Images from a parallel time

The concept of alternate history — the construction of alternative scenarios starting from minimal deviations from history — offers the possibility of interrogating the linearity of time and opening up parallel universes, similar to the real one but subtly different. This is a critical exercise that does not aim to falsify the past, but rather to reveal its latent potentialities, the junctures at which the narrative could have taken other forms.

Within this perspective fits the project Tamed Archive-ucronie by Danilo Torre, which stems from a “wandering and stray” archive: a heterogeneous collection of lost and forgotten visual materials that have survived time without a precise location. The artist intervenes on these fragments of collective and private memory, transforming them and returning them to the public in a new form, capable of generating novel narratives.

The images — sourced from impossible archives, ancient glass plates or photographic enlargements — undergo a printing process in handmade cyanotype, a historical technique that evokes the idea of blueprint, meaning both design and trace at the same time. This process accentuates the suspended character of the images, which seem to come from a time outside of time, ready to graft themselves onto a parallel dimension.