Often while I am working what I am doing generates another work or project and for this reason it remains unfinished. Each work fertilizes others.
If I tell you Unfinished what is the first thing that comes to your mind?
I immediately slip into the personal, because I have a tendency to start things, projects and sometimes I finish them but I don’t realize them, at other times I postpone the end because in the meantime the intuition for another work was born.
Unfinished what color / shape is it?
The color for me is dark, it tends to black because it must receive the light of creation, the shape is a circle that is not yet closed.
Is there something you have left undone in your life?
My great unfinished is a novel that I started writing when I left Milan, disappearing for 3 years after an existential short circuit, I went staying for a while between Stromboli and Etna. There I started writing a novel, “The pilgrimage of impossible lovers”, then it happened that inside the novel there was a character who built 32 votive structures, then that thing derailed my existence, I started building those structures, I finished them and then I wanted to show them in an exhibition and I was sucked into a whirlpool that took me away from my initial intentions. For 20 years I have been taking mental notes and written notes for the novel on a daily basis. Last summer I met a publisher, Angelo Scandurra, who suggested that I summarize it in an illustrated story for one of his fabulous mythology series. So I wrote the story and did the illustrations, but the publisher passed away shortly before publication and so once again the cycle of a work was not completed.
When is a work completed?
There are jobs that I put my hands on all the time and if they take them away from me I’ll work on them all my life. I have an unfinished story about a portrait that an artist makes of his woman and that over the years, as the woman changes, he changes her on the painting. He has portrayed her as a girl, then the layers of color continue to sum up until he portrays her when she is old. Then she dies and he finds himself with this painting that preserves the whole existence of this woman in the layers, he has it in front of him and this work that would seem completed instead collapses under the weight and all the layers come off and the canvas becomes white again. This is an unfinished tale about an unfinished painting. The ending is in my head, but I haven’t written it yet.
To accomplish something means to put it to good use, that work has also ended up being known. But if it could depend on me, I would put my hand to all the works I have done, I would take something away, I would add something else. For me, incompleteness is continuous change, the sign of the transformation which is the meaning of existence. The fifth principle of the Chibabalion (of the seven principles that have governed esotericism) is that “nothing is at rest, everything, everything moves, everything vibrates”. Quantum science has proved it, there is no immobility, and if everything flows, can there be a sense of completeness?
Where do you keep your unfinished ones?
In my mind and they haunt me, that is the immaterial place where they exist. Then as a material place, they are scattered everywhere, my big dream is to have a place to keep them together.
What is a fertilizer for you?
Often while I am working, what I am doing generates another work or project. Each work fertilizes others.
3 words that you would match with unfinished?
Restlessness, missed opportunity, vibration, vitality.