"CHI GETTA SEMI AL' VENTO FARA' FIORIRE IL CIELO."~ Ivan

This was one of the workshops I participated in as part of the Ama Forest Week at NABA. The workshop was taken by Ivan, a poet from Milan who specializes in Street Poetry, what he calls 'Poesia Viva'. Ivan is part of an artistic body called 'Art Kitchen', and it was there that we formed a series of public interaction works to install in the city...

In this workshop I created two ideas as public art pieces. The first idea was of representing the invisible descisions and journeys of life; when we enter and when we leave the world. For this idea I visualized two people sitting in a public and open square, kneeling opposite one another. One person would represent life, and the other would represent death. For the duration of an hour, these two people would work like a human metronome, using a physical noise, like the clicking of fingers, or slaping of the stone on the ground to mark the time when someone enters and leaves the world. I read up on the statistics for how many people are born and die in a second; every second a person dies, whilst 4 are born... I like the dualities of these pathways and to bring them together physically in the space as opposing journeys. Black & White.

My second idea was to create a space for a collective identity...This would again be set in a public space. This piece was for people to throw away and to set free their external identity. This involved the public to come and participate in the work, writing their name/what they believed to be their identity on a piece of paper and to throw it into a circular space that represented than idea of 'collectivity'. This idea was about giving your name to a collective presence, to let go of your title, and to just become a floating body in space...

Take a piece of paper and write your name on it: write what you feel defines you as a person: your intimate and public identity...

Our name is what defines us, it is what we think of when thinking of someone else, it is what we use to introduce ourselves to the world...

When you have written on the piece of paper, take it and throw it into the space we have created for you...The space is a metaphor of the public, of our communal space, of public society; of the world.

In this moment you are throwing away your identity, your name and giving it to this collective presence. We are all human and in this moment we are united...