The reflection of Alessandra Baldoni on the practices of image-making and seeing gives rise to a dialogue between two bodies of work: the treasure chests of the series The Universe Has No Centre (2024), previously exhibited at the “PRIMA” exhibition at BPER Gallery in Brescia and at the latest edition of MIA Photo Fair in Milan, and the reliquaries that make up the new series entitled Private Legend (2026).
Alessandra Baldoni likes to describe herself as a poet as well as a visual artist, and on this occasion the photography stems directly from the written word: the exhibition title, in fact, echoes the opening line of The Years by Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux.
"All the images will disappear": a statement which, in an age dictated by the dominance of the visual, is only seemingly paradoxical. It is, in fact, precisely the overload of images that renders them fragile: they end up flowing incessantly, consumed by the speed with which they are created and forgotten.
Alessandra Baldoni responds to this sort of visual apocalypse by taking the opposite approach: she decides to slow down and to take a step back, to try to listen and to listen to ourselves, and therefore to choose what to save. Defining herself as a "sentimental archivist", the artist lends an ear to voices that are usually unheard, to save stories of fragility and vulnerability.
The treasure chests that make up The Universe Has No Centre (2024) hold details and gestures photographed from masterpieces by female artists who lived in past centuries, in a practice of recognising female talents often forgotten or deliberately obscured. Alessandra Baldoni subsequently intervenes on these images with poems she has composed herself: the image generates the word and, in turn, the word allows us to reimagine the images.
If the treasure chests protect the image, the reliquary elevates it to a subject of veneration. In Private Legend (2026), Alessandra Baldoni draws on the tradition of sacred reliquaries from her native Umbria, gathering images, details and symbolic fragments into deeply intimate and personal visual elegies. In an attempt to resist the passage of time, a sort of emotional archive emerges, opening up the possibility of becoming, for us too, a miraculous presence.
