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 is a meditation on the fragile tension between inside and outside — a tension born from the human impulse to draw boundaries around the formless, to give shape and shelter to space once wild and undetermined. My work moves beyond architectural readings, tracing instead the shifting currents between home and horizon, enclosure and openness, the finite and the infinite.
Each act of circumscription is double-edged. To enclose a space is to make it human: to carve out refuge, to claim a sanctuary, to weave the threads of identity into a closed and sheltering form. Yet in the very gesture of protection lies the seed of oppression. Every wall, every limit, bears the mark of violence, of exclusion. Each boundary whispers of a beyond — of an untouched expanse calling to be crossed, of a freedom just out of reach.
Walls summon homes into existence. But they also conjure the vastness beyond their edges, an uncharted space that presses against them, silent and insistent. The home, once a cradle, threatens to harden into a cell. Identity, once a refuge, trembles under the weight of its own closure.
It is this restless oscillation — between the longing to dwell and the yearning to journey beyond, between the embrace of shelter and the call of the horizon — that pulses at the heart of my work.
photos: Leonor Fonseca