Some images are not to be looked at. They are carried within.
There are photographs that no longer belong to the time in which they were taken.
They remain imprinted — like collective wounds — piercing through the skin and into memory.
From one of these images, Pietà was born: the photograph by Mohammed Salem, winner of the World Press Photo of the Year 2024, portraying a Palestinian woman in the desperate embrace of her niece’s body.
That image moved the world.
A fragment of reality that forces us to look, not to turn away — to recognize in another’s pain our own reflection.
To transform it into sculpture means to give it an eternal body, to return to it space, weight, and breath.
Love cannot stop death, but it can still defy oblivion.
Pietà is this: the image that becomes stone, the stone that becomes image again, memory taking shape.
