Nobody Forgets Nothing / Francesca Minini, Milan, Italy, 2023
America Is Far Away
Ser libre. Ya en su vientre mi madre me decía
"ser libre no se compra ni es dádiva o favor".
Horacio Ferrer, Libertango, 1974
Paula is crying, because the seagulls have all flown away. Her mother takes her in her arms. She has to make an effort to do so, her belly begins weighing on her, she’s pregnant, although this remains unsaid. But that’s the way things are, many things are left unsaid, many of the threads joining together moments and episodes in time and space are left hanging; they’re lost in time, like tears in rain, or like smoke. We too are smoke, all of us.
The seagulls that have flown away look for a place to land, but there’s nowhere to be found. More and more monuments, parapets and balconies are covered in spikes that would hurt if sat on. There’s always someone who thinks that seagulls ought to be kept away, they make everything dirty, they bring diseases. They take our jobs, they don't speak our language, they sit on the street doing nothing, they're scary, they never say thank you. They should just go back where they came from, it makes no sense for them to come and ask for asylum here, we don't even have enough to eat ourselves, let alone for all these birds.
Asylum and exile are similar words. Asylum is dreamed of, begged for and sometimes granted; exile was once a sentence, today it is most of the time a choice. But it’s a choice that is actually not really a choice at all, because it’s the only alternative to hunger, to fear, to threats, or even to death. When did the age of exile begin? Years ago, decades ago, centuries ago? What country do you feel you belong to, when you were born far from where she who carried you inside of her would like to be?
A letter is intimate, personal, confidential; a postcard on the other hand is almost public, anyone can read it. A postcard is made for travel. Perhaps also to give some brief news, fleeting like smoke, but above all for traveling, light. Its two sides are of equal importance, at first glance one would be inclined to say that the image is the public side, and the back, with the greetings, hugs or kisses, is the private one. But who can really say which side is public and which is private? The tragedy of those trying to cross the Strait of Gibraltar at night, on a half-deflated dinghy, for instance, is just as private as it is public. The age of exile is the age of a drama in which we too are implicated, each and every one of us.
The smoke from a cigarette is ethereal, it curls in the air and then disappears, but sometimes it gets into the eyes, makes them red. It becomes an excuse: I'm not crying, smoke got in my eyes... Bronze that melts in fire doesn't make much smoke, usually one melts it so it slides into a mold to give it a specific shape, but it can happen that one wants to melt it just to make it lose its shape. To transform the message that a shape communicates into its opposite: into a revolt, or at least a protest, be it public or private. They say that Christopher Columbus flattened the tip of an egg to make it stand upright and still. There is a certain poetic justice in seeing him in turn deformed, half fallen, still pointing his finger at America.
But America is far away, on the other side of the moon. So far away that perhaps it doesn't even exist, perhaps it's just an idea, as abstract as a square or a rectangle. When Columbus said that we could get there by another route, it wasn't even America that he was thinking of, and in any case, everyone laughed at him, it seemed like a provocation, the idea of a madman. Runo and I met halfway several times. He was going and I was coming back, or vice versa, or maybe neither of us was coming nor going. This text is another step of the journey, and it is written in the first person, because the first person is the most public of all.
Jacopo Crivelli Visconti