WHY?

(a bit of “arty talk” … sorry)

I would like to underline the fact that I am not politically oriented. At the time in history we are living now, I believe that I cannot put my trust in anyone. But I am “artistically” oriented towards people, especially those people close to me.

My artistic research revolves around what Renov defines as “Domestic Ethnography”. When the existence of an artist is connected through ‘communal or blood ties’ there are no definite demarcations, but only blurred lines, between the artist and its subject, The Self and The Other. The artist indeed can become the subject. Any form of expression, or narrative related to the ‘you’ will implicate automatically also the “I”, artist, in intricate facets. The Self and The Other, in this case, are so connected to each other, that the subject will not have reason to exist if not only in the relationship with the artist .

This interest of mine has brought me to a deep analysis of bonds with my family and my roots. My family’s new life in UK started in 2008, when we moved from Italy as working migrants. A journey is the beginning of any story of migration. Is the point of a new beginning but at the same time of rupture of any structure of knowledge and memory we have been building before in our life. As our prenatal memory continues to exist only in our unconscious and we cannot remember the moments of the womb’s transition to life into this world, also for a migrant often the memory of the journey disappears and only fragment are left to remember, overwhelmed probably by the experience of having to rebuild a new life, in a completely new world. As Nestor García Canclini expressed in his talk Migrants: Workers of Metaphors, to achieve an understanding of the importance of the millions of migrants in a society, it is necessary to pay attention to what is lost and gained in symbolic transfers, the abandonments and the recreations of meaning.

Migration implies a radical way of experiencing uncertainty.

It is of this uncertainty I am chanting the stories…

… Stories of uprooted memories where we are forced to live only our present, as John Berger would say in his book A Seventh Man, life has continued in our absence and we ourselves have changed. Though we may try to re-establish a unity between the reality exterior to us and the life that has gone by in what we still call “home”, we become recidivist, locked in our own static time.

Home is not where we left, it is a transcendent state in our mind, struggling to unify two different and parallels worlds, the one we left and the one we are living in.

A journey back home, is in reality a journey through my memories and an ultimate effort to reconnect with a broken past.