Nostalgia. The first and main emotion that overwhelms anyone who looks back at family photos, even if they are his parents or grandparents, even if he is struggling to figure out which relative is in such and such a faded photograph – perhaps because he has not seen her for several decades.

Of course, taking pictures from some dusty closet of their father’s house, they evoke not only personal memories, but also collective ones, while “shuffling the deck” of these images, new narratives may be born.

With this idea in mind, Pascua Borgia And Pavlos Fisakis they started work on a project that was supposed to be an exhibition Breath Documents. It all started with immersion in the past through photographs of parents. “Little by little, one thing led to another, so other images came in, and this narrative began to be created,” explains one of the two curators of the exhibition, hosted by Parnassian Philological Association, in its production Roof.

The two curators then added photographs from their contemporary photography practice, images from the Internet, added “found objects”: it could be an image we found downstairs, a photograph by another artist, or a postcard,” explains Pascua Borgia “K”.

The result of the work of “Documents of breath” can step on its logic collage -after all, any visual or photo exhibition to some extent contains the logic of “montage” – however, here the creators wanted to continue the gesture of appropriating the “other” images that are there, images that have been edited, reformulated and thus become part of the new narrative. “And this process is just as important as creating a new image, that is, how you put everything into a story,” says Pascua Borgia.

In this photographic journey, Borgia and Fizakis had two main landmarks: “Passagen-Werk” or otherwise “Gallery Work Plan” from Walter Benjamin And “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne” from Abby Warburg.

Benjamin’s “thesis project” is a great work that the German thinker did not have time to complete and consists of a collection of quotes from various authors, philosophers and other sources and they relate to his time, modernism, the city of Paris. “It’s a set of fragments that takes them and turns them into something new” curator comments.

Abby Warburg, on the other hand, was an art historian active in the early 20th century. With “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne” he tried to compose his own history of art from antiquity to the Renaissance. So he began to collect images from works of art, which he expanded and arranged into collages on black panels in such a way as to show commonalities, connect threads, create paths.

In a sense, Borgia-Fisakis’ “breathing evidence” also travels the distance. from more personal stories to a broader concept of history. Of course, history can never be unified, as Pascua Borgia points out. After all, “it’s always about the human eye and perspective. As a rule, there are hegemonic narratives, such as the history that is taught in school. But it’s not. The researcher or artist, allowing more than one voice to be heard, undoubtedly leads to a result that may be closer to the truth.

The works of the Breath Papers seek this truth by examining what has happened, what has changed, and finally, what the “old” can tell us about the current state. He invites us to look at family and more personal images. like a kaleidoscope through which we can reflect not only on what was then, but above all on what we are doing today.

The exhibition “Documents of Breath” produced by Stega will last until May 17 at the Art Gallery of the Philological Association “Parnassus”.