Ersilia Tarullo is an Italian photographer based in Rome. She spent her childhood in a small town surrounded by mountains in Abruzzo. Since then, her photographic research has become an introspective journey while simultaneously a discovery of the unknown:: it is made of real elements that do not dwell on reality, but rather create a parallel one. Such is the case in her series Saudade.

words by Ersilia:

Quantum physics tell us that outer time, meant as duration, is nothing more than a human limit that we use to have a rational perception of events. In "Saudade" the protagonist time is the inner time, the one responsible for the distortion and alteration of feelings, which in turn, can evoke images in our mind.

Each image of the series is “une petite madeline:” an object, a smell, a vision, or a perception, which with sensory stress, brings out the entire memory in its subjective value. In this way we reach an epiphany that breaks the dichotomy between past and present. And time becomes only one.

Emotionally, the images are interchangeable: they represent some generic, unrecognizable and impersonal places, but the aim is to allow the observer to produce autonomous analogies. Perhaps this process will not only produce memories of real life, but will give the sensation of experience moments that have never happened, that the observer does not know he has lived or has never actually lived.

So "Saudade" deals with a feeling that embraces and exludes time at once, dragging it away from a real context. This feeling flows through every human being who has experienced the melancholy, the absense, the tenderness, the distance.

Ersilia on IG