The Reprises project is a documentary and autobiographical photographic creation in which Alejandro Erbetta travels through the regions of his ancestors to reconstruct his family history. The book tells the story of his family, who migrated from Italy to Argentina in the 19th century. Searching for the origins of his ancestors, Erbetta retraced their steps between 2009 and 2013, reconstructing, through images, documents and stories, their itinerary.
At that time, his grandparents had departed from the north of Italy, from the Piedmont region, to then go down south, to the port of Genoa, where they embarked in the vicinity of a ship named Matteo Bruzzo of 1885. The photographer's journey took him from Fontanetto d'Agogna, where his grandparents were from, to the city of Genoa. From there, he crossed the ocean and arrived at the port of Buenos Aires in Argentina. Once there, the photographer began to do research in public archives and in institutions specialized in the history of immigration in Latin America, such as CEMLA (Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos sobre Migraciones).
Erbetta's great-grandparents were part of that great displacement of migrants who left for Latin America in search of a better destiny. Their story is captured in official documents and in family stories that, as in this case, deserve to be told so that they are not forgotten. In the book Reprises published by La Luminosa editorial, photos of my trip, photos from the family album and archive photos will be intertwined. It deals with the essential questions of our time and their relationship with history: identity and the history of immigration. The graphic design was done by Magdalena Pardo, Alejandro Erbetta and Julia Dupont. The long format and the wide margins allow a better contemplation of the narrative, giving the photographs a document-like aspect.
The sequence is simple, which favors reading: in some cases there are two images facing each other, contributing elements of nostalgia and recreating a journey through memory, while in others, text and image appear, delicately contributing to the narrative. The most important thing about this book is the space it gives to establish a journey through family history and the respect with which the images are associated to the stories they reveal. We have included this book in the unfolding section because of the way this narrative is generated in association with the folds of the book and the turning of the pages.
