2023 is closing with poetry issues #28, clearly showing a direction that I am feeling increasingly comfortable with: The combination of sound and image, captured and edited in manners that make them compete poetically with the text they come with, and the integration of text into a vivid visual style. Painting and drawing are coming back into the picture, and I dare to be myself more than ever. Call Me The public phone booth, where generations have spent hours and small fortunes talking to friends, family and lovers, where tears were shed and laughter echoed, seems to be a curiosity of the past, a ghosted presence in the urban landscape. One of my plans for the future is to re-imagine the phone booth. For now, I present here the best example of a public phone booth's organic role for (and inevitably its integration into) lively subcultures. This little jewel is handling many themes at once. I was fumbling with the topic of unrequited love in my mind for quite some time and then one day, one of the first nice ones, I was lying on a bench looking at the sky and there was this optical illusion of the pole falling while the sky remained still (of course it was the moving clouds). So then the two topics mingled, and more layers came, especially the broader one, of living in one society but in essentially different realities. I didn't use any elaborate phrasing but I believe the meaning gets across, all the more through the simplicity of the language.
Reflection For a second I thought we were two-gether mirroring each other sharing an understanding of this world that is melting like ice-cream on hot asphalt. "Stubborn" is a commentary on roles, contemporary life, love and how looking up to someone shapes us. I enjoyed how the composition came together, through a mix of loose ideas and experimentation, and the result is highly personal but in certain ways also bigger than a mere obituary to a god or a father.
Stubborn Dear father, I am very ambitious as I was made in your image and likeness. It is true that my goal is to be successful in life just as you wanted me to be but my success is divided into late mornings and long nights into loves not watered down into potentials patience, expectations and compromise. Dear father, I am living in a garden of steel when all I ever wanted were flowers and interactions free of roles: Skirts and pants united. I wanted to be rich but my non-accumulative currency would be the primary formation of meaning – experience, as a principle. For you, dear father, I still want to be the perfect son although I was born a stubborn daughter. Sicily I am changing. Growing. As an artist and as a person. This means that I am integrating and using the past as fertile soil for a happier life. In my artistic practice this translates into…