Quem tem amor vai à Roma

A place of encounters and passages, the journey and sharing of life: this is Amor, this is Rome.

Roma, Bernardita Morello's long-term ongoing photographic project, is the opposite word for Amor (spanish for love), but it is not its negation. In fact, in Rome we see a very profound and sincere affirmation of the experience of love, because it is a living love, an affection that moves, that falls, that hurts itself and others, but that gets up to come make coffee and take care of the garden flowers.

Morello shows us that the matter of days is made up of small glimpses of genuine affection. Her gaze does not pursue encounters or even love, but lets them happen, just as the images she produces are not destinations. It's the banality and rawness of life: always unstable, always in pain, like a camera flash cutting the skin, like the plucking of a flower, the head turn of a woman we know so very deeply, or a child's hands holding a carton of eggs.

Her photography is like a slight sourness of wild berry; or like when, among a bunch of ripe blackberries, we find one that is especially green and sour, or one that is too ripe and sweet. We feel the difference that jumps in our mouth, and the face contracts with disgust at the sourness or with joy at the sudden and unexpected sweetness of the fruit.

This is the experience of Love and Rome — its absolute banality, the beautiful encounter of things, the freshness and sourness of fruit in the mouth or the sweetness of jam made right on the family stove.