H.M
H.M. reflects on memory loss as an internal form of conflict, a silent fracture between experience and recollection. Inspired by Henry Gustav Molaison, whose condition reshaped the understanding of human memory.
The work focuses on the echoes of trauma: disorientation, absence, bondage and the unsettling awareness of something lost yet impossible to retrieve. Through archival materials, reconstructed mnemonic tests, staged situations and self-portraits, the images translate the emotional landscape of amnesia into a subjective fresco.
Amnesia becomes a metaphor for human conditions in which conflict unfolds internally and invisibly. The inability to retain experience creates a limbo between presence and disappearance, knowledge and emptiness. In this space, neuroscience appears as discovery and uncertainty, exposing unknown histories of medical trauma and marginalization that deeply affected me.
H.M. approaches photography not as testimony, but as a place where disturbing collective anxieties resonate in silence.
“Can you imagine what it’s like to have one night 20 years long with no dream?
That’s what it’s been like. Just like death.
No difference between day and night, no thoughts at all. In that sense it has been totally painless which is not something which is very desirable really, is it?
‘Cause it’s precisely like death.”
Find out more:
Website: alessandromazzola.net
Instagram: @_ale_maz_