A long-term body of work developed across dense urban environments by lens-based artist Riccardo Magherini. “The Shape of Memories” explores the disorientation of moving through different places—of being present but not belonging. The project captures Magherini’s travels through cities like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Hanoi, and more. Each image is a composition of hundreds of fragments gathered and layered in the studio until the image begins to carry the emotional weight of the experience itself. The result is not a record of what was seen but a reconstruction of what was felt.
“For the past fifteen years, my photographic practice has been an ongoing exploration of how we perceive and remember the world around us…. I realised early on that the traditional ‘frozen moment’ of photography was fundamentally inadequate to tell the truth about a place. Life in these environments does not happen in a static fraction of a second. It is a continuous, layered vibration of noise, scents, colours and the relentless flow of people. To capture that intensity, I felt the need to shift my paradigm: I stopped trying to capture reality, and began collecting it. Embracing the profound sense of estrangement that comes from being an outsider in a foreign land… Just as our minds do not remember in sharp, single frames but rather in a sedimented accumulation of sensations, these images hold multiple moments at once. The Shape of Memories is an invitation to step inside the image—not as a historical document of a specific second in time, but as a living space where memory, emotion, and place coexist.”
