On Thursday, 4th of May at 6.30 pm Sonia Marin will be at Micamera with journalist Alba Solaro to launch her book: Twenty Weights, please (Boîte Editions, 2022), with a special screening of the short film My mum used to call me sister, written and directed Sonia Marin, shot on 16mm film by Vittoria Elena Simone and produced by C41 Magazine.

As Sonia Marin states, “Twenty weights, please is the story of two very important women of my childhood and life: my maternal grandmother and her daughter. With this personal project and my pictures of many places so meaningful for their memories, I want to celebrate these two women and their life in London, in the 1950s. This is a diary: written and lived by them, read and re-written by me through an in-and-out-of-time journey which enters my present from the past, leaving me with a sense of melancholy. The images I shot over the last 20 years safeguard this emotional archive: no sign of time, just working places, the house, empty roads they ran with their bicycles, the market street full of leftovers, the light at the end of the day.”

A text by Alba Solaro accompanies these memories that float in the air like the smoke from a Weights cigarette, gracefully held between grandma’s fingers. “As a child, in the house where I grew up in Rome, I used to sit on the edge of the bed, next to the window, in a precise spot where the sun beat down directly in the early afternoon; filtered through the glass, it warmed without burning. I don’t know how to name that feeling, I would stand there with my eyes closed, it was perfect; I would think, one day I will miss all this, one day it will be lost forever. What feeling is nostalgia for something that has not yet passed? The thing is that you never think that that moment will really come, but then it does. I look at the photos of Twenty Weights, please and I find that feeling again. The mountains from a plane window—where were we going that time? The streetlamps on the street corner at night, the old TV set in a bare room, the fishcake, the chimneys on the roof, the bedsprings. The play of reflections on the car windows as you approach to go inside; the row of washing machines behind the window of the laundry shop, seen in passing as you walk down the street—and where were you going? The carpeted wooden stairs—the same as in all the rented flats of all the trips you’ve taken to London in search of an increasingly indefinable thrill. It all seems so random, it looks like a family album that has lost most of the photos with people in them.”

On the same evening, there will be a special screening of the short film: My mother called me sister, written and directed by Sonia Marin and produced by C41 Magazine. “My mum used to call me sister was born from my overpowering need to imagine and to tell: I remember that at her house, between tea and a cigarette, the tales of the past captured my imagination, I was fascinated and I really felt as if I had been there myself in those streets, in that factory and, under that damp sky… I could even smell it. I interviewed my mother, I wanted her to remember as many details as possible, and her words took shape in precise and recurring images, simple moments of a sometimes banal everyday life that returned like unexpected gifts, giving her a comforting smile. It is that sense of belonging that I wanted to resurface, a link with that precise moment in which one feels present, a homage to a past that transforms and returns as a moment to be contemplated: My mum used to call me sister now takes me back to those streets, among the people, alongside my grandmother and her daughter in the silent London enshrined in Twenty Weights, please confusing the end with the beginning.” (Sonia Marin)

Sonia Marin was born in Padua on February 25th, 1971. She is a Milan based professional photographer and author. Along with her career, she is also a longtime resident lecturer at IED, European Institute of Design, for the photography and fashion departments. She collaborates with influential fashion, accessories, and interior brands and companies, and her work is featured in several international and national magazines. She played an important part as a speaker at the Advertising Photography section during the 6th International Orvieto Photography Convention in 2004. She won 1st prize Best Fine Art Picture in the Commercial Field at the 10th Master edition of the 2006 International Photography Festival in Moscow. In the years, she has exhibited her work in numerous shows, both nationally and internationally.