Tre Oci: the house with three eyes

“What a strange power there is in clothing!,” wrote Isaac B. Singer, and stranger still is the power of lost, abandoned, forgotten clothing.
I live in my own world, made of disordered order and ordered disorder. Outside the lines, outside the boundaries. It fascinates me to soil and deface things, make them impure, put the surfaces of different objects in contact. I spend long hours, oblivious to everything and everyone.
A blank sheet of paper, the small spaces of pages already written, used notebooks, old book jackets, paper or cardboard, postcards, scraps of cloth, all asking to be filled.

Everyone has a story, a more or less distant past, a more or less happy present, a more or less certain future, a history, be it good or bad, made of joys and sorrows, loves and hatreds.
Clothes are like us, they’re part of our experience of life, of the succession of events; sometimes slaves of what happens, at other times active subjects that become emotions and states of feeling, our thoughts and memories, our views of the outside world and our way of experiencing it.
They contain fragments of what they were, of what they are, and what they will be; they’ve taken part in someone’s life and now are part of someone else’s; who knows what’s next… but what matters is what they are transmitting now.
Clothing, in this sense, tells a story.
I grew up surrounded by fabrics, in the family butigasthat enchanted me as a child. I lost myself in the mountains of cloth. Since then I have an instinctive approach to fabrics: I like looking at them, touching them, selecting them, accumulating them, classifying them, torturing them.
Fabric is, for me, a material to be molded, shaped, changed. Raw material, shapeless, designed in one way and transformed in another and then another still.
Almost like making bread: the flour is kneaded, rises, and brings to light the shape that is inside. I’m drawn to the process of becoming, experimentation, the unfinished, the open work, the magic of raw chaos that gradually takes form, assumes definition, comes alive, eventually becoming something that you can actually wear!
I feel linguistic variance very strongly, variance in grammatical standards, the deviation from everyday language daily, the free and personal use of words, chosen, combined, juxtaposed in unusual ways.
Free to create games, oxymorons, metaphors, analogies...And that’s what I try to do with scraps of fabric, objects, furnishings, and such…
Accumulating, layering, assembling are set in opposition to subtracting, removing, reducing. They battle against flatness, cliché, banality.
Sure, you need the system and you need excess, but I prefer excess, eccentricity. Systems are a closed order and demand rigor. Excess shatters order and rigor and produces something new. I collect, I hoard, I combine everything I find. I like to rummage through memories, to ransack the orderly chaos of a junk shop: a portrait, a suitcase, a globe.

Junk that was once beautiful and is now shabby. I think of who owned those objects, why they have been abandoned like dogs. Once beloved objects now sit there, without an owner, without function, without any history or status. For me it is instinctive, natural, to not throw anything away, to recycle, to conserve everything. I get totally involved in anything that smells of shadows, of the past, of lives stolen or denied.
Particularly objects that have been used, worn, broken, tattered, thrown away, now useless. I collect things, and often dogs. They carry with them fragments of what they were. They speak. They want to keep living. I like to listen and to wait until their memories resurface.
And that’s how the installation for Through women’s eyeswas born, from the discarded props and costumes and abandoned, forgotten objects in the storerooms of the Fenice.
Every swatch, every weave, every thread almost, comes from different times and different people, and when they’re combined through specific choice they acquire new breath, they’re charged with meaning, they release energy. They bring many stories with them and yearn to weave them, recount them...
They tell stories of women, important stories and everyday stories...
I think of a house that can accommodate them. A big house with big eyes, eyes open to the world, to beauty. I imagine a house, a great domestic universe where forgotten clothes relive their former glory.
The entrance evokes a passage, a journey through space and time, in an atmosphere of “otherness.”
For me, designing a collection or an installation means writing, recounting. The premise is invariably a story. The narrative cues can be many, and they trigger visual analogies, new images, unexpected meanings. A character, a person met by chance, an episode, a banal fact, an image, an object, a picture, a verse, a poem, a song, a letter, a film set my visions in motion. I'm always careful to listen to these messages and translate them into signs. I'm passionate about giving a voice to things that are seemingly mute, because they speak.

Rooms, then rooms covered with sketched wallpaper, poorly finished and infinite, that reveal the gaze of a strange, different woman... wallpaper in warm colors, neutral, dusty, soft, enveloping, delicate, light. They create an atmosphere, a lived-in air, an aura of antiquity that evokes lived lives, real and invented stories. They evoke purity, they shed light, they dilate spaces and fill them with lightness, a thoughtful and crowded lightness.

Rooms full of clothes that lead to other rooms. These others, all burgundy, emptied of every piece of furniture, exist only as a backup, as a support for the images on display.
As such, the big house with three eyes relives another time.
The clothes impose their presence, they breathe with all their expressive and evocative power, they are charged with meanings, they trigger explosions, echoes, impressions, emotions, they tell tales of yore. And they act as hosts for the photos that tell us of the gazes and views of others.
In the exhibition design for Through women’s eyesthere is a reflection on courage, memory, and the spirit of the time: a composite reality, alive, which opens itself to beauty, to otherness, to the horizon.
A collection of gazes that remind us of the need for a dense existence, through rules that are from time to time transgressed and respected, violated and reinvented.
All my work is based on trust, dialogue and exchange. And with this project I’ve tried to create a motivated environment in which visitors can get involved in order to feel alive.