A predisposition

 
What’s behind the spasmodic impulse to accumulate and organise?
 
STORY NUMBER ONE: THE GRANDPA WHO TIDIED UP EVERYTHING
My maternal grandfather Vincenzo’s mother called him “the original”. He did not want wardrobes in his houses in Milan, Verona and Villafranca, but he did have about forty dressers in which he placed and archived different things: objects, letters, articles, documents…Every single element or group of elements was wrapped in light yellow paper held tightly together by an elastic band on which he handwrote, generally in blue or black ink, the content and its history. All the paintings hanging on the walls of his homes and all the objects displayed on the dressers had a handwritten or typed label on their back or their base. This label gave some information about the object and some notes about its creator.
 
STORY NUMBER TWO: THE GIRL WHO PLAYED “TIDY-UP” AND “MAKING COLLECTIONS”
When I was a child, I invented a game that was called “Tidy-Up”. For days, weeks or months I lived intensely inside the space of my room with my mountain of objects, toys, sheets of paper and colours, producing magmatic chaos. Then I suddenly got the urge to start playing a game that was extremely precise and meticulous. Over one or two days I reorganised all of this messy pile that I went through using personal criteria and producing an obsessive order. I remember my parents’ astonishment and my satisfaction, the sensation of freedom and beatitude after completing it. My mind cleared, I knew that from that moment I would be able to start over from scratch and freely emit substance only to tidy it up in the future.
 
The other game that filled my childhood years was “Making Collections”. I spent days spasmodically and manically either on my own or with my cousin Fulvia going to markets, fairs and shops to buy and collect all sorts of things that I then organised in containers that I kept hanging on the walls or in boxes in drawers. Over the years I had, to name a few: a collection of figurines, collections of notebooks and notepads, a collection of matchboxes, a collection of erasers, a collection of knives, a collection of tins, a collection of pendants, a collection of “jokes”, a collection of “little things”…
 
STORY NUMBER THREE: THE DAD WHO HELD TIME IN HIS DIARIES
From the age of nineteen until the day he died at 63, my father shut himself in his room every day of his life in order to write a few words in his diary.
He transcribed thoughts, quotes and facts with normality, dedication, rigour and method, conserving the time in which he lived within these notebooks.
 
STORY NUMBER FOUR: THE HUSBAND WHO IS GATHERING FACTS
One day the girl who as a child had played “Tidy-Up” with her shapeless substance and “Making Collections” of objects, met the boy who “Gathering Facts” to analyse them.
My husband Luca is a historian. He observes reality silently, he looks at it, ponders it, studies it, analyses it and finally describes and interprets it. He sustains that being a historian is different from being a novelist because he has to base what he says on sources, in other words clues, documents and written accounts, monuments, artefacts, recordings, etc. He says that since he started his historical research, he has increasingly changed how he walks, how he shops, how he talks to people and how he reads the newspaper.
In the mid-90s he and a friend created a magazine that had the subtitle: “History and documentation of the present time” in which, among other things, he wrote that “instead of talking about “inventory”, a term that always concerns a definite and limited number of subjects, it would be better to use the term “collection”, which gives more of a sense of opening, temporariness and infiniteness”.
 
STORY NUMBER FIVE: THE ARTIST WHO PRODUCED THINGS AND THEN, WITHOUT THROWING ANYTHING AWAY, ORGANISED WHAT SHE HAD GATHERED ACCORDING TO HER OWN CRITERIA
For years I allowed things to come out of me which were formed fluidly without having a precise project, not thinking about what they were and what they would be. It was only later that I began to see them as facts, to look at them, to try to understand them and name them.
I haven’t left anything out. I have tried to keep in everything unreservedly and without making a selection.
In looking at and sorting out the entirety of my work, I have tried to be as objective as possible even if I know that an archive produced by the artist herself can’t be aseptic. Obviously, extremely subjective views are included that are full of meanings marked by my own point of view.