Anna Fraire approaches memory as a layered and evolving process. In her series Family Album / Album di Famiglia, she reconfigures old family photographs by combining them with personal documents, letters, postcards, and school reports. These elements intertwine in compositions that do not reconstruct her family’s history but rather explore the fluidity of memory. Fraire’s work highlights how memory is not an ordered archive but a shifting terrain where past and present, personal experience and testimony, constantly blur.

Her process embraces imperfection and transformation, demonstrating that memory is not about restoring the past but engaging with its remnants. By working with inherited materials and disrupting traditional photographic storytelling, she challenges the notion of history as something fixed. Instead, her compositions invite viewers to consider how memory functions beyond mere documentation, existing in layers of meaning that shift over time. Through the family archive she works with, Fraire explores the interplay between presence and absence, joy and hurt. Transcending the personal, she traces the connections between us and our emotional legacies, opening up new perspectives on what is inherited and reinterpreted across generations.

Ivona Tau, working at the intersection of photography and artificial intelligence, explores memory through digital reconstruction. In her series My Grandmother’s Memories, she processes a collection of negatives and 8mm film footage taken by her grandfather in the 1960s and 1980s, training AI models to reinterpret these archival images. The AI-generated results—faces that resemble family members but are never exact, moments that feel real yet remain elusive—evoke the fragility of memory and its tendency to blur over time. Her approach reflects the way recollection is unstable, subject to distortion, and shaped by both human perception and technological mediation.

Tau’s work extends beyond her grandmother’s memories to broader reflections on the impermanence of personal history. As her grandmother experienced memory loss—mistaking loved ones, inhabiting a past that no one else could see—Tau became fascinated by how memory fragments and reshapes itself. AI’s generative glitches—its distortions, shifting forms, and fluid reconstructions—mirror this process, highlighting the instability of remembrance. Her works, including After-School Social Club and Longing for an Embrace, Longing for a Gaze, explore how artificial intelligence can serve as both an archival tool and a metaphor for the ways memory is reconstructed through personal and technological lenses.

Through Fraire’s tangible, layered assemblages and Tau’s digital reinterpretations, Somewhere, Something Shines reveals memory as an active, ever-changing force. Whether through the physical remnants of personal history or AI’s generative reimagining, both artists expose how remembrance is shaped by materiality, perception, and time. Their works question the boundaries between preservation and reinvention, personal and universal, nostalgia and transformation. In an era when digital technology increasingly mediates how we remember, this exhibition serves as a reflection on the fragile, fluid nature of memory—one that is always shifting, always becoming, always shining in unexpected ways.