Rooms That Still Speak

Rooms That Still Speak is a photographic exploration of nostalgia, loss, and the quiet persistence of physical memory. The images in this series were taken in the aftermath of a house fire that destroyed Luca Michielli’s home in December 2024. Each photograph highlights a specific room or angle tied to vivid personal memories. Providing an investigation of spaces where moments were once lived, now left in ruin.Shot digitally and composed with the sterile precision of real estate photography, the images in the series adopt a cold, observational tone. This deliberate approach stands in stark contrast to the emotional weight behind the photographs, emphasizing the disconnect between a house as a physical structure and a home as a container for lived experience.Accompanying the photographs is a book composed of two types of images: salvaged prints from Luca’s childhood and drugstore-style reprints of personal moments. These photos of sleepovers, playing music with family, parties, and time with pets are displayed side by side, mimicking a traditional family photo album. However, the arrangement feels somewhat off, distant, like a faded echo of something familiar. What remains is not nostalgia in its warmth, but nostalgia in its ache.Together, the series and book form a meditation on what lingers after loss. The project does not attempt to rebuild or restore what was lost, but instead invites the viewer to sit with it and live within it, in order to feel how memory once occupied the space. In this way, Rooms That Still Speak becomes not a reconstruction, but a quiet testament to the spaces where absence echoes and memories still speak.