On the day I arrived in Turin I felt immediately lost in a dream, and now that five weeks have passed my eyes are still half-shut. I could always hear that the city was alive, and touch the hard stone walls, but I didn’t really feel like I was really there. My thoughts were still in England, because England was written all over my DNA and my subconscious mind was a cauldron brimming full of it. I wrote about the strange feeling of departure, bearing fear and uncertainty. The ground was trembling and I didn’t know what would happen next.
Now the tables have turned and I am due to fly back to England tomorrow. This time the feeling is less ecstatic and fear is out of the equation, but departure is certainly felt and with it, as my thoughts race 700 miles ahead of my body, I am already partly in England. I have been lost to the gushing streams, hazy heights, and dazzling lights – a dreamland made complete by the big white orb that oscillates between the city and sky. In twelve hours time I will finally awake. The end of the dream is nigh.
Before London tolls me back to the life I knew, I wish to reflect for a moment on my relationship to my immediate environment while I’m still here. As quoted in my exhibition statement, c.2000AD was founded on this ‘sense of detachment’ – I could not have begun to turn the present into a fiction if I did not feel that it already was! Yet before I had conceived my first idea for this Turin-specific show, I’d already considered some ideas for identifying an awareness of place in more general terms, although still specific to Italy. Inspired by several public information boards I had seen around the city my intention was to create a series of site-specific street-maps with ‘Voi Siete Qui’ (you are here) arrows on them. The arrows would, however, be incorrect or imprecise, and the idea was to see if anyone would realise this. With the addition of a question mark, the phrase ‘You are here’ in Italian becomes ‘Are you here’[?] and this play on language was central to the work. The effect of c.2000AD owed a lot to the easy-to-understand display with the addition of some handouts that had been translated into Italian, with thanks to gallery director Barbara Fragogna. For this early text-based idea however, the only language was Italian.
I reserved this idea as a side-project, making a printing block in my spare time out of old wooden letters (from a market stall) wedged into a fragment of chair frame. And now that the exhibition is over, I have finally devoted some time towards making some prints. While thinking of different papers to test the block I found some blank postcards that I’d brought with me from England and realised how this would be more favourable than using a display board. The postcard is a perfect format because it is a symbol of ‘distanced travelled’. Instead of ‘Wish You Were Here’ or any representation of a place, ‘Are You Here?’ turns the receiver rather than the sender into the subject of the postcard. The phrase is ambiguous in questioning their location but also their understanding of reality. Such questions as ‘are we really here?’ and ‘why are we here?’ have tempted me to read philosophy since my mid-teens. And more recently, in my art practice, I have been examining the feeling of detachment that makes the unfamiliar so extraordinary, or at least detaching oneself from the familiar.
I have been slowly waking up here, and now feel used to the climate, sights and sounds of the city, the cross-rhythms between river and engines, not to mention the music of the Italian language. It is that language that buzzes in my head each evening as I return to my studio and has provided the soundtrack to my adventures here. On the surface, those tunes tell me that I am here, but something far deeper vies to tell me otherwise.
D I C E M B R E 