Hands

I write. I follow a rhythm. I place one word next to another, their meaning changes, their texture and patina too. Light and shadows are important.

I’m trying to create something instinctual, raw. I let myself weight, my hands soft, my heart quiet, my body an unfolded map.

I’m coming out of a period of not allowing. I period of no fait, of not holding silence into my palms.

I think a lot about hands, holding, touching, about the aesthetic of touch. Touch means a lot to me. How we touch reveals how we love.

Keats writes:

“Touch has a memory”.

Touch has also a vocabulary, notes, like musical compositions, one note next to the other. How we share a space matters. What is absent matters too.

In the last years I have tried to understand myself, to find a way through my feelings, and my making. I have made small things, beginnings, brief encounters with the self.

I have to finish a big project, bigger than myself, bigger than my maturity as an artist, thinker, and writer. It has been painful to work, to distance myself, to feel broken, to create in isolation, in a tiny space, a room overlooking a tree which lost the only nest, in a day of early April, after a storm.

April is the month of storms, of death and rebirth.

I’m about to finish my big project, the biggest I have ever worked on. I want to be done with it. It is hard to keep it in my life. It has been seven years.

I came close to the sea to understand that I’m many things, that simple short sentences, fragile and vulnerable ones are my land, my language, my skin. I don’t need difficult words, hidden meanings, complex philosophical concepts. I need words like love, embrace, texture. I need hands, touch, the history of presence.

In the last seven years I have cried a lot, maybe that’s why I cam to the sea. To talk to water, to feel water, to exchange water, to become water. Me and the Sea, the sea of life.

I’m creating tiny quadernos (notebooks). It is the only thing I can finish now, in a language that is not mine, a vocabulary that is too simple to hide into, a language I didn’t even knew I had.

Where was all this, when I needed it?

I’m ready to keep pages blank. No fear, no pressure. I have learned to create without applause. I have learned to create in solitude, in isolation.

I can create from nothing, but ashes are never nothing, they are everything, maybe they are the beginning.

For a long time I thought I was alone, and then I realised the next to me I had painters, writers, weavers, ceramists, musicians, gardeners. I had also those who left too early, the ones who spent their creative life in anonymity. They are my inspiration. They walked the path of making, the path of hands.

I want to offer my hands like a pilgrimage is offered to the believer.