IN TRALICE AL TEMPO (diagonally through time)

The installation draws inspiration from two stories: A poetry book titled ‘In Tralice al Tempo’ (Diagonally through time), written between 1924 and 1931, by Alberto Caligiani, my great-grandfather on my mother's paternal side.                                                                                                            

The anti-fascist crafts of blacksmith Lionetto Pii, my great-grandfather on my mother's maternal side.

‘In Tralice al Tempo’, which gives its name to the installation, poetically explores the artist's poetic escape from’ la tristezza cittadina’ (the sadness of the city), crossing and trespassing urban boundaries. Lionetto Pii, a blacksmith, created three-pronged nails in a small, hidden workshop, improvised in-between two walls of his house. The nails were later used by the partisan resistance to slow down Nazi troops entering the city by dispersing them on the streets. These two figures and their practices, set against the Florentine landscape of their time, inspired the central themes and the choice of materials for the installation. Materials such as shutters, curtains, handles, shattered glass, and three-pronged nails symbolise 'border materials', used to define 'boundaries' between external and internal spaces, between the outside and the inside. All the materials used were salvaged from the street over the past two years.
Alberto Caligiani's poetry exists outside the urban frame, while Pii's craftsmanship is born and functions within it. Escaping these boundaries becomes an exploration, a journey filled with movement, play, and poetic research. Within the urban confines, hostility and violence transform into resistance, community, reaction, protection, involvement, and craftsmanship. The installation aims to convey a physical experience through a curation that requests an exploration of space and attentiveness on details.

The work is a nest of sentences and words, fragments of poems extracted from the fallen pages of ‘In Tralice al Tempo’, which are only discovered by exploring the space carefully. The book flutters within a ventilation system, protected by glass, where part of the work is developed. The three-pronged nails form a constellation within this site, revealing a hidden, visceral structure of the space. A yellow painting dominates the majority of the wall.

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