Free Speech

I always liked spending time in my girlfriend’s old family flat in Bari in the summer, and I think that’s because I can become part of the environment—by which I mean that my resistances are nothing compared to the forces they encounter. Earplugs are not enough for the loud noises coming from outside the open windows and fall off anyway, mosquito repellent becomes useless in a few minutes, every cold shower is forgotten as soon as I lie on the warm mattress. This bodily condition feels reflected in the apartment, which is old and slowly corroded by a gentle neglect and the decades it spent being inhabited by university students, nobody, or us.

Once we had an invasion of cockroaches that went out of control. We were fighting the usual pain of having to find a way to get rid of all these animals that run everywhere as soon as you turn on the light, and using poison as a barrier, being afraid for our cat. But my girlfriend managed to kill most of the ones that were in the apartment with a tall spray can and it was horrible—and you only do it because of the social agreement that cockroaches need to disappear and you can use chemical weapons to make that happen which is terrible. And sometimes one starts wondering about these social agreements. What can change them, and for how long? Like the stories of how some kind of government policy made people in the United States eat lobsters, which were considered disgusting before, and similar facts.

The apartment is perfect for cockroaches—in another kind of society, we could have beautifully coexisted: we, our cat, and the cockroaches, sharing the shadow the walls provide during the day, the running water, or the usual summer breeze that comes through the window in the early afternoon. But that’s not the case, so we killed some—or let’s say, my girlfriend killed some, and I placed the traps in dark corners and forgotten places. After some days, they were gone, they didn’t come in anymore, and after a week, our cat stopped looking anxiously for them.

But also that life that comes in and it’s too much—so much that you even have to try to get rid of it—is what I like about that apartment. And maybe the reason I always feel very productive there. Which is a big word for an artist like me, who is trapped in a pseudo-conceptual practice of too much thinking. But still, I often manage to sit down and glue some objects I find together, or draw, or even make some watercolours. And the works I make there are materially made of that feeling of too much life, which—like the cockroaches—is a little bit disgusting.

It’s like a very ripe fruit, almost rotten—too much time alive—which doesn’t mean old, it just means too much environment went into it, I guess. So if you look at the watercolours I make while there, they are all very Turner-like, atmospheric—clouds of dust and mud and water bubbles and so on. They feel dizzy. Or maybe they are supposed to make you feel dizzy. I’m not sure they do, since I’ve been realizing recently that I’m not that kind of artist who can make up something that conveys a precise feeling. Perhaps nobody is.

But I found out this thing about myself while writing about art, and I was about to make the same mistakes—writing this well-written description of spaces or things and hoping to transmit a specific emotion into the reader. But then I realized that that was just not working for me anymore. So I decided that I would only write about my experience and thoughts, hoping that the reader would share some of that, or at least would find that interesting or even entertaining.

I think this thing of the environment, and being like a rotting piece of fruit, is a particular feeling of being in the South in the summer, and I also think that many artists have made work about that. I guess that’s because you can’t avoid it. My brother says the heat is more democratic than the cold. I think that’s true—even if AC is everywhere. I’m not exactly sure how, but perhaps it’s the way heat sticks to you in a very short time and stays for the rest of the day, like a layer of glue and dust on your skin. And it’s true you can shake it off with a shower, but it can jump right back on as soon as you go down the street to throw away the garbage at night—because if you throw the garbage away during the day it starts almost cooking and becomes a paste of sugary, rotten plastic that sometimes, when you pass by it, feels like the memory of a good smell, now also corrupted. Like us, our cat, the cockroaches, and all the pieces of furniture in the apartment.

And all this rotting away and sticking to all of us, making us into a blob of stuff, has this capacity to erode every border—or at least make it blurry or foggy. There is a kind of unpredictable durability in this environmental condition that takes every definitive form of material and collapses its borders into mush. Which is something quite nice to feel.

And I think our cat feels that too—in us—that we are closer to a sort of natural state. And she feels more like we are a pack, or I don’t know, more equal, less constricted by certain societal rules of any kind. Which is a very good feeling to have—to live in an apparently diminished quantity of law in some moments of your life. Or at least to inhabit space, and also time, with a renovated absence of property.