Departure, Landing, Return. My process as an artist can be synthesized in these three words.
Progressive stages, people encountered. Necessary for an understanding, over time, of the journey undertaken.
Departure
The place from which I departed is the village of Nocelle, magically perched on a rock face above Positano. A unique locus of rural history. Facing a vast horizon, infinite and mutable. Immersed in silence, deep and intense.
A cascade of 1850 steps connects it to the world below. The presence of this flight of stairs profoundly affected my existence.
Landing
A desire to acquire learning and knowledge stimulated me to leave my place of birth and led me first to Sorrento, where I attended the Art Institute, then to Naples to study set design at the Academy of Fine Arts.
In Naples, crucible of contrasts, I was exposed to the world of art and discovered the allure of the theater, that mysterious sleight of hand hitherto completely unknown to me.
After Naples, my next destination was Rome. There, in 1990, I met Firouz Galdo, an architect and set designer. I worked as his assistant for six years, designing theater sets for Italian theaters and theater festivals. This close professional relationship was very determining for me, enabling me to shake off certain academicisms and to gain a sense of wherein lies elusive and inherent meaning.
During this phase of my life in Rome another awareness was awakening within me. An awareness that, today, I refer to as the sense of losing contact with one’s place of origin, of feeling uprooted.
Return
My return to the place from which I had begun my journey came about through my meeting with Richard Fowler, a Canadian theater director who had trained at Odin Teatret in Denmark, and with his company, Primus Theater.
I worked as a set designer with this company for three years, from 1997 to 1999, creating, in the village of Nocelle, a trilogy of performances entitled “C’Era Una Volta in Montagna.” The performances were based on direct experience with the locality, on life stories told by the village elders and on the imaginative facets of the mountain on which the village rests.
This experience enabled me to re-establish a powerful and decisive connection to my homeland and my roots. It also helped me rediscover the motifs that are a value added to my creative process: the extraordinary beauty surrounding me, the infinite sense of space, the intrinsic relationship with nature and with the people in my community. And, the silence.
As I continued to pursue my creative development, I became increasingly aware of the importance of finding one‘s own expressive dimension and of how necessary it is to search for a language that is unhindered by assumed mechanisms. To create something enduring that bears witness over time to one’s own evolution. A mutation enclosed within the two-dimensional space of surfaces that are the custodians of the realm of one’s emotions.
Since 2005, a group of professional colleagues and I have been working under the aegis of the A.D.I.N. Cultural Association to promote cultural events, including events dedicated to contemporary art, involving the participation of artists and related experts from both the local area and further afield.