Urban Mythologies
Urban Mythologies is a month‑long field process in which the body becomes an instrument of perception, and the urban environment becomes a field for revealing trajectories obscured by aestheticization and social narratives. The project does not operate through a goal but through a direction: a return to a wild, expansive, free form of presence in which physical orientation regains its organismic function.
Throughout the project, I enter mythologized zones — open urban spaces, city gardens at night, dormitories, train‑station peripheries, and places where street tribes organize their temporary habitats — inhabiting them organically, in accordance with the movement of the field. Sleeping in these spaces is not performative; it is part of the process of reclaiming my trajectory and recognizing the real physics of the city and of my own body.
The navigating body reveals the organic competencies of street communities and their informal forms of togetherness, contrasting them with structures of assistance that prove to be not organic but compensatory. Urban Mythologies does not romanticize the street — it exposes its actual tensions, micro‑trajectories, and the places omitted by a uniform, object‑driven gaze.
My methods — pure presence, notational scripts, watercolors — do not document; they reveal. Watercolors do not aestheticize monuments or people; they ask how they would like to be painted, crossing the threshold of aestheticization that often masks the absence of genuine human kindness. They also become a temporal medium that permeates ordinary, momentary encounters.
Urban Mythologies opens for me an organic form of trajectory‑based art: a practice in which the work is not a representation but a movement of the field. The project is both personal and social — the return to my own trajectory becomes a tool for recognizing deep layers of urban reality as well as my own structural orientation.
Italy, 2024