Installations
luci, lights
In the case of luminous objects, the idea is that the incandescent filaments of the old light bulbs are graphic elements of writing: we are faced with a text that we recognize as such but for which we lack the key to understanding it.
When Edison invented the light bulb that we used until a few years ago, Monet had not yet started painting his water lilies…
rio negro
I talk about emotions, sensations, imaginations, but I don’t want to say anything about the engine that drives the work, discovering it is the job of the beholder. Another journey, if you will.
In a gallery I see the works as they are presented, at the height at which they are hung: but there is also the rest of the space, silent and patient, without paintings, without people.
omaggio a charlotte salomon
Born in Berlin in 1917 to a family of Jewish origin, Charlotte Salomon took refuge with her maternal grandparents on the French Riviera in 1939. Between 1940 and 1942, haunted by the nightmares of persecution and the premonition of an imminent end, she painted her autobiography “Life? Or Theatre?” — small gouache paintings with text and musical notations. In doing so, she achieved victory by managing to preserve, pass on, and make indelible, the memory of her life, the very thing the Gestapo tried to destroy. Will all of us be able to say what is necessary before a Gestapo (illness, misfortune, the natural end) knocks on our doors too? And what is needed to do so? My cycle of paintings explores these subjects.
voglio vedere il mare
In the summer of 2004, I transported a ton of seawater from the mouth of the river Etsch to the Brenner Pass. The bunker of scalini 84 stufen was filled with a hundred plastic buckets of water. Another four buckets of the seawater were fastened to the steep stone wall between the waterfall and the bunker, forming a vertical line. In April 2007, the bunker was emptied, the buckets and iron brackets were dismantled and taken from the wall, while the remaining water (about 700 of the original 1,000 liters had evaporated) was taken back to the Etsch river mouth and restored to its place of origin.
Performances
My travels with abraham goldfisch
A goldfish is an elegant metaphor for contemporary art: shiny, disarmed, always spinning in circles and saying nothing.
In recent years, I have traveled so much that the exotic has lost its strength. When you are twenty (years old), abroad begins at the next tram stop: the women are more beautiful, as if there were more oxygen in the air. In foreign languages, which we barely understand, the definitions have an unattainable precision.
At forty, all taxis smell the same.
delocazione
The method I chose for this performance is that of de-location, that is to say, the transfer of elements of a Japanese tea ritual into a different context, that is the Italian ritual of coffee, and the attempt to record the aspects of contiguity and the differences that result, just as they present themselves: without evaluation, without comment.
The performance is dedicated to Giò di Sera, great Neapolitan artist in exile and good friend.
5 pezzi facili
I have always hated certain forms of mainstream Italian literature.
So, in 2006, I wrote a small book of short stories (Cinque pezzi facili, Five Easy Pieces), in which I tried to use all the literary forms that I can’t stand. The serious publishing house, Minerva, printed it.
Then I asked a friend of mine (Emilio Rigatti, who wrote many* beautiful texts) to disguise himself as a critic and do his job, destroying my work. And he did it very well!
38 disegni erotici
The 38 erotic drawings are called this way because they are neither 38 nor erotic. Okay, it’s a cheap joke, but I wanted to have one of my stories about “sexual education cinema in the 1950s in Italy” read in public. And indeed, many people came out of curiosity to see my erotic drawings :)