Skin
The title of the installation I am presenting is “Pelle”. The work is made up of different kinds of recycled wood: every piece of wood contains its own material specificity – weight, color, length and width are purposely different. Their intrinsic diversity and the composition of the work has inevitably created some empty areas, some places of respite where I have inserted pieces of Japanese paper. The lightness and airiness of the paper surfaces from the solidity of the wood: it reacts to the touch and to coming into contact with air, it moves and changes shape. The concept of the structure is inextricably linked to that of its weight. Lightness blooms in the absence of weight. I purposely intended to make this installation an inconstant one: I never want it to be the same. It ideally will adapt itself to the space that hosts it. Just like our skin that changes, breathes and moves. And like a liquid body that finds new escape routes, new solutions for emerging from the stagnation of gravity.
My research can be defined as one concentrated upon the idea of a fluid body, one that lacks a containing framework. This concept has urged me into investigating all the possible articulations that such a body – bearing that type of material quality – can assume in space and in the dance with the same. Obviously its being-in-the-world status would change: we are used to relating with our own weight and gravity (in fact, with our own solidity) and we drag the said qualities into space. Our body is a solid that contains the capacity of a liquid. Our framework actually restrains the morphological and expansion potentials that liquid intrinsically possesses. My work crystallizes these considerations into a hypothesis, into a question: what if our body were lacking structure, what if its main characteristic was liquidity – then what would its relationship with the world be like? I believe that one of the fundamental attitudes of mankind is dispersion: the body tends to be diluted, leaving behind an echo of itself. The passage of a body can always be proven: dust, particles, electricity, shadows. The body sinks, quickly slips, becoming an imprint.
