L’uomo elefante

These very first days of 2023 see me chewed up and spit out inexplicably alive from the year that just ended. I lived a few months struggling with myself, until finally a few days ago I identified the wound from which I was bleeding and bleeding. Now all I have to do is take a good look at this pain, get to know it, embrace it, and come to terms with it.

This journey has been eased by so many good things around me. First and foremost by family and friends: the people who love you for who you are and believe in you even if you fall down and cry. Then the rhythm, which I learned from the Steinerian school, has been crucial. It anchors you to the ground, sheltering you from the storms. And the smells, which more and more, as the years go by, make it clear to me how time is but a mere illusion. The smell of new toys. Of quarrel. Of pause. The smell of 7 o’clock in the evening, the calm energy of rest, of coming home, of chatting with loved ones.

And finally by a beautiful novelty given to me by the river to which I am increasingly learning to rely, relinquishing with relief the control-freak that we are all taught from earliest childhood. A vital flow that in this case was personified by Barbara Pavan, a curator and collector present wherever in the world there is art related to weaving of all kinds.

Thanks to her and her crazy creative energy and organizational skills, one of my works, “L’uomo elefante”, will be exhibited along with those of 23 other artists from different countries around the world in an international exhibition entitled “Appunti su questo tempo”, which the press release defines thus:

“These premises gave rise to this exhibition, which, as the title states, is an exploration of our time, its contradictions, victories and defeats; a tale entrusted to needle and thread and returned to the viewer through the talents of artists committed to investigating its lights and shadows, facing its challenges and reading its many nuances. From political resistance to new balances between human beings and nature, from migratory flows to propaganda, from illness to identity, from war to compulsive consumerism, embroidery becomes here, stitch by stitch, the lexicon to give voice to contemporaneity and to provide us with another point of observation of the reality that surrounds us.”

The exhibition will be inaugurated on January 21 at 6 p.m. in a space that seems to have come out of my dreams: it is called CasermArcheologica and since 2017 it has been based in an ancient noble palace in the historic center of Sansepolcro, in the province of Arezzo, dedicated to contemporary art, artistic residencies, and social aggregation that primarily involves young people from the area.

The Palazzo Muglioni’s halls have been renovated with rare delicacy and intelligence: the appearance has remained decadent, the antiquity of the building shines through everywhere, and the contrast between the history of the place and the modernity of the art is beautiful, intertwining, giving strength to each other. I could not have imagined a more beautiful place to exhibit embroidery for the first time. Or perhaps I had imagined it just like that, when many years ago, in unsuspected times, I created a virtual gallery for my previous life’s work, set on the terrace of a building in Rome, San Giovanni.

To say I’m excited is an understatement. The exhibition will continue until April 15, and I am looking forward to meeting the other textile artists and seeing their works on display. I hope to see there some of the people who follow my work, I’ve seen that there are many of them living outside Italy.