The taste of the marvellous | Nora Lau

20th January, 2008. Dream sketches.

Fregene has become a chaotic place. Marcello has bought a new car. And it is even much more powerful than his last one. I have to move away!

Driving down the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, I catch sight of an empty piece of land. The only one. Indeed, Italy‘s seaside places seem to have become one big unified built-up area. Attracted by the strange gap within the extensions of settlement, I enter the pine-wood-thicket. After a while I arrive at a sandy beach, a place almost distant from the earth, meeting my momentary inner apogee.

Having a lark, lying on the beach throwing dices with Giulietta for lack of a card game, I suddenly know how it should be, my house, our house: it will be a big circus. Even more! It will consist in different kinds of circuses forming an ensem­ble: the Muse‘s home, a theatre, a guest house for our friends, a car park (it won’t bear any comparison with Marcello‘s garage), and the villa, our private circus. The old lighthouse in the dunes? An ideal thinking temple!

The villa will be our vantage point and direction tower, offering views in every direction, on each floor another one. From there, we communicate with our friends in the guest house nearby, almost crystalline in direction of the villa and protected towards the sea – scenes of sweet life, actors and actresses, fables, a wine-cellar and a pasta-kitchen, which reproduces the provincial tastes I loved as a little boy.

The villa is a control desk and my private theatre. It is a circus and a cinema at the same time. Large apertures and a balcony are facing the acrobatic vehicles appended in the airspace of the car park. And, on the upper floor, our bedroom is directly connected with the Muse‘s home: if it appeared in a film, critics would write about an autobiographic obsession. Should I care? Forever, I will be in search for the Italian mums of my childhood! Inspiration, caricatures of wonderful beach-muses, bathing, escorted by strange male figures. A bow in front of the satire! In front of an imaginary universe! A dreamlike magic! Pleasure! All in all: The taste of the marvellous! Now Marcello might come.

Project for: Icarch gallery, Chicago, IL, US.

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