Mauro Lanza: You can easily return to the past but no one is there anymore

There is one image more than others that seems to capture the sense of the liminal spaces of the past […]. It is an old photo that has been edited using a graphics program. Some of the details have been changed and wording has been added. The background is a retro living room, with yellowing walls, carpet on the floor, and an old sofa. Some bits look like a collage, such as the television on the left and a seemingly endless corridor that can be glimpsed on the right. There is a mysterious square window on the back wall, through which we can see a patch of black, starry sky. The foreground features a sort of cut-out of a child riding a red bicycle, patterned with the snowstorm effect of interference on old cathode ray tube televisions. The text, written top and bottom in classic meme fashion, reads: »You can easily return to the past, but no one is there anymore.«

The past is gone forever, and even if we could get back there, it would be empty. This is why the images of the places we connect with childhood, shown vacant and deserted, arouse deep, conflicting feelings in us: nostalgia for a time that we see as simpler and more carefree, or maybe just ripe with possibility, mingled with an awareness of the inexorable passing of time.

 

Excerpt from Valentina Tanni, Exit Reality. Vaporwave, Backrooms, Weirdcore and Other Landscapes Beyond the Threshold (Rome: Nero, 2023)