I’ve been walking in this garden for over twenty-five years. Back then, I used to take public transport to get here. Now, just a stroll is enough.
Gregory Corso’s grave has always been one of my destinations. In his epitaph, I always find the concept of cyclicity explained in the stark and powerful way that I’ve only found in poetry and ancient religion, as well as in everyday gestures and common objects.
Sacrae mensae
I narrate death through everyday objects because I want to view it as a domestic reality.
The objects I’ve shaped for the first area are inspired by those of everyday use and private worship in ancient Rome.
We are in non-patrician Rome, in homes, still far from abstract spiritual thought. Major events were celebrated at the same table where meals were consumed. The domestic table was always felt as an altar too.
The most beloved deities to the Romans were the Lares, “the divinised spirit of deceased ancestors felt as persistent in the house and honoured with worship by the descendants.”
I’ve added to common utensils the objects with which the Lares were depicted, always in a dancing and joyful attitude, in the act of making a libation: pouring from one object to another. Pouring from the rhyton to the situla. The adaptation of these objects involved simplifying traditional forms and engraving a phrase from Gregory Corso’s epitaph.
“Like a river unafraid of becoming the sea”.
The objects utter the phrase, pouring becomes saying. Pouring and serving are both daily and ritual actions, and they are acts of care.
Humida terra
If I take care of death as a domestic affair, I see in the field near the house the earth that holds in its dark womb the seed, and accomplishes the dual work of death (of the seed) and birth (of the sprout). In the cyclical vision of events, these two things merge in an active phase. The beginning of a transformation process.
Corpore
In the last area, my doing is faced with the ongoing, uncontrollable metamorphosis. The hybrid bodies are pure desire and adherence to the beauty of the world. They tear fiercely out of vital impulse. A motion towards something completely new, which happens through experience.
The circularity between the areas is supported by the surrender to the nature of things, to the cycle of life-death-life.
Grief mobilises immense power of transmutation, it’s a cyclical process of renewal.
“When death takes something from you, give it back.”** From someone who wasn’t afraid to be that River, learn how to become the Sea.
This is what I must give back.
Download Brochure
