We are incomplete because we come into the world as separate, we do not have completeness, we look for the other for this feeling of connection.
If I tell you “unfinished” what is the first thing that comes to your mind?
The path of humanity on this planet: we are unfinished because we come into the world as separate, we do not have completeness, we seek the other to achieve this feeling of connection. We are accomplished when we are cosmic energy, then we come into the world as half. I think of life, of existence, of what we do because of the feeling we can have when we feel part of a whole, connected. When we feel separate we experience our limits. Life is a path towards completeness that will probably take place with death, the apex where you rejoin everything, with cosmic energy. All my doing and my work is driven by this engine: trying to develop this feeling of connection that makes you feel part of a whole, of a being “together” that reaches the whole. The others make me feel that I am part of a single body that is humanity, we are all participating in one great work. Even in the sexual act, there is this, welcoming the other in your body because your body is not enough for you; even when you give life, the other sprouts inside you, you are born from another human being, or rather from two others, it is madness to think that we are separate.
Unfinished what colour does it have?
I think of the basic colours: white where there is everything, the unfinished is potential energy. Even black, we are in something indistinct, in the great alchemical work, black is the unconscious, the indistinct, the underground.
What is your relationship with the unfinished?
The theme of the perfectionism of the completeness of the works has been overcome thanks to the avant-gardes, siding against academic art, against the perfection of classical beauty. The Surrealists and Dadaists questioned the entire previous system that made art something dead, works of great virtuosity but an end in themselves. Art is life, as contemporary artists have taught us. How life is therefore unfinished, in motion, in constant transformation. The performance was born in the late 1950s, after the world wars, with this idea of incompleteness. Artists are no longer interested in producing an object, but art becomes life, happening, it becomes an act, and in the act, there is the accident, there is the unexpected. No work remains fixed in time, whether completed or not, it undergoes the action of time, it gets old. The sense of transformation always runs through work.
When is work done for you?
The work is a trace of me like the snail that leaves a trail, the work is a trace of my path, it does not have to be perfect, it is a trace of how we are in a given moment, if we are not projected towards perfection, it is right that the work put an end to it because you want to move on to something else. Or you are like Stanley Kubrick and you decide to work for 10 years to make a perfect work, but I’m not like that, I don’t want my perfection to become a cage. My interest is to live, and this tool that is my job I use to live in the world and it helps me to be a better version of myself. Thanks to it, I learned to listen, observe, dominate my ego, be a channel for something. My work lasts as long as it must last to give shape to what I need.
3 or more words that you would use to describe the unfinished?
Walk, travel, time, wait.