“Describe what happens inside of us when we think? Describe: see the form of the thought in movement (…) Not an autobiography, but the story of what happens inside of us when we think.”

(Enzo Paci ‘Diario fenomenologico’, 3 July 1958)

 
 
The “Mindsite” is my website, which has become a place where I can live in solitude while at the same time being somewhere that I can mix with others.
 
It is as thought my brain had moved from inside to out, from my cranial container to a point here in front of me. It is as though my brain continued to reason outside of me, helping me to visualise my thought concretely.
Everything is generated so quickly, the rhythm accelerates, ideas accumulate, and I know that each one will gradually find its correct conformation.
 
This thinking subject has made my mind become visible and concrete, and when I take it out and about and describe it out loud it makes me feel like a kind of troubadour who transmits her story orally accompanied by posters made up of words and images.
 
The “Mindsite” is my website, which has become a place where I can live in solitude while at the same time being somewhere that I can mix with others.
 
Basically, it is almost as though I have built a home, a den where I can stay and live, but it also a place that yearns to interact with others.
It is almost as though the space of the studio were replicated virtually in the space of the site: both closed and introspective places, created to set out one’s practice and thinking, but at the same time both of them places of openness and hospitality.
 
The way in which the mindsite articulates its reflections is through the constant addition of fragments of thought. The reasonings about individual themes grow, expand and are modified slowly over time. Sometimes they are superimposed or repeated exactly as they are, while at others they evolve into something different, adding new considerations little by little over the years.
It is possible to find the same works, the same reflections, repeated various times in different chapters, but each time with a different meaning or from a different angle.
The mindsite is a continuous perfecting and honing of a thought that despite being concocted, despite always taking into account the complexity of things, hopes to gradually reach a simplicity, a final synthesis.
 
It is as if I were involved in an inexorable attempt to structure, to define everything, to try to understand everything even while knowing that this effort is forever destined to fail. For as long as I live, I will keep alive the possibility of reviewing everything and for as long as there is the possibility of someone else’s gaze, things can always be debated and alive. The process remains eternally open and never concluded.
 
For anyone entering at the beginning, all of this can appear difficult and arduous, because (I repeat) this is not a book in which I explain, but it is the brain I think with. My hope is that for those who want to spend a little time and who allow themselves to get lost inside it, the mindsite will become a way not so much of getting to know me, but of getting to know themselves.
Once a visitor to the site told me something that is exactly what I was hoping would happen: “Entering your site, I had the feeling of being lost inside a labyrinth. At first I felt disoriented and confused, but then I left with the feeling of having made my own pathway, which helped me to understand your story, but also mine.”
 
It happens sometimes that people returning to this space no longer find things exactly as they were. Micro and macro shifts of meaning force them to reconstruct a new pathway.
Actually, every now and then I ask the programmer to help me rethink the structure to adapt it to my new way of thinking. And so for the visitor who returns, the sensation could be that of having entered a building in which not only furniture and objects have been moved, eliminated or added, but where the walls themselves have moved or multiplied, thus defining new spaces.
 
The form that this heavy and smoking brain takes on is a bit like that of a piece of architecture covered by a large dome (my bowl enlarged and overturned) with lots of big and small rooms, and lots of twists and turns that are not always connected with each other.
The only way to understand the whole is to enter and exit the rooms continuously. In order to find one’s bearings again it is necessary to activate the use of memory a bit like the card game “Memory” in which the player tries to create a route backwards, trying to remember where a certain image previously lay.
This is the effort that the guests-visitors have to make, but I also have to make it every time I tackle my obsessions.
 
There are those who might object, asking: why would you complicate your life in this way, why didn’t you learn how to create an archive, why didn’t you look at other types of site first, why didn’t you use planners, why didn’t you create an outline and stick to it?
Because firstly, I have always thought that I should choose the space to be in, that I would never accept a dimension predetermined by others (just as I wouldn’t for my artistic expression, whose form I have slowly determined over the years). “Never accept things as they are handed to you, start from your inclinations, from your interiority, Maria!” This is the motto I have repeated to myself all my life.
And secondly because constructing all of this system of things empirically and continuing to keep it alive through direct experience is all I consider fundamental in the final construction of the work. The pathway to reach it is more important than the final result. The process is more important than the form.
 
(Written in 2019. Modified in 2020)