“Hiroshima, a return to life”

Factory Phnom Penh (FT Gallery)

21^st Nov – 12^th Dec 2024

‍

Alexandre Bergamini is a French photographer and writer of Italian origin whose photographic research revolves around an archaeology of memory. He uses intimate archives and writing as a possible legend; photographic legend and "marvelous story where historical facts are transformed by imagination and poetic invention". What is seen and what is out of frame, what is considered real and true and what is no longer.

Born in 1968, he first worked in the field of theater, since1999 he has published books around photography and several literary texts, poems, stories of intimate travels (India, Japan, cargo ship trips) and historical stories, with themes of abandonment and loss, wandering through travel and encounter, the imprint and absence of his brother Vivian, who committed suicide at the age of eighteen, and the last part of his work on the theme of returning to life. He has published two books on photography, "Casa central" in 2001, and "Le Livre de Vivian", in 2019. He has been exhibited in Marseille and at the Dumba collective in Brooklyn. He is currently continuing his project with a book of personal photographic and literary archives, traces and proofs, an X-ray of memory and wandering. Through the family album, Alexandre Bergamini questions intimate and popular history, confronted with official history.

He is the 2024 winner of the cross-residency program “La Route des résidences” co-organized by the French Institute of Cambodia, the French Institute of Vietnam and the Alliance française de Chiang Maï and the writing residency program “Villa Marguerite Duras”. He presents a work in progress for which he is in residence, text and legendary photographs around the presence and absence in Hiroshima, entitled "Hiroshima, the return to life."