Game of Thrones, season 1, episode 2. Jaime Lannister pushes Brandon Stark out of a tower’s window, declaring: “The things I do for love”. The little boy just witnessed him being intimate with Queen Cersei, who is, in fact, his twin.

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From the critical text by Alessia Locatelli - International photocurator & Artistic Director of Biennale of Female Photography of Mantova:

“We can be next to someone and not perceive them, pausing in the solitude of a place that becomes the simulacrum in which to find that feeling of isolation.

But photography, as is often the case, is a propulsive tool. It allows to rework pain, to return and channel toward a visual narrative, that vocabulary of loneliness, illusions, disenchantments that constitute the other side of affection.

The photographic project The things I do for love by Irene Ferri aims at a sentimental recherche. Exactly as it happens in the boundless work of Marcel Proust, Ferri undertakes a journey "à rebours" through photographs dense with absences in order to recover from “love”.

From the central shot, with the presence of the human body claustrophobically occupying the frame, the entire photographic sequence unravels, whose need is to emphasize the transition from density to evanescence, to a void. A visual restitution played on the representation of objects (cars, unmade sheets, pieces of soap - or two halves?) that, in their "loneliness," seem to be left there, abandoned by someone.

There is only one shot in which the human body occupies the entire frame, but it is in the voids that we need to look most closely. Thus, it is in the photographs that appear seemingly vacant that the viewer can sense a heavy and uncomfortable presence.

The absence actually alludes to the enormous sense of loneliness and isolation that the photographer felt in this journey both physical and emotional into “love”. And although in the moment of the shots she was never alone, the full power of absence is felt in these photographs.”