"I tried to leave" - Postcards

Installation site specific, 52 pieces, 2017 - 2018

Digital prints on cardboard

101° Collettiva, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa

Galleria di Piazza San Marco 71/c, Venezia, 2018

Ivan had moved to Venice. Ivan loved Venice. One day he locked himself in his room, "I wanna try to leave this place", he said. No one has ever seen him leave the room since then. A long time later an old box was found among his effects. The box was full of never sent postcards.

Synopsis

The work represents a collection of unsent postcards from trips that never happened.

The collection includes 52 pieces, one postcard per week for twelve months.

The installation is a playful revisitation of the birth and growth of a depression that leads the main character, Ivan, first to lock himself in his room and then to try to escape —from his room and his suffering— through journeys he can only undertake in his imagination.

But if every escape ends where it was born, and Ivan never left the room again, the postcards must travel: each person must take one with them and send it. Only by sending the postcards Ivan's journey can be completed.

The installation only makes sense if it disappears; only if people feel they want to help change an ending that isn't yet written.

Postcards description

The design of each postcard presents three different levels of semiotics, distinguishable by three different colors: there's always a corner of Venice (purple ink) superimposed on a place never visited (black ink) and a memory (pencil grey).

These three levels overlap, sometimes blurring into one another—as happens when we think, that the projections of our desires mix with our memories and our present, blurring their features—and create a new geography of emotions that rewrites the city of Venice along with Ivan's psychological morphology.

In these drawings Venice, from a simple city, transforms into a chameleon reality, narrow but infinite, always different and always the same. Over the skeleton of its bridges and buildings, the fabric of a hundred other countries and a hundred other destinations are tied together to create the body of a new path, which moves from the external world towards the internal one.

On the back of each piece, instead, there's a thought, a poem, a diary page.

A fragment of reality: the note of Ivan's malaise, the thoughts that depression brings him.

The origin of the work

Sometimes the choices we make betray us, sometimes it's the ones we don't make that turn against us. Other times we deceive ourselves when we don't know what we are really wanting.

Ivan represents all those who find themselves stuck in unhappy situations - chosen or not - from which they cannot escape.

Building an alternative future means having creativity but also the means to make the necessary changes and the courage to implement them. Not everyone is lucky enough to own this magical triplet. Most of the time we endure our lives with fatalism or we learn strategies to live peacefully with our daily anxieties. We look for escapes, or narratives, to bear the weight of difficulties because we seem to have no alternatives.

Ivan's story is the story of those who can no longer bear the burden, not even that of their own narratives.

Those who enter depression enter a reserved, intimate space, away from shared places and away from others. A bit like staying locked in your room while everyone else is playing in the garden.

I also remained locked in my room for a long time, like Ivan. And I too, like Ivan, risked never going out again. I dreamed of leaving but I stayed where I was, collecting journeys into the lives of those who were playing in the garden. This is how postcards were born.