Che pesante sto tetto
Elia Castino
22.12.2020
“Can you help me find a roof above my head?”
When he first arrived in town he asked that to everyone he encountered.
He had nowhere to stay permanently: I cannot tell whether he was desperate but certainly quite stressed.
It took a while but he eventually managed to find a roof.
He managed to find one of those that stands on pillars with walls that fragment the space below and define it into many units and rooms, all of them assigned with typological functions and spatial features in order to follow a specific program: bedroom, hallway, kitchen, living room, staircase, laundry room, bathroom, toilet, entrance – an enfilade des chambres to frame quotidian existence under the principle of rigid spatial distribution – a restrictive, conventional, unmovable, limiting, oppressing, constrictive realm: namely a house.
“¡ How heavy this roof !”
He couldn’t help exclaiming that as soon as he entered.
It was so heavy he couldn’t stand it, and it looked like the space itself couldn’t as well.
He well knew that a house is not a home and his true reason to find one was for the most essential need: to finally find some solace by laying under the bed, obviously.
Particles, fibres, skin, hair, soil, pollen, pollution, minerals, ashes.
“The dust flocks below this bed look just as the ones below my childhood one.” Traces of occurrences.
Traces of experiences.
Traces of casualties.
Material for reveries.
He thought the only thing his home could be made of, would be dust.
***
Elia Castino engages with space making and art practice. He explores the architecture of the everyday as spatial dimension and cultural construct. His work questions the conventional domestic connotation of the home by staging scenarios that present another idea of inhabiting. His narrative occurs at the threshold between reverie and reality, intimacy and exposure.
Photo credits: Francesca Lucchitta