Dear Betta,
I am happy to share once again with you that thread you more or less left in my hands and that I more or less took around, lost…, extended, shared with others, kept safe. Our last collaboration, what an adventure, was in Bologna, at the 2006 Art Fair. You had assembled a courageous stand bringing together such different authors, me included, each one so different in our visions and methods of research. The result was enriching, and difficult, and in a place of markets and merchants, the liberty you took by supporting not only one “thread”, but of holding different threads in only one hand was met with suspicion.
On that occasion, we chose to expose my first “Forest Skies”, which were livid from the cold of that particular winter (I had just moved to Milan), and from fear (the forest as a metaphor of the danger of living) then little by little spring returned, inside and outside. The heart became warm. More light entered in the forest and my skies became the object of three personal, and less monothematic shows. The counteracting sentence (still in place) is from nature to culture. I came back to The City, the cities! The ones in which I have lived, and in the ones where I will live, and in order to narrate them I chose the local Heroes, the ones from the monuments: lives from the past chosen as an example for the future three-dimensional materialisation of what Jung defines as the “collective unconscious”. However, around the monuments today, a subtle sentiment of a remote past lingers on, like wind on trees, the examples are behind us, ahead of us. Heroes live and die in the short time dictated by consumerist culture. And that is cause for me to further photograph them, catalogue them, study them in detail. For our small, extravagant exhibit, I have chosen material which, by means of your thread, you could use to easily join us. It is a collection of papers from my drawers, ordered, settled, but nevertheless – I hope – yet not devoid of meaning, still speaking to you.
Luigi
Milan, January 11, 2014