Spiral

Dear C: You are right. I must give you more information. I’ll start at the beginning because I think that the method – if one can so call that motley collection of facts, be they planned or impromptu, that constitute everyday working life – is as important as the results.
I started in the winter of 2002/2003 photographing the snow on the branches of a tree near my house, simply because it was a pretty image. Then, one sunny day, I found a dead robin underneath the tree and I took a picture of it, for no particular reason this time. A while after this I photographed the side of the building I work in – I wanted to use this same picture, but taken in the summer, for the Milan show invite (March 2003). On the surface of things, nothing links these images. I did not know how I would use them, except for relating them to my studio, a subject I revisit quite regularly. So the images had to stay together and since the easiest way of linking images is placing them in sequence,
I created a short film, only three frames long.
The sequence came to me spontaneously, almost instinctively: tree, studio, robin. But this intuition is the result of a millenary sedimentation that has little or nothing to do with instinct and spontaneity. It is culturally and socially determined. In this sense, it was inaccurate of me to talk of life and death as pure and simple facts.
The opposite is true, we are talking about life and death in a Christian perspective, which I was brought up with. Life as a gift from God, to whom it must return. That the image of the snow on the branches and the dead robin indicate a circular movement, returning what came from the sky in material form back to it as spirit, is a happy coincidence.
The second happy coincidence is the empty chair behind the window pane in the centre of the image and the entire sequence, which begs the question: who is, or who wants to be, the spectator of this event? From my point of view, being a spectator is an almost intolerable condition almost, the margins of any real participation are also very limited.
The empty chair is the (involuntary) sign of this complexity: no longer able to subscribe – as an active participant or spectator – to a religious or religiously secular interpretation of natural facts such as life and death, I can only try to follow this new movement, as though it were my own breathing.
There are no universally shared principles, since we cannot find them but perhaps we can find a point of contact in the body, in its materiality. But a body like this, naked and innocent, cannot be portrayed because it has never been born.
I would like to finish with some brief notes about the structure. It takes both the first movement into account (sky/earth, earth/sky) and the second movement, which indicates the ideal route to depart from consolidated interpretation, this or any other.