and the landscape to preserve visible signs, generates matrices, portals, images whose horizon vibrates, spatial archetypes that unfold and dissolve like echoes of an imaginary morse code, a system of signs that refers to languages used to communicate and request help: minimal gestures, to translate and extract from oblivion the dissolving traces.
The line of water book is published by Witty Books in April 2025, designed by Fiorenza Pinna.
