Many artists have transformed temporarily museum’s rooms or commercial galley’s spaces into their “homes”. In these spaces they’ve lived for days, weeks and sometimes even months. The idea of seeing, assuming, accepting or transforming the “white cube” into a living space has many social, political and of course cultural implications. Most of these artist’s performances have shown the way the artist eat, sleep, read, write, socialize, etc. They have introduced in this way the everyday life of ‘the artist’ as somethings whether extraordinary significant, meaningful and inspiring or just plain boring. The visitor in most of the cases has been transformed into a witness but also often into a voyeur.
A recent visit to the DEUTSCHES HYGIENE-MUSEUM in Dresden recalled an “sleeping idea” I had many years ago while watching a picture of the “The Tomb-Death of the Hippie” (Paul Thek 1967). The “sleeping idea” it was very simple and it seems that while sleeping all these years it was growing in silence until it woke up while I was standing in front of a 1:1 sculptural arrangement made in the 20′s that illustrates a native amazonian family dressing all their typical costumes, standing in a little piece of land that had also some representative vegetation of the area that this family used to inhabited.
A house beside all we know about it is anything but a strange embodiment of our deepest and most ancient fears. Houses are permanent monuments to fear. Houses not only proof our physical fragility but also our need to have bigger, stronger and longer lasting bodies, bodies that we can whether rent or buy, that can be in blue or in white. But we know a house is not home. Home is an abstract and highly relative concept but home appears to me as the container of all the happiness that exist in our universe.
“The Tomb-Death of the Hippie” for some reasons made me write this sentence in my memory: “home is everywhere”. But at that time I have immediately contradicted this idea, opening the following question: -If home is everywhere then can I travel and live in many different places without ever looking back?, is that possible? The answer came to me years later looking at this “family” (sculptural arrangement at the DEUTSCHES HYGIENE-MUSEUM): -I was already homesick before leaving the place I have born.
Everything has a patina for instance the air, the light, a friend and of course home. This patina that comes together with every single particle and with every single moment it is impossible to remove, this patina always existed and always controlled our memories and played beautifully with our emotions. Home can be certainly everywhere we want it but for some reasons to touch again the first chair we have ever touched make us breath in a beautiful rhythm.
