Normally, I work with materials such as oil paint, charcoal, silver, tar, wood or paper to create a virtual space: the image. The materials forming this artpiece are entirely different, though.
Hannah Arendt – in her lecture Thinking and Moral Considerations – firmly distinguishes the ability to think from acquired knowledge, education and even intelligence. To her, thought is no commodity; it has neither solidity nor persistency. Adopting a metaphor from Plato, Arendt compares human thinking to a wind – invisible and fleeting, vanished the very instant it ceases to move. “How can anything relevant for the world we live in arise from so resultless an enterprise?” she asks, and continues: “An answer, if at all, can come only from the thinking activity, the performance itself, which means that we have to trace experiences rather than doctrines.”
Those last words describe pretty well what we’re up to in this project. No special education in poetry or linguistics is required, despite the literary and multi-lingual theme. Neither are there any settled intents, nothing external to be proven or achieved in this artwork. We deal with the tracing of personal experiences, in Arendt’s sense; and the basic materials seem to be time, trust and attention.