On the importance of receiving and of the past

 
‘All knowledge cannot be acquired by one man only. I have accepted this notion: I am a link in a chain.’

(from Auguste Rodin: ‘The Cathedrals of France’)

 
Archiving through cataloguing is something to do while alive and is not a form to contemplate after death. What I mean by this is that cataloguing is an active task precisely because it allows the archive to continue to subsist, to grow. I have turned the archive into a tool to use in life and to crystallize in a form when I am dead. Whoever comes after me can decide whether to leave it as it is, to continue to keep it alive or to make it disappear forever. It’s enough for me to have it as a device to keep active, always renewed, in life. What I want to say by this is that I focus on continuity during my existence, but I am not interested in thinking about things that come after me. The artist can’t decide the future of her work: it can persist or disappear despite what she may want. And if the archive itself should melt like snow in the sun because nobody keeps it alive, then it should be accepted as a natural occurrence.
 
I imagine the space of the archive as a go-between, a passage between what happened before me and what will happen after me. In my father’s diaries I found this expression that I really like: ‘passing the torch’, which he used to define his diary writing. I am borrowing it here to say how I perceive my work and my archive system as a whole. I think of myself projected inside this archiving organism that I make correspond to the essential of my work and with everything I feel I have to say about it, and I imagine this ‘myself’ as the being between one point and another, between someone who precedes me and someone who comes afterwards. Let’s say that as well as what I have said about the archive so far, which is that it is a place for continuously cataloguing in real time, I am also aware that it is a possibility for opening towards a gaze facing the future, understanding that the continuous reiteration of my present is nothing more than a transformation of the present which will become the past.
 
There is a work which precisely condenses all this thinking. It is the ‘Dad’s Diaries Home’ to which I dedicated a paragraph called ‘Father (Piero Morganti) that can be found in the chapter ‘Meeting the Other’. Everything that later exploded and expanded in my work could already be found in my father’s diaries: a keeping track of one’s daily life through – in his case – transferring words onto pages and in my case, transposing colours onto canvases. To underline all this, to highlight and support it, I designed an object that is nothing more than the container where I decided to store my father’s diaries, the place where I symbolically take care of what preceded me, considering that which came before as something that has anticipated what I do. Everything that we are is a derivation for good or bad of what has been done and left by those who came before us, and we can’t do anything other than propel it forwards, making it first ours, absorbing it, reinterpreting it, transforming it, grinding it and elaborating it before finally passing it into the hands of someone else.
To leave an inheritance you need to try and reach a form of compact synthesis. You cannot leave a weight in the hands of others, but rather the lightness of an emptied endowment in which the work of selecting, discarding and summarising has already been carried out. It is not possible to keep everything if you want to leave space for others.
Finally, this idea of being merely a bridge between those who came before and those who come afterwards concludes in the emblematic decision I have made to symbolically pass into my son’s hands this object which contains the essence of his grandfather, imagining that one archive substitutes another, that one life has to make room for another.
 
Other considerations on this topic have been dealt with in the chapter ‘Meeting the Other’ in the paragraph ‘Maestro’, in which the relationship between pupil and teacher, the passing down of knowledge, of a conscience, of a passion that occurs between an older artist and a younger one, is acknowledged. And in the paragraphs ‘Mother’ and ‘Great Aunt’, where I have tried to highlight the responsibility of inheriting, and the importance of the exchange of an interior world, of a perception and of a sense of things that takes place and goes from one woman to another, from one generation to another.
 
(Written in 2022)