Antilia

I
The imagined city, the expected city, the desired city is built inside the traveler’s heart. The real city is straighter, it is always taller or shorter, lighter or darker, it is misplaced. Yet the desired city is a ghost and the ghost haunts forever. Pirra is about the ghost: that thing we cannot lay hands on and which remains suspended before us. Suspended and yet visible and inviting with its concavities (deep like a well with a well within). We evoke the image of the uterus as the first lost city, the primordial ghost, to talk about the loss and how the lost object somehow remains.
II
A fragment, an uterus the size of a fist, an imagined place, inhabited and never known. Perhaps it’s our only place in the world. Pirra is the desire of returning, the longing for that thing which is no longer possible to possess, or which has never been possessed at all. High over the gulf with its square closed around the well, the city survives with no name, and nameless it becomes more tenaciously ours. Suspended over an unsteady table the primordial ghost stands, so that we can exorcize it, to trap it, to dream it and still not touch it.

project team: Alessandro Tessari with Clara Machado
project: Mirabilia exhibition. Interpretations of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities
status: Completed project
date : 2018.10
client: Antilia Itinerant Gallery