WALK THROUGH TIME
I climbed Etna in search of myself as if it was the path I don’t know… of Compostela, a sort of pilgrimage to Sicily..
at the same time I was looking for energy, and getting closer to my ancestors, perhaps Greek, but certainly navigators of the Mediterranean , even if in the family we don’t remember such roots and you don’t know why, but you feel it… you feel that you belong to something ancestral, magical and sibylline. You are looking for something, your senses carry you, like a magnet you know that THAT place will tell you words about the world, about yourself, about others… So, inebriated by intuition, I set off in search of answers. Where to look for them? How to receive them?
I didn’t know anything, but I was ready, yes I was ready to welcome everything that the journey would reveal to me.
A Volcano, in my imagination, since I grew up in Tuscany, is a powerful place in southern Italy, it’s a geographical description on the map, the story of Pompeii learned at school, synonymous with danger and destruction, fire, lava and lapilli, people running into footage, suffocating dust
…But when you arrive in Sicily and Catania and from there to Nicolosi, and then you find yourself at the foot of this agglomeration of strength whose tentacles begin to peer at you among the shrubs that have grown years after the eruptions, when the black sand infiltrates between the roots and between the flowers and between the toes … a clear and sparkling mineral contrast is created, the dazzling yellow of the mimosa … the roof of a house emerges halfway from the grip of the merciless lava cooled over the years … ghostly landscape on the sides of the road you travel by car… a journey into the eviscerated bowels, evaporated by the heat, of the earth’s orgasmic womb. .. and reading here and there I discover that the volcano is called The Great Mother, The Lady, The Mountain, indeed, The locals atavistically recognize it as a female nature, a living form, …. and so I understand everything .. I understand why I felt this inexplicable attraction, I understand why I was almost hypnotized by this scent, I realize that I was looking for a natural temple where to praise, where to sacrifice, where to think about ancient rites… I was looking for My Ancient Me, that version of myself lost in the past generations, centuries and millennia, and it was like re-joining all temporal versions of oneself.
… A wonderful feeling heterogeneous and unifying at the same time … I don’t know what transformation I have experienced over time, what dust has formed my bones, what food has coloured my blood, from which egg I was born and in which nest I grew up and developed an universal consciousness…but I live in time, our ineffable God who dominates everything…a feeling that we might have already been there, perhaps as an animal, or a plant or a grain of sand, or maybe just a pronounced sentence… perhaps a small agglomeration of mineral who looks at his abstract metamorphosis forged over the millennia.
Testi critici
Nicoletta Provenzano – Circolo degli Esteri
