ALTROVE – Lorenzo Mini
23 March – 16 April 2023
Fulgor Palace
“But where am I? I feel like I’m nowhere….
…you can’t see anything at all, oh! Ah, but I’m sticking here to the little wall…. Only in ’22 was there such a fog. Gina! Gina!
Now if death is like this, it’s not a good job… Everything’s gone! The people, the trees, the birds in the air, the wine… Fuck”
When the fog is so thick and dense and all you can hear in the air is the insistent noise of the “Fischione” (whistling boat) on the harbour, my thoughts inexorably take me to the scene in Federico Fellini’s film Amarcord, when Titta’s grandfather comes out of the house in the midst of a historic “nebbia” (fog) and, feeling lost, utters the above phrases.
With these fogs, so persistent and compact, walking along the beach is an almost dreamlike experience, and the intermittent and powerful sound of the nautophone
accompanies you on an extraterrestrial journey, ‘Elsewhere’, in fact.
On one side you have
complete nowhere, marked by the faint sound of waves lazily lapping against the
shore, coming from a deep white.
On the opposite side one hears distant voices of people at work, preparing for the summer season.
Walking parallel to the line of the sea, one can encounter strange creatures in bizarre shapes and bright colours that seem to come out of nowhere, or find themselves in unlikely settings.
And so you feel like you are ‘nowhere’, alone and lost, just like your grandfather in the scene from Amarcord, in a place that does not exist in reality.
At a certain point, however, the fog begins to clear, the whistling stops and the dream vanishes; you are home again.
