Entitled “Cartography of Solitudes”, this photographic volume published by Marsilio Arte ‒ in bookshops from 29 September 2026 ‒ brings together over seventy photographs by the RiseUp duo – comprising Giovanni Gallio and Sara Capovilla – alongside texts by Gianmarco Pacione, all inspired by a disease that robs people of time and memory. RiseUp talks about the book

Cartography of Solitudes was born from a family experience and the impossibility of finding adequate words to describe a disease that seems to elude any form of representation. Alzheimer’s acts slowly, altering the perception of time, space, the family ecosystem, and all relationships. Its progression redefines the very meaning of presence, transforming the lives of both those experiencing the disease and those who remain by their side. The project takes shape within this space of constant, ineluctable, and painful transformation, where any type of linear narrative is insufficient or, at the very least, incomplete. The experience of Alzheimer’s progresses through shifts, gaps, repetitions, sudden and definitive suspensions of a memory that, gradually, becomes more delicate and elusive. Through the language of contemporary photography, Cartography of Solitudes explores this sense of unprocessable instability in the patient and those around them, allowing a complex sequence of allusions to delicately, never piously, trace the complex phases of the disease. The images bear witness to the gradual dissolving of a mother into a world progressively losing its own reference points. At first, reality still retains its compactness: the light is full, the colours retain depth, the faces inhabit the space naturally, appearing clear. Then, the equilibrium cracks almost imperceptibly. The very substance of the image becomes uncertain. The time of wandering, so characteristic of Alzheimer’s, emerges in the sensation of a continuous movement that no longer leads to any recognizable place, or any familiar person. When the diagnosis takes on a clear identity, the visual flow of the book shifts again. The blackness expands, the faces dissolve, memory recedes further and further, leaving behind only sparse fragments. Finally, even the darkness thins, flowing into a suspended white that suggests not so much a full reconciliation as a threshold beyond which every experience loses its consistency, becoming a diaphanous wreck, anchored in depths impossible to fathom. The work therefore seeks to trace a fragile cartography of those invisible territories that are at once revealed and concealed in the progression of Alzheimer’s by destabilizing lights and shadows, in the awareness that losing one’s memory is equivalent to losing who we are. And in the wish to also give voice to those who, with tenacity and human weakness, witness from the outside the unveiling of these territories. A process in which, ultimately, only stones remain, layered guardians of another memory, destined to be eternally protected.

RiseUp

BIO
RiseUp are Giovanni Gallio and Sara Capovilla, a photography duo based between Verona and Venice. For the past twenty years, they have been working in tandem across hybrid visual genres, exploring sports, fashion and documentary photography, and collaborating with national and international brands and magazines. Today, their focus returns to photojournalism with Cartography of Solitudes, an intimate project dedicated to Alzheimer’s and the forms of disorientation that the disease brings with it.