WHY AM I LAUNCHING THE5 - MY NEW CREATIVE TRADEMARK FOCUSED

ON:

CARE, LOVE, EMPATHY AND FORGIVENESS, AND WHY NOW?

The intense experience of fear linked to the diagnosis of visual impairment I received in my adulthood, triggered a radical need to get to the roots of what it meant to me to feel safe as a woman, while living with ‘disability’ and why I couldn’t feel a trace of that feeling of safety within my body until my 30s. The journey that started in 2022 it is now a three years documentary centred in THE

POWER OF STORYTELLING TO TRANSFORM OUR LIVES FROM VICTIMS INTO AUTHORS.

I therefore started researching in the realm of mythology to better portray the three main emotional domains I could sense being connected to visual impairment and to what the roots of those emotions now so violently triggered in my body truly represented:

FEAR

LOVE

CARE

FORGIVENESS

EMPATHY

AND THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO FATHEROOD AS THAT GIFT OF PRESENCE, OR

ABSENCE, that women could relate to throughout their adulthood, while stopping to think, rethink, or simply witness, their relationship with love and its dimension of safety. Mine within photography is a journey that has only been made possible by embracing my authentic self to its core, While uncovering the roots of fear and its relationship with what love meant to me, as e-motion, an energy in motion and constant evolution throughout our life. A process of discovery I would have never embarked on without what visual impairment brought to me five years ago, the call for unveiling, layer after layer of experience, my vocation for photography and in particular for visual poetry storytelling, as an art-form in its own right.

I most recently had my fourth eyes operation at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London where I had the luck and the joy to have been, truly, taken care of over. So after six years without being able to look into somebody’s eyes, as my capacity for face and colours recognition was being impaired more and more by my eye condition, my brain, but above all, my body as I now am aware of, started filling the gaps with other stories for me to ‘look at’, other stories for me to feel with other senses.

The stories of what my body, my mind and above all my energy were capable of, narrating to me through my entire body, what the presence of somebody else’s energy made me feel, and that guided me to slowly but surely, over the course of the last three years of shooting, to conclude my latest creative documentary.

A story that has become a form of self - guided meditation through, the now mono- sight lens, of my visual creative process.

I have been FEELING REALITY throughout my entire body, via a form of total

EMBODIED COGNITION, rather than just through my eyes and mind - mnemonic processes.

I ADDED OIL PAINTING TO MY PRACTICE LAST YEAR, AS A RESULT.

THE MAKING OF ME THROUGH COLOURS, AS I CAME TO DEFINE THIS ACT

OF SELF – DISCOVERY … This journey is now A TWO – SIDED STORY OF UNCONVENTIONAL CARE AND

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE, RECEIVED AND GIVEN

Between my mum and myself, a journey which for me started during a talk I had with Claire, founder of PhotoFringe 22 while I was living in Brighton, and which then continued throughout my new project’s research studies on how:

- IFS acronym for the Internal Family System psychoanalytical model

- The neuroscience of emotions; regulation

- The neuropsychology of embodied cognition

can set someone free from the triggers of CPTSD as in Complex PTSD in adulthood.

This is the story of a lived experience FROM TRAUMA TO GROWTH, that I am now

ready to start sharing, to help others living through challenging times in their lives,

TO BUILD RESILIENCE IN THEIR FEET, AND ABOVE ALL IN THEIR HANDS,

TO LEARN AND RELEARN HOW TO TRULY HOLD EACH OTHER’S HANDS, BY

KEEPING ON MOVING FORWARD, or as my Mum would say in Italian:

- POCO A POCO -

Step by step :)

With Care, Love and Respect, Letizia Lopreiato