Escaping the archive

 
Said by a compulsive archivist like me, what I am about to say might take on a particular meaning. Affirmations like this, coming from someone who keeps a record of everything, including things that didn’t work out, who archives and makes public everything she does, will probably seem like a type of incoherence.
Obviously, the everything I talk about isn’t really everything. It is the everything I have decided to see at the centre of my view of things.
Omitting, hiding, selecting, not seeing, the right to forget, are actions that give me the freedom to avoid any kind of judgment or categorisation that helps me to complete my story how I like, to determine my act of intentionality and awareness. I am perfectly aware that there will be subsequently another, others, of these writings. Actually, they are desired and provoked by me first and foremost, but only after having done my de-codification. I know that afterwards there could be rediscoveries, interpretations, additions, etc, which I see as the possibility to revitalise a substance that would otherwise remain dead.
Sometimes it wants to be covered, hidden, because it has perceived that not everything can be archived and that something necessarily has to go out of control, even something of itself.
Some of my works, some of the situations I have recreated, contain this feeling. I am providing a couple of examples below:
-        The work known as ‘Infinite Painting’ where one colour superimposes another, cancelling out the one that precedes it. Imagine that this canvas started in a dark corner of my studio as a space where I could let everything I imagined happen, including some attempt to engage with reality, but each time it was eliminated and covered by a simple and absolute painterly act – that of spreading one colour on a dimensional surface to affirm the passage on this earth.
-        The experience of the ‘Wednesday artist meetings’ which took place in Venice for around ten years, during which a decision was made not to document anything, to hide what happened in the group from those who were outside it. Sometimes there was an attempt to recreate a space where people could stay protected in secrecy and intimacy, where it was okay to make mistakes and say stupid stuff without anyone hearing or anyone ever knowing. A space of freedom, where artists found the strength to express themselves, open up to others, where it wasn’t a question of showing off, but of talking about themselves out loud.
 
 
 
(Text written in 2022)