There is a before, there is always a “before.”
There’s a place we loved, a song we listened to for hours, singing it half-heartedly or singing it at the top of our lungs, a lullaby handed down through the ages, a lucky object or something to which we are otherwise attached.
And then there is a fairy tale we grew up with, something we loved to do and it made us feel good, just good.
Little everyday things, nothing extraordinary, but they are memory, they are serenity, they are home.
But what happens when the unspeakable breaks through? When our world shatters,
the values we believed in dissolve,
what we loved is swept away,
and we ourselves feel lost? Does that “before” still exist?
From this question comes “Flowers Remain.”
Because this is also how life can be rebuilt: with a flower, with a stone, with a candle. A flower for every moment to remember
A stone for those we would like to forget
A candle, for the people we loved and lost.
Stones, flowers, candles – together they tell our story.
A mosaic of photography, voice and writing to narrate a fragmented life, but still rich in beauty and light because – despite everything – “flowers remain.”
In collaboration with Medici Senza Frontiere
In Palermo, Medici Senza Frontiere has launched a project dedicated to the care and rehabilitation of migrant survivors of torture and intentional violence. In collaboration with Policlinico “Paolo Giaccone” Hospital and the University of Palermo, the PROMISE Department (Health Promotion, Maternal-Childhood, Internal Medicine and Specialty Excellence) and the CLEDU (Legal Clinic for Human Rights), the MSF team runs an interdisciplinary outpatient clinic aimed at migrants and refugees. The service offers medical, psychological, social and legal support, always supported by intercultural mediation, to an average of 76 active patients (2024 data). The patients, from more than twenty countries, have experienced extreme violence, particularly during transit in Libya.
In the context of this project, photographer Valentina Tamborra created a collaborative, multimedia work entitled “Flowers Remain”-the identity that survives torture. The title of the project draws inspiration from the lifeline as an element of Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET Narrative Exposure Therapy ) used in the psychotherapeutic pathway for recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder.
The goal is to recompose what torture has tried to destroy: identity. The project interweaves photographs, videos, Instax images, written texts and audio tracks created together with the patients, offering them a space in which to become protagonists of their own narrative again, telling themselves for who they are, in their full humanity. Each participant – including some staff members – was invited to share aspects of their lives and stories: passions, memories, dreams.
An invitation to value the elements of beauty and strength that continue to exist. Despite everything.
