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When my mother decided to through away all family’s slides she was hoping to lift up a heavy weight from me: a complicated and sometimes painful past only her and me share nowadays. Her radical intention made me pay attention, as I would have never done otherwise.
I was able to recover only a few slides and a few pieces of paper in a box but they were enough to explore history, rethink my memory and listen to the silences that became for me so eloquent…
History is the capriciously agreed, unchangeable, documented part of my past. Memory, capriciously ever changing, was quickly visibly transformed with my encounter with the family archive: I photographed my family members (who all passes away except for my mother) as I remember them: not through their faces but their character, their energy, what they mean to me.
And silences? The stories never told, the thoughts never shared, the photographs never shot interested me more than the content of the slides themselves. This is the reason why when I found closed packages of slides inside the recovered box I kept them unopened: the unknown, the silences would have an object where to settle.  These packages or loose pieces of paper with little information, would allow me to imagine always-different hidden part of my history and enrich my memory.

Lorena Guillen Vaschetti, born 1974 in Argentina, studied Architecture and Anthropology in Buenos Aires. She worked as an independend architect in Buenos Aires annd New York. She was trained photography in different workshops in Argentina and at New York's International Center of Photography.

In the series "painted rituals she photographs Aborigines dancing at  around a nightlit fireplace. What we see is not the perception or interpretation of an Ethnograph but timeless images full of colour and energy, combined with a sensibility that make these images accesable with all our senses.

Thomas Kellner, from the catalog "Chapalango" - contemporary dance pohotography