Invisible Boundaries 2021
Green wrapping paper, sketch paper, canvas 200 x20x 3.5 cm, triangular canvas 21×15 cm, drawing in sketch paper 21×13.5cm, calligraphic marker, black bristol board, paper tape in parked car.
Photograph ©Marco Lo Rocco
Dedicated to E. and A. and their cars
The installation takes place using the cockpit of an auto-mobile, a car that for its stationary state due to the confinement for COVID becomes a showcase, an auto-immobile, a car-motionless.
The auto-mobile offers a shelter. A. slept inside for years until one day, when fortunately he was not there, the car burned up; it had been his room.
E., who, with advancing multiple sclerosis, could no longer use the car, one day left it open, available to anyone who might need it. For years, many people were able to sleep/rest in her FIAT 126. The windows were hazed over from minerals and pine needles. Slender seedlings leaned against the windshield wipers for support as they grew. Born at the base of the windshield from seeds carried, like soil by the wind. In this installation the car becomes the site of an arrested world march.
In the drawings of 2021, the hands of the figures claustrophobically push a transparent, hard, invisible border. The triangular canvases, Human Landscapes and the long canvas Untitled, placed in the rear window, were all made in 2017. The long canvas Untitled is/was inspired by two verses by the Syrian Kurdish poet Golan Haji. The upper part of the canvas reads, “Nobody can distinguish the drowned from the saved,” and the lower part, “Warm in the lungs are our unsaid words.” In this canvas, however, the unsaid words extend to the entire body.
Finally, in the drawings on paper of 2021, human figures look at us through their side eyes, which have become almost a lateral monocle. The hand continues to draw as in 2015, as if that is the only shape that repeats itself, the only memory of the human figure. The earliest drawings date from 2015 in the pages of small sketch books, full of figures that are repelled by an invisible obstacle, like a border. The figures fill up pages one after another: an exercise in exploring shapes.
