"Daddy, will mommy come back with spring, like the flowers do?" Francesco Pennacchio was three years old when he asked this question, the spring after his mother Emmanuela disappeared. This childhood anecdote, both sweet and tragic, was the spark that pushed Pennacchio to embark on a long journey. He began by comparing the exploration of family photographic archives with the uninterrupted cycles of the natural world, then he retraced his mother's steps in the places she visited in Europe, posing in the same locations and superimposing archival photographs with new creations to reconstruct shared memories and create an anachronistic meeting point between him and his mother. The journey ends in the herbarium of the Jardin Botanique de Genève, where the collected species have been extracted from their renewal cycle and become documents and archives of biodiversity. It is this journey, traced in the photo book "Unlike Flowers," that Francesco Pennacchio will discuss with Fred Stauffer, Curator at the Jardin Botanique de Genève, and Danaé Panchaud, director of the Centre de la photographie Genève. Two seemingly very distant perspectives, that of family life and that of science, but which can tell the value of archives and memory as a method of knowledge, of grieving, and of scientific understanding.
Contact the team for pricing