MARKING TERRITORY 

IN VENICE: THE HOME-STUDIO ROUTE, BEHIND THE STUDIO, THE ADJACENT SPACE, THE ISLAND OUTSIDE THE ISLAND

“If we say ‘house’ and we use this expression for everything which generally acts as a habitation, from the most primitive clay huts to skyscrapers – which are radically different in that they are sensitive data – we are already ‘thinking’: house. The house is absolutely not given in a substantial way, it is the thought object which corresponds to a habitation. The desire for knowledge points to houses. The thought generates the ‘house’ in the sense of a dwelling place.”

(from Hannah Arendt’s diary, December 1969)

Constructing and inhabiting one’s own space, adapting it to one’s own practice. Building a “house” which can accommodate one’s own intimacy, one’s thought, one’s practice.

It starts with Venice and how this city relates to my work. (Paradoxically, it is as if the lagoon, its system of waterways, all of Venice, were like the bowl where I do my daily work and my paintings were like sheets absorbing the dirty water, the coloured water of the canals, from the bottom to the top. The sludge on the canal beds is an accumulated substance like that which remains at the bottom of my brush holder.)

The chapter is about the space where things happen, where the work is contemplated and created.
It will talk about my studio, but also my route from home to the studio, about the canal bank next to it and about Pellestrina.

By place I mean a mental condition rather than a physical one; an interior but also an exterior; a distant exterior and a close one.

My space is a sort of ecosystem that supports itself.
There is a solitary aspect: when I am inside, I am in and the exterior stays outside – the exterior is there and I am here.
But there is also an adjacent aspect that concerns contact with others, closeness, proximity with something else that the nucleus feeds on.

(Written in 2015)