One of my favorite parts of working on embroideries is when I take them out of the washing machine and lay them out in the clean air, on the deck, on their beautiful hemp ropes. Without soaps and fabric softeners, the natural fabrics have a dry, naked scent, a dear friend of mine often says they are reminiscent of pepper.
I changed it up again. After the three small embroidery-archipelago, of which I told the last time, I felt the urge to work again on something big, after the cloud and the vento, and I remembered a pastel drawing that I did in Rome many years ago, in 1997, when I attended one of the first Italian web agency, the legendary Uhuru.
In the drawing I depicted a giraffe in the fetal position, drawn as if it were in the womb, almost life-size, on a sheet of tissue paper that took up an entire wall. Then my life became more complicated than it already was; I stopped attending the studio, which changed locations several times, and the fragile artifact was lost in the maze of moves and agency history.
That image always stayed with me, and when a few months ago a stunning photograph from a video of an elephant fetus in the womb caught my eye, the idea of embroidering it on a nice big sheet began to take root in me, peeping out in early October.
It’s exciting to work so big. It forces me to face my limits, in so many ways, and to silence my head, which judges what I do, weighs me down, wants my constant attention; the mind is passive aggressive, it has to be tamed, it has to figure out who is the leader of the pack, or at the first opportunity it will maul you.
All this is to say that a few days ago, while immersed in my threads, I finally understood the warning the boy gives Neo in the Oracle’s waiting room: “Don’t try to bend the spoon. It is impossible. Instead, try to get to the truth: the spoon does not exist. Then you will realize that it is not the spoon that bends, but you yourself.”
That as I wrote now almost two decades ago in my thesis at IED is only for me to circumvent the mind, and that only by circumventing it I can become a conduit of the purest energy and disinterested, and open the door to the vast expanse of the possible, that the magic exists and is real, concrete, quantum. That’s it, that’s all.
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