UNA BRILLANTE MEMORIA

We should find a refrain for every place
that could intertwine with other refrains,
with other places, before the war of the enclosures
could overwhelm even the last remnant of melody

S. Licata, Nonplaces and heterotopias.

“What do you do specifically? I didn’t get it all.”
“I deal with reification” Gilles replied.
“It’s serious work” I said.
“Yes, it is” he replied
“I see” Carole added admiringly ”it must be a really serious work with big books on a huge table covered with lots of papers.”
“No,it is not how it works”. said Gilles,I wander, mainly I wander”

Tous les chevaux du roi, Michele Bernstein.

A brilliant memory

During the evenings of an extremely hot summer we have been crossing the city like a new path, we follow barely perceptible tracks, invisible and unmarked trails.
After bypassing monuments and attractions we have stopped to decipher the signs of time on the walls.
Walking in this summer drift,we have been tracing new maps, we have been drawing another city, we have found new points of reference that mark the passage,the life, the violence,like a travel diary carved into the urban landscape.
There is an invisible and moving city within this sleeping and still city,we think,and even Mina, who is walking with us,seems to sniff its smell this evening.

We stop on the Lungarno in front of the Palazzo alla Giornata, time before we had noticed the wounds left by the bombings of the Second World War on the facade of this historic building, many years ago, in a summer like this and tonight we are going to take the cast of the lesions with the silicone rubber.
The morning after in the studio we obtain the clay copy of the bombs lesions from the casts that we have taken the night before, then we incorporate the clay copies of the lesions onto some clay vases.
These vases will preserve a fragmented and widespread geography of memory, a map of imprints returned on ceramic objects, which will grow by collecting other signs, other wounds from other places and other cities on as many vases.
We would like A brilliant memory to become a traveling project that could collect the wounds of the cities affected by war. The architectural body is a metaphor of the body of communities, of men, of animals.
With A brilliant memory we would like to dedicate an initial journey to the lesions, holes, splinters that mark the body of cities, then we would like to map and trace other signs of other origins, collecting traces of ours and other cities, reconstructing lost stories and memories which will mark the surface and volumes of vases and objects.
While walking you sing the maps,in this way the aborigines are used to follow the mysterious trails of memory which are not marked except by the ability of words and vision, while walking we rediscover place and memory, and create new worlds, while our steps mark time and space.