Travelling between places, imaginary lands, in an historical moment where we humans were constricted to live between
our four walls. Coming back to when I was a kid, playing imaginative games. Since we were little, my brother an I used to
to translate the physical world in our imagination. Our bedroom was the magic room where everything could become
possible: a castle under the clouds would transform our bedroom in a room where clouds were made by big duvets all
around the floor; the magic school would transform our bedroom full of ancient books and weird potions in ampoules with
water colored by the ink of markers; a restaurant would transform our beds in tables, the nintendo 96 full of bills would
become the cashmachine.
Everything would be possible, by imagining and translating symbols into the physical world.
Last year the pandemic started, closed in our houses, I would move the furnitures in my house everyday. Make every day
different. The house is this onesame space, but Livia, you can change it into different places everyday. One day the couch was
in a certain position, the day after it would be in another place; one day all the plants would be moved in the same spot and
the day after they would be dislocated around the house.
I cannot walk in the city but I can create different cities in my house every day.
It was working, my mental health was doing well until I received a call from my landlord. I had to move house in the middle
of the pandemic, without knowing where to go. And then I realize: no matter how attached we are to the objects and
furnitures we own, I could not trust my house as an anchor during the pandemic. But what I could trust, and that would be forever,
my inner spaces, my imaginative places, my memories and the history of myself.
When I was in primary school I wrote a fantasy story about a girl who could travel time and space through portals.
I came back to that.
The virtuality allow us to break into reality, recreate places that are in our imagination, they become real in the digital realm.
Obtaining physicality even without bodies. I remember a research I made on the ‘Eurhythmy’, the body that moves and
performs in front of the spectator could suggests possibile realities; the sounds and the unspoken words of the moving
body will bring the viewer far away from the theater where he’s looking at the performance, far away to the possible reality
of movement that is expressing unheard sounds and unspoken words.
By writing these fictional descriptions of imaginary cities I was travelling time and space, my body would perceive that
even being still. The theoretical physicist Alessandra Gnecchi says: an artist can shock us with perspectives that challenge
our logical views, but they offer our mind a chance to escape from the rules of physics and find creative ways to
approach our research1.
Travelling into cities where the gravity changes according to the sound, cities that grow as hives, markets that become stages,
nomadic kingdom, by doing that I was synthesizing some concepts I find related to our contemporary society. It is a
kind of manifesto where the progress does not exist anymore, borders between nations neither, bodies move as planets in
the universe. This is an atlas of imagination where we people are pushed to think differently about our bodies and about the idea
of collectiveness.
We are humans, moving a collective intelligence; the Earth is a conductor of acoustic resonance, as Meg says to jack in the fourth
scene of the Jim Jarmusch s Coffee and Cigarettes, our beings are a dynamic system.
1. The quote is extracted directly from a conversation between Alessandra Gnecchi and the CERN (2021).