Monument to the relationship

HOLDING HANDS: ARCHIVING THE GESTURE
“And now I am not taking your hand for myself. I am the one giving you my hand. Now I need your hand, not so that I won’t be scared, but so that you won’t. I know that believing in all this will be, at first, your great solitude. But the moment will come when you will give me your hand, no longer out of solitude, but as I am doing now: out of love.”
(from “The Passion According To G.H.” by Clarice Lispector”)
 
From 15 May 2017 to 26 May 2019, the day my mother died, my daily meetings with her were recorded in a repeated photographic image depicting the contact between my hand and hers. My obsessive way of accumulating everything, of not letting anything I consider important go, and of not letting people I love go, led me to capture this gesture every time she and I saw each other.
 
My mother spent the last years of her life in a nursing home in Venice not far from where I live. I went to see her and keep her company every day. We read, chatted, thought, laughed and sang together. We kept each other company in a sweet and cheerful journey that gradually led us to our natural separation. A couple of years before she died, we wanted to do something together, imagining that this thing could, perhaps, in the future take shape in the body of my work. In such an extreme and paradoxical situation we tried to create the conditions in which things could happen fluidly and naturally, to make them merge in a precise image. It was not a question of keeping them, but of letting them go.
 
Each day, as soon as we saw each other, she would urge me on with “The photo, Maria!” She would hold out her hand, I would take it and document this act with a photo. “Holding hands” was a way to help us elaborate this passage symbolically.
What emerged is in a certain sense a celebration of dialogue. What I mean is that it is not a mausoleum for one person, one mother, my mother, but a “monument to relating”, a highlighting of the relationship between two people rather than raising the single individual on a pedestal separate from the other.
My mother said that it is when you feel you are communicating with someone that a vital expressive form can arise. Writing must always have an interlocutor and must always potentially be aimed at someone, even if this someone is only an imaginary person. She told me: I like listening more than speaking! I like listening. I listen and then I find the words to reply to you.
 
All of these photos printed as doubles (one stays with me and the other is for a hypothetical new possessor), were subsequently touched one by one by my finger tinged with colour, the painterly substance that is formed every day in my bowl. This fingertip touching, which retraced the entire journey, took 484 days, the same as the number of meetings with my mother.
We have gone from the contact between two hands to the touch with the painterly gesture and I expect that someone else will add their own. In fact, it is as if anyone who comes to hold these cards is adding their contribution to the dual gesture.
 
All of these photo-paintings are kept in a container with drawers (inspired by a Chinese lacquered box that my Uncle Sandro had given mum), which as well as having the task of containing them also has the task of bringing a piece of the concentrate of my existence closer to this dialogue. The external part contains some small marquetry made with a fragment of the dried drops of my “Infinite Painting”.
 
I knew that the substance the work is made of was the time that we spent together and I also knew that nothing could be expressed while it was happening. I could only be in it and submit to it.
In that moment the only thing to do was to let the experience wash over me, and then keep it inside for a while, letting it sediment. Only at a certain point, further down the line, who knows, maybe something would emerge.

Hands
Since May 2017 my daily meetings with my mother have been recorded in a repetitive photographic image depicting the contact between my hand and hers. My obsessive way of accumulating everything, of not letting anything I find important go, and of not letting people I love go, has led me to capture this gesture every time she and I see each other.

Touches
All those works characterised by a touch of colour added with the point of my finger or hand belong to this series.

Photos
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