Every wall is a horizon
Wood, charcoal on paper
2019
Every wall is a horizon
Wood, charcoal on paper
2019
(...)
né dolcezza di figlio, né la pieta
del vecchio padre, né ’l debito amore
lo qual dovea Penelopè far lieta,
vincer potero dentro a me l’ardore
ch’i’ ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto
e de li vizi umani e del valore;
ma misi me per l’alto mare aperto
sol con un legno e con quella compagna
picciola da la qual non fui diserto.
Dante, Inferno, Canto XXVI
*
(...)
Nor fondness for my son, nor reverence
For my old father, nor the due affection
Which joyous should have made Penelope,
Could overcome within me the desire
I had to be experienced of the world,
And of the vice and virtue of mankind;
But I put forth on the high open sea
With one sole ship, and that small company
By which I never had deserted been.
Dante, Inferno, Canto XXVI
Every wall is a horizon explores the relationship and opposition between inside and outside, specifically focussing on the symbolic and material gesture of delimiting and circumscribing an originally undetermined space. Beyond the purely architectural and formal interpretations, I am interested in the dialectic between ideas of home and horizon, openness and closure, finite and infinite. There is actually an ambiguity and an unsolvable tension between inside and outside. On the one hand, closing a space upon itself is metaphorically making it human, creating a shelter, a refuge, a definite identity and a closed system. On the other hand, though, this act is authoritarian, violent and oppressive. Any border, limit, boundary, entices us to its overcoming, nourishing our desire for the infinite, for the limitless space beyond, for an imagined liberty. Walls create a home. At the same time, they generate a vast and undetermined space beyond them. The home/identity becomes then a jail, from which we have to get out. This oscillation, between the need to take shelter and the drive to move beyond towards the horizon of freedom, is the main theme of my work.
photos: Leonor Fonseca