The Fragmentation Project
Photography has always been, for me, a question rather than an answer. A photograph taken in the world does not close a moment — it opens it. And The Fragmentation Project is where I push that opening as far as it can go.
The starting point is always a real image: a party, a journey, a face, a room. Something that happened, that was felt. I then subject that photograph to a process of geometric decomposition — breaking the image into modular units, expanded pixels that dissolve the surface of the scene into fields of pure colour and form. What remains is no longer the thing that was photographed. It is the residue of it. The emotional temperature without the descriptive detail.
I think of this as what memory actually does. We do not remember in clear photographs — we remember in fragments, in impressions, in colours and atmospheres that have survived the passage of time while the specific details have not. The pixel becomes, in this work, a unit of forgetting: each one a small act of dissolution that, together, produces something new — an image of what it feels like to remember, rather than what there is to see.
The works in this series span two decades of personal experience — London, Munich, the United States, Bavaria. They are rooted in my own life, my own chronology. But the fragmentation process removes the autobiography and leaves something that I hope becomes everyone's: the feeling of a past that is still present, still warm, but no longer quite visible.
"Remember me "
Size : 126x100 cm
"At a party long time ago"
Size : 120x120 cm
Medium : Photography
Medium : Photography
Limited Edition 1/7
Limited Edition 1/7
Forgotten stories"
Size : 150x150 cm
"Old Games"
Size : 140x105 cm
Medium : Photography
Medium : Photography
Limited Edition 1/7
Limited Edition 1/7
"Convivenza...Londra 2003"
Size : 110x150 cm
Medium : Photography
Limited Edition 1/7
"Around USA "
Size : 130x130 cm
"Bavarian trip"
Size : 150x85 cm
Medium : Photography
Medium : Photography
Limited Edition 1/7
Limited Edition 1/7
"A summer on the motorway "
Size : 150x115 cm
"New suburbs"
Size : 150x150 cm
Medium : Photography
Medium : Photography
Limited Edition 1/7
Limited Edition 1/7
"LA.... some time ago"
Size : 150x82 cm
Medium : Photography
Limited Edition 1/7
About the work
The Fragmentation Project occupies a singular position within Furio Torracchi's practice — it is the series in which his central preoccupations with memory, perception, and the limits of the photographic image are pursued with the greatest formal rigour and conceptual clarity.
The method is deceptively simple: a photograph is taken — of a gathering, a journey, a domestic interior, a moment of shared experience — and then systematically decomposed through geometric reduction. The image is broken into modular pixel units that dissolve its descriptive surface, stripping away the specific details of the scene while preserving its chromatic and emotional structure. What survives this process is not representation but resonance: the feeling of the original moment, detached from its particular content.
This is, at its core, a phenomenological investigation into the nature of recollection. Torracchi proceeds from the observation that human memory does not function as a photographic archive — it does not store clear, complete images of past experience. It stores impressions: warmth, light, colour, atmosphere. The expanded pixel in these works is not merely a formal device but a philosophical proposition. It argues that the degraded image — the image that has lost its legibility — is paradoxically closer to the truth of memory than the sharp photograph it began as.
What distinguishes this series from other post-photographic practices is the specificity of its biographical grounding. The works carry titles that locate them precisely — Convivenza...Londra 2003, Around USA, LA...Some Time Ago, Bavarian Trip — yet the visual treatment renders these biographical anchors almost inaccessible. The viewer knows where and when, but cannot see. This productive tension between the named and the dissolved, the documented and the forgotten, gives the series its particular emotional charge: the feeling of standing at the threshold of a memory one cannot quite enter.
Spanning two decades of personal history and produced in large format — many works exceeding 130 × 150 cm — The Fragmentation Project makes a claim on physical space as well as psychological territory. These are not intimate works to be examined closely. They are environments to be inhabited, in which the viewer's own experience of incompleteness and recollection is activated and held."
Catalogue essay, 2026"