Video by LUDOKA >>> vimeo.com/feelmgood  ///  facebook.com/feelmgood

The video above was shot in the summer 2014, when I stopped in Sapri, a little town around Naples, at my friends Ludoka and Riccardo from feelMgood. While they were hosting me and my adored rainbow xylophone, Ludoka got inspired and decided to deliciously video-tell the essence she felt from Felice.

Starting to write Felice as personal letter, I did it in my mother language, Italian, and in Italian I kept writing, to catch all my spontaneity and confidence with the words. When in April 2014 my little book was done, I worked at the magic props I needed and then I left my home in Utrecht (The Netherlands) to backpack from Northern Italy till Sicily, busking in the streets, joining the awesome Ferrara Buskers Festival and being hosted by lovely places such the Circolo Arcipelago in Cremona, the Jarmusch Club in Caserta and the CSOA Lambretta in Milan. During the second part of my adventure, my rainbow xylophone found the great company of a harmonic disc, played by Edoardo Ponticelli, and we performed together in Florence, Bologna, Perugia, Cremona and Milan.

Since 2012, I tend to produce in English; if this project wasn’t born in such a natural and intimate way, I was probably going to write in English again and going to perform in The Netherlands or elsewhere. Probably, not in Italy. Instead I wrote it in Italian and therefore I went back in my home Country, to do this. Eventually I traveled in Italy more than ever and I experienced it with new eyes. And I could share there what, after all, I learnt abroad, mostly due to my own story, but partly thanks to the atmosphere, which I love so much. Dutch people perceive themselves very cold and not hospitable at all, while often it is just the other way around. Maybe because they think so, they do their best to be cozy – and they make it very well. In my perception, they are very heartfelt. Plus, they are actually open-minded and astonishingly straightforward. Some drops of all this surely influenced my work. Many drops. Utrecht has been the place where I learnt how to breathe again after a deep crisis: I find that life made a good job, bringing me back in Italy again, now healthier and happier, with gifts. All the sincere and magic thankfulness that I could feel during my tour made me think:

I am exactly where I am meant to be.

In October I went back in Utrecht, where my vibrations turned into new colours that inaugurated the series of visions that I call the Flowerasms.

In the era of the instant self-documentation, during the summer 2014 I particularly enjoyed to travel without a smartphone and, as camera, this time only a disposable one. In the beginning I even rested from having a sketchbook with me, as I almost always do, because I wanted to immerse completely in the here and now – and both drawing and photographing partly create a dialogue with the situation, but partly send on another dimension and put a filter as well.

However, during the way I got some pictures thanks to my friends Masha Rozhnova, Veerle Van Harten, Manuel Benyacar, Laura Bianco, Paola Zema, Federico Fronterrè, Sonja Burgì and Ludoka.

Felice means Happy!

Felice on Facebook

Screenshot from Manuel Benyacar