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Last Issue: #31 The Journey
Twenty thousand leagues under the sea by Jules Verne (1825-1905). This book is the answer to my thoughts on travel. It certainly anticipated the saga...Read more
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Loading ...When we were children we’d love to stroke mother’s otter fur coat (or perhaps it was beaver or lapin, who can say for sure at this point in time?), moving my hand back and forth in fondling reverie: a light-coloured stripe, a darkcoloured one. How soothing it was to trace figures with one’s hands over that beloved body.
Memories are what put the bite and flavour into vintage. But what makes the memory of a recurrent event unforgettable, is that recollection of the first time it occurred: the first time I remember mother looking glamorous; the first time I invented a game; the first time that a situation that was to repeat itself gave me pleasure.
I behold the phosphorescent green rabbit; its mutated fur was created by the Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac through genetic engineering. Before me stands the new world, with all its unsettling bravado. Does this mean we might one day see blue otters being bred to save having to dye the fur? Scary, but sometimes even amusing, at least as long as such innovations don’t entail any mutation in our own physical makeup or until such tinkering with the genetic code turns out some bio risk we can’t handle. But if that glowing rabbit – which as such has at this stage become a fairly familiar icon of certain art’s new frontiers – impresses me at all it’s precisely because of those childhood memories of my tender caresses of mother’s soft fur coat that come to mind when I see it. It’s in fact an emotion born of the contrasting relationship between that time so intimately my own and this other time, between the then and now.
“Novelties are the only relief that make memories bearable”.
Small public, neighbourhood gardens are another childhood recollection, especially typical of urban childhoods. We’d be taken for a walk in them, our hands tightly clasped by the accompanying adults, which heightened the unpleasant feeling of pending calamity: dog droppings to have to be careful not to step on; the nearby street that we were strictly forbidden to cross to fetch that ball that had rolled over to the other side; the forlorn patches of grass with their seasonal vagrancies that left muddy puddles large and small exposed after each rainfall. Time passes and here I now am visiting the Living Art Park in Turin, so masterfully planned and laid out with absolute dedication by Piero Gilardi.
As I walk the Garden I come across a stone enclosure in the shape of a four-leafed clover set off from the rest of the field by a ditch. The ditch is well drained and always dry but it’s covered by a carpet of lush green grass, as befits a place where, if I could, I’d love to be allowed to play even today. It’s Dominique Gonzales-Foerster’s “Trefle”, a garden-cum-castle and it’s a prompt that draws forth recollections of the first public gardens I remember, the nerve racking “don’tdo-this-don’t-do-that” one’s of my childhood in Milan. Now, instead, here’s this beautiful artistic invention, especially designed to allure people of all ages to come together and familiarise with each other in pleasant and relaxing surroundings.
The hectic city is kept safely at bay and the visitor feels as if she has magically alighted on some sort of enchanted flower in this protected haven.
Here I am now, driving fast down the motorway. The roadside cafés that whiz past are more or less the ones of my childhood. There’s a photo of me of when I was still a toddler with that same curved staircase in the picture that I now tackle two steps at a time. I’d like the commissions for the design and construction of new cafés to be given to distinguished architects.
How exciting it would be if one of these buildings, so heavily stigmatised and considered the epitome of base consumerism and yet so convenient for the tired traveller, were to be the proud and memorable creation of some archistar. I find that bridge designed by Calatrava, for instance, with its large central arch and two smaller side ones spanning the motorway and telling me I’m coming up to Reggio Emilia, a remarkable and reassuring landmark. Not that I can stop off and refresh myself or anything, but it’s somehow comforting to know that the motorway I once used to travel along as a child strictly confined to the back seat of the car and which I now hastily drive back and forth on is not quite the same as then. Time swiftly rolls by and carries me along in its wake; any thought of remaining solidly anchored to the past would be piteously self-deceitful. Novelties are the only relief that make memories bearable.
andrea illy angela vettese architecture Art artist berlin Biennale business coffee Colour communication community company creativity culture Design europe experience food future history idea ideas innovation internet Italy knowledge life london michelangelo pistoletto milan mind new york Passion past people school social Society Students time tradition university venice world
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