Ghostly is an interactive video installation built around the quiet threshold between image, memory, and apparition.

At the center of the work is a vintage photograph, back-projected and enclosed within an old painted wooden frame, as if it were an object preserved from another time. At first, the image appears still, silent, and self-contained, carrying the fragile authority of an anonymous portrait rescued from the past. But the work does not remain closed within the fixed condition of the photograph. It waits for the presence of the viewer.
 

When a hand approaches the protective glass, a sensor is activated and the image begins to come alive. The portrait slowly opens itself, revealing a story that seems to have been silently buried within it all along: an imagined narrative, poetic rather than documentary, evoked from the emotional and symbolic aura of the face. What emerges is not the reconstruction of a real biography, but the possible life of the image, the secret vibration it has continued to hold beneath its stillness.
 

The animation responds directly to the movement of the viewer’s hand, particularly to its vertical displacement. This creates a subtle and intimate form of interaction, one that naturally encourages a gesture resembling invocation or spiritual evocation, as if the spectator were attempting to summon a presence from the silence of the frame. The hand does not simply activate the image: it enters into relation with it, almost negotiating its appearance.
 

In this way, Ghostly transforms the act of looking into a small ritual. The framed photograph becomes a threshold object, suspended between archive and séance, between material relic and moving apparition. The work reflects on the latent life of images, on the desire to awaken what has been fixed by time, and on the strange tenderness of trying to make the past answer back.

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Shows

Mad Festival, Latina - 2015

Credits
Concept and art direction - Francesca Fini
Photo documentation - Paola Acciarino