loredana denicola
l'oscurità, ma io ho una luce
an autobiographical project
a visual atlas of illness
digital and mobile photography, medical scans, and personal archives
ongoing since 2018 — book in progress
L’oscurità, ma io ho una luce is a therapeutic autobiographical photography project born from sudden illness, physical pain, and a profound personal rupture.
It began in London in 2017, without warning. What I initially thought was temporary quickly became a long and ongoing experience of physical suffering, emotional isolation, and identity loss.
In 2018, after a 55-day hospital stay in Puglia, I returned to a body and mind I no longer recognised. I left behind my life in London — work, relationships, photography — and came back home in a state of fragility and uncertainty.
In that condition, I began to document what I could not fully express.
Writing on scraps of paper. Taking photographs with whatever device was available. Slowly, photography stopped being a profession and became a form of survival.
Self-portraiture and writing turned into tools for observation, resistance, and reconstruction.
This project is not a record of illness.
It is a process of transformation.
It traces the passage from disintegration to awareness, where pain becomes language, and vulnerability becomes form.
In my most difficult moments, a quiet inner presence persisted — not as certainty, but as resistance. A refusal to disappear.
Over time, I learned to live within uncertainty, rebuilding meaning through fragments: images, notes, and gestures.
Each photograph is a fragment of that passage — a trace of presence inside instability. Together, they form a mosaic of rupture and reconstruction.
This work speaks to those who live with invisible pain, and to the possibility of finding strength within it — not as an idea, but as lived experience.
Life is unpredictable. I have learned to live each day as it comes.
Installation of the autobiographical photography project L'oscurità, ma io ho una luce, presented at Gallery X in Dublin.
The work explores themes of illness, pain, and resilience through digital photography, self-portraiture, and therapeutic writing.
What’s the meaning of all this?
Fear. Dizziness. Pain. Darkness.
A fragmented state of being, where thought and emotion collapse into complicity.
A blade of light cuts through the darkness — briefly, almost violently — before disappearing again.
Pain. Dizziness. Darkness.
I move toward it.
It grows larger — a heavy planet from my past, pulling everything inward.
There is no space. No escape. No sincerity in the landscape of thought.
A tunnel opens and swallows me.
A hospital room.
The smell of antiseptic and illness. The weight of helplessness in the air.
A broken figure kneels before another body — still, absent, unrecognisable.
And then I see her.
That terrified woman is me.
The walls close in.
Memories arrive in fragments, sharper than pain itself — mistakes, regrets, repetitions that refuse to fade.
Reality dissolves.
Only sensation remains.
What’s the meaning of all this?
The question returns, without answer, suspended in emptiness.
Fear. Dizziness. Pain. Darkness.
The cycle repeats — an endless loop of thought, sensation, and fracture.
I am a prisoner of my own mind.
Amid the collapse, something persists.
Not resolution. Not clarity.
A faint interruption in the noise — unstable, almost imperceptible.
A memory of another state of being, distant and unresolved.
It does not hold. It returns only in fragments.
I move through it without certainty.
There is no exit, only passage through shifting conditions of perception and fear.
The woman I see — terrified, suspended — is me.
And at the same time, not fully me.
Something both recognised and unreachable.
What’s the meaning of all this?
Not an answer.
A repetition.
A condition.
Fear. Dizziness. Pain. Darkness.
They do not resolve.
They return.
They continue.
The adult is a child who has lost the ability to dream and rejoice.
This loss, for me, has often taken the shape of what we call illness — not only of the body, but of perception itself.
What we call reality is unstable.
It is filtered through thoughts, emotions, inherited beliefs — systems that shape how we see and how we suffer.
I have experienced how internal conflict can become physical, how the mind can construct forms of distress that feel real, absolute, inescapable.
Is it possible to shift the way we inhabit ourselves?
Not as a conclusion, but as a question that remains open.
Fear, repetition, and inner contradiction are not exceptions — they are conditions of being.
What we carry inside does not simply remain inside.
It shapes perception, language, and presence.
Healing, if it exists, is not a destination.
It is a slow repositioning of attention — toward what is fractured, unresolved, still forming.
Perhaps we do not change everything.
Perhaps we only learn to see differently what is already there.
What is pain?
It might seem like an easy question, but its meaning shifts depending on who experiences it.
For some, it is a signal. For others, a punishment. A warning. A flaw. A test. A fracture in the body or in belief.
For me, pain is what forces a collapse of the external world.
A withdrawal.
A narrowing of perception until only sensation remains.
It is a place where time loses structure.
Where the body becomes both object and territory of experience.
Where sleep does not interrupt suffering, but is invaded by it.
Pain does not stay in the body as a single event.
It expands, it distorts, it reorganises attention around itself.
There are mechanisms that try to explain it — biological systems, signals, responses, repair.
But none of them fully contain the lived experience of it.
And yet, there is a moment where explanation ends.
Where meaning is no longer external, but embodied.
For me, pain becomes visible only at its limit.
In front of a mirror.
When the body and perception collapse into the same image.
Tears, recognition, refusal.
A moment where endurance becomes confrontation.