Sara Palmieri uses photography as a tool to investigate the perception of time and memory through their resonance on the space we inhabit, and as a starting point to question the forms of reality, to show the fragility of its certainties.

Inspired by the Polesine flood of 1951—the most devastating in Italian history—the project considers the territory as an archive of memory, where water, earth, and inherited stories act as living agents of transmission. The image itself becomes a perceptive surface where opposites merge: visible and invisible, past and present, submerged and emerged.

The Polesine flood of November 1951 was a catastrophic event that affected much of the province of Rovigo and part of the province of Venice, causing approximately one hundred deaths and leaving more than 180,000 homeless, with extensive social and economic consequences. During the two weeks preceding the flood, intense rainfall occurred throughout the Po River catchment basin. While not reaching historical peaks in individual areas of the tributary basin, this rainfall was characterized by an anomalous temporal continuity and spatial distribution: indeed, there was virtually no interruption throughout the entire period, and the entire catchment area was affected. Furthermore, the spatial and temporal distribution of the rainfall was such that the flood wave of the main Po River overlapped with that of the individual tributaries at their respective confluences. This factor, which actually occurred despite its extreme improbability, is the cause, more than any other, of the anomalous hydraulic conditions in which the Po River found itself during the disastrous event. The occurrence of this unlikely circumstance caused the flood wave to progressively increase, flowing from upstream to downstream, corresponding to each individual inflow of its numerous tributaries, both Alpine and Apennine.

The Line of Water explores memory as a shifting, fluid entity, where trauma is not just a wound but a catalyst for transformation. Through a poetic and metaphysical reflection on transience and loss, the project examines how the territory—both physical and emotional—absorbs, reshapes, and transmits traces of the past, generating new languages of remembrance and creation.