The Last Impressions of Home
With The Last Impressions of Home, the artist presents his family house as if it were an extended family member, one that has quietly held stories within its walls. Now facing imminent destruction, the house becomes both collaborator and subject, working with the artist in a last goodbye.
Zanni transformed the house into a giant pinhole camera obscura, with each room acting as a camera. Sheets of light-sensitive paper were placed on the walls, and through a tiny pinhole, the outside world was projected inside, creating large-scale negative images of the garden, neighbourhood, and the house itself.
The process was both technically demanding and deeply personal. Every window had to be covered, the kitchen converted into a darkroom, and the bathroom into a wash station. Working in total darkness inside an empty house that had witnessed over a century of family life, Zanni experienced the space as suspended in time. As light entered through the pinhole, the house seemed to come alive again, its walls transformed into canvases for lived memories and echoes from the family archive.
The resulting photographs are imperfect: creased, uneven, marked by fingerprints and chance. These traces highlight the intimacy and authenticity of the work and emphasize the collaboration between artist and subject. By presenting the images as negatives, Zanni draws our attention to what is usually hidden: the photograph as both presence and absence, the print we see, the negative that quietly holds its trace, and the fleeting moment of light that produced it.
The Last Impressions of Home is not only about documenting a house, but about holding onto what it meant as a home. It builds a fragile visual bridge between personal memory and collective history, inviting the audience to reflect on the spaces that shape us and the traces they leave behind.