Julia Romano’s Memories of India reimagines landscapes as visual biographies—layered digital collages blending architecture, nature, and emotion to explore memory, identity, and personal journeys through place. The #Newsdesk reports.

Julia Romano’s Memories of India is a stunning digital collage art series inspired by her 2023 journey through India. Blending architectural marvels, lush landscapes, and symbolic line drawings, Romano creates visual biographies that explore the deep connection between memory, identity, and environment. Her unique artistic style transforms traditional landscapes into rich, layered compositions that resonate with emotion and reflection. Exhibited at Cosmic Heart Gallery in South Bombay, this immersive collection invites viewers to experience travel, memory, and storytelling through evocative visual narratives. Discover how personal experience shapes place in these extraordinary contemporary art collages.

“Everything we want to remember, we must assign an image.” This refrain, drawn from María Gainza’s Un puñado de flechas, sets the tone for Argentine artist Julia Romano’s new series, Memories of India, a rich visual exploration of memory, place, and experience. Grounded in reverence, curiosity, and personal transformation, Romano’s work reimagines the landscape as a living archive—a "visual biography" etched in colour, line, and layered symbolism.

Inspired by her 2023 stay in India, Romano doesn’t merely depict geography; she inhabits it. Her compositions act as travel logbooks, capturing moments of discovery and wonder across a single plane. By “overlaying architectural, natural, and symbolic elements,” she reveals the multiplicity of stories embedded in the land—stories shaped not only by history and place, but by emotion, reflection, and perception.

Far from being static snapshots, each collage is a dynamic archive: layers of photographic imagery—flora, monuments, roads, temples—interwoven with freehand black line drawings. Together, they unfold like memories—nonlinear, sensory, and deeply personal.

The iconic Taj Mahal appears not as a postcard image, but as “a profound repository of layered memories and cultural resonance” in Romano’s treatment. She lifts it from cliché, transforming it into a living site imbued with her own “perception, admiration, and quiet moments of awe.”

A Dialogue with Memory

Romano articulates her creative ethos clearly: “The act of contemplating these landscapes is a journey in itself. Everything converges to remind us that a landscape is not confined to its superficial appearance but is, above all, a place intersected by the unique gaze of the observer.”

This sentiment anchors the series in subjectivity—memory not as a faithful recorder, but as an emotional interpreter. Her digital collages serve as travel notebooks where memories, cultural identity, sensations, and learning converge to “take us back”—back to the place, the feeling, the moment.

Through her method, landscape ceases to be merely external backdrop. It becomes, instead, a vessel for the internal world—a reflection of experience, identity, and the ongoing dialogue between self and environment.

A signature element of Romano’s work is the juxtaposition of freehand black drawings with photographic collage. This duality creates a poetic tension: the precision of the camera with the fluidity of the line, the concrete with the ephemeral. The effect is aesthetic and symbolic: the natural and constructed worlds harmonize to evoke deep introspection.

This layering of elements—of flora and architecture, of shadow and light—invites us to lose ourselves in the rivers, pillars, and trees. The landscapes become threshold spaces, porous and alive, where viewer and place echo each other in quiet resonance.

Praise from Cosmic Heart Gallery

Jalpa H Vithalani, Creative Director of Mumbai’s Cosmic Heart Gallery, captures the essence of Romano’s series in heartfelt praise: “These digital collages transcend conventional landscapes, transforming them into visual biographies that weave together personal and universal narratives. Each piece, inspired by Julia Romano’s 2023 journey through India, blends architectural marvel and natural elements. I personally love the element wherein she has interlaced the collages with black free hand drawing.”

Her words echo the series’ core mission—to weave individual memory into visual form, bridging the intimate and collective. 

Final Thoughts

In an era defined by fleeting images and scrolling feeds, Memories of India reminds us of the power of intentional image-making. Each collage is a meditation on the act of remembering—on how the places we visit, breathe in, stand before, become infused with layers of feeling and reflection. Romano’s landscapes are not just witnessed—they are witnessed by a witness, her insight illuminating the essential entanglement of the observed and the observer.

In the hands of Julia Romano—and under the curatorial guidance of Cosmic Heart Gallery—the act of looking becomes an act of remembering. And through remembering, we are called to feel, to connect, to reimagine our own pathways through the visual and emotional landscapes of our lives.

Presented by 𝐂𝐨𝐬𝐦𝐢𝐜 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐆𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐫𝐲 along with the 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐨𝐟 𝐀𝐫𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐚 & 𝐁𝐚𝐬𝐮 𝐅𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. G-2a, Court Chambers, Mumbai | 11 June – 31 July |  11am–7pm (Tue–Sat) | https://www.cosmicheartgallery.info/landscape-as-a-visual-biography/