TRAVEL SKETCHBOOKS and DISPOSABLE PHOTOS : my non traces

Here are the pictures that I made during the summer 2014.

Not a “proof” of the performance I made. I wanted to enjoy the here and now and not to have the filter of a big camera, a smartphone, or any predetermined task. I planned the least I could, I wanted to go with the flow. I just took some photographs with a disposable camera and made some sketch, mostly portraits of the people I met; so these images aren’t really related to my performances, but the absence of other footage is conceptually related to my little book. I could update continuously the social networks with a massive stream of (sincerely beautiful) pictures, because of this era and because video and photographs are languages that I speak as well, but I wanted to live something that could be possible this way also in the past––I was looking for a bubble of time and space. I believe that technology is fine and it is part of nature (I believe that absolutely every thing is part of nature) and that it’s the way we use it that makes the difference. I’m not against the technology at all (a nest is technology too, by the way), but that’s indeed the way that many of us approach it which is insane. As media designer and artist, I wanted to inspire a different relationship and I desired to create a higher interaction with my project also online (maybe with a sort of game and some QR code), but in the end I couldn’t wait any more to run and roll on the road.

The documentation that I happened to have later from my friends was something that I didn’t really chosen: some of them suggested to do it, encouraging me and pointing out how wiser and functional was to have some footage. Obviously it is and I’m extremely grateful to them and now I have that delicious video from feelMgood plus more unpublished video footage from Faber Teatro. I liked that somehow “happened”, without me asking for that, therefore I decided to accept the gift (accepting gifts: that’s also something precious to learn). But I wasn’t really looking for it. In artistic environments, I often heard how much the documentation of a performance is practically mandatory. And I remember how once upon a time I was used to look at any moment with a narrative point of view, always feeling like a sort of spy, hidden director, writer, or whoever else, almost stealing life. I wasn’t fully able to enjoy the moment itself: it always had to be “useful” for something next, to make a story out of it, to make art out of it. Art could bring sense to life. When I learnt how to appreciate better life itself, I wasn’t much interested anymore in telling it, in dreaming: I am already walking in my dream, I’m living the life that I choose. Living this life, I learnt again the sacred role of the art, I learnt that at the end of the day, when a family is tired around the fire, everybody waits for the storyteller. I learnt that while we cook all together and someone chop the wood, songs can make us feel stronger and much more united, and it is very lovely if some musicians play around. As always, it’s a question of balance, and the wisdom lies in the way we do something: nor technology or storytelling are corrupted themselves, it all depends from the way we do it, the intention and orientation.

All these thoughts about my self-documentation may be overthinking. But I hope that the lightness of the images in this page eventually will tell something else.

One last thing.

The portraits here are far from being all the hearts I met.

My thankfulness / towards everyone / pray to be infinite.

(Here are my non traces.)