“Once we were kidz” is a visual and sentimental journey through the 90s-2000s, an emotional archive that restores the fragile and noisy intensity of a time suspended between innocence and discovery.
The title evokes a collective and generational dimension: a “we” that looks to the past as a living territory, still capable of questioning the present. Love stories, friendships and urban landscapes, public and private spaces intertwine with slowcore soundscapes and environmental noises, restoring the atmosphere of a generation that grew up between analog dreams and first digital glows.
The photographs by Lulù Withheld, despite a strong personal connotation, assume a universal value, offering a point of contact between artist and collective narrative and inviting to pause, recognize and listen to a distant era that continues to resonate in the present, in a courageous backward process of understanding and reintegration of one’s own identity.
«Living with the tightrope walker, who we are or have been, also means giving him a little freedom. Like sitting astride the ledge, sometimes if he wants, to breathe his dangerous drunkenness”. Because what we were will accompany us forever.
Once we were kidz
A visual and sentimental journey by Lulù Withheld
We were kids.
Obvious, right?
Adolescence is a treacherous ground. It is a very short time that you know can give in at any moment, dangerous and so full of splendor.
It lasts nothing, that moment.
When you’re in it you only think that time is forever. But forever does not exist.
There is no forever that we promised ourselves so many times, all of us.
Gone are the days of rainbows
Gone are the nights of swinging from the stars
And those days are over. They’re over and that’s it.
What remains is this feeling of having been there. Of having gone through that moment and having lost something anyway, along the way. So you find yourself twenty years later dealing with a useless yet heavy emotional baggage that you’ve carried with you since then.
Because what was, then, is also what we are, now.
On the last page of this book I noted: «Living with the tightrope walker, who we are or have been, also means giving him a little freedom. Like sitting astride the ledge, sometimes if he wants, to breathe his dangerous drunkenness».
There, what we were will accompany us forever.
Digitizing all my photos for the first time, a lifetime later, was not only a nostalgic operation, in full 90s revival, but also of discovery and reappropriation; a kind of delayed coming-of-age of twenty years.
This operation, or gesture, allowed me to understand and reintegrate, in some way, my identity. This nostalgic arsenal is a sort of visual diary, that can show me who I was but also, and above all, who I am. A kind of backward identification process, in which I can identify with an I that, obviously, no longer exists but that, however, allows me to preserve, over time, the sense of unity of my own I. In a mutual exchange between past and present.
In the end the work (the labor) of memory allows us to process our personal story…
understanding who we were allows us to know who we are.
And are we not, all of us, the sum of time on us?
Once we were kidz is, for me, an act of courage, that same courage that is required to be there, to have certainty of one’s own existence.
Once we were kidz is for me a process of detachment but also of reappropriation, and finally of contemplation of that youth – cruel – that was and will not be again.
Once we were kidz is this regret this impossible attempt of this condition of this arrivederci that cannot transform into goodbye.
Using the words of D. written in his last letter.
Lulù Withheld bio
Lulù Withheld linktree
Lulù Withheld – Website
Once we were kidz on display at space MA in Perugia (article)
Photographing to Exist – A conversation with Lulù Withheld