“Dad, will Mom come back in the spring, just like the flowers do?” Francesco Pennacchio was three years old when he asked that question, the spring following the death of his mother, Emmanuela. This childhood memory, both tender and tragic, is what sparks Pennacchio to embark on a long journey.
He begins by juxtaposing an exploration of family photo archives with the unbroken cycles of the natural world, then retraces his mother’s footsteps to the places she visited in Europe, posing in the same locations and superimposing archival photographs with his new work in order to reconstruct shared memories and create an anachronistic meeting point between himself and his mother. The journey ends in the herbarium of Geneva Botanic Garden, where the collected species have been removed from their cycle of renewal and become documents and archives of biodiversity.
Francesco Pennacchio will discuss this journey—documented in the photo book Unlike Flowers —with Fred Stauffer, Curator at Geneva Botanic Garden Danaé Panchaud, Director of the Geneva Center for Photography. These are two perspectives that may seem very distant—that of family life and that of science—but which can illustrate the value of archives and memory as a means of gaining knowledge, processing grief, and advancing scientific understanding.
