«What happens to journalistic reportage photographs when the news is published, passed and years of new news put distance between the shot and the life of the image?» This seems to be the question that Gabriele Stabile asks himself when, after more than a decade, he reopens his archive and begins his creative journey with the photographs deposited there, turning them into the tables you see, flipping through the book. The creative action of the photographer, like human memory, leaves traces, marks, scratches, repetitions of images, makes the memory an emotion, immediate as little vivid and definitely reworked. Swim Till I Sank is an invitation to dive into the depths of memories, without necessarily drowning.

These photographs are reborn through the filter of a kind of dream, a dimension much larger and wider than the precise memory and the simple fact. The golden eyes, here, are also those of memory, that go beyond the moment to embrace time. They see the beauty and elegance of the gesture that is similar in places, times, actions far from each other. The Aristotelian units of photojournalism have definitely disappeared. The artist’s gesture thus passes through two moments: the immediate recording of the fact and the reworking of the material when, over the years, he lost his "relevance" and, sometimes, even the exact memory of where the photo was taken. The practice of imagination is the exercise necessary to restore life and truth to the world.»