In search of a landscape for my cardboard
cut-outs, I come across Marina Romea.
The brown water that, in summer, welcomes the summer bodies of ordinary people; normal, average bodies, their feet disappearing beneath the opaque sea.
The aquatic amid the industrial; the ordinary and the submerged.
It was precisely within that opacity that the uncanny of my imagining resided: those first swims without being able to see the seabed, frightening and fantastic.

The faded beach, the mosquito-infested pine forest, the washed-out signs amid the glimmer of shells, all merge into a barren limbo that belongs to me. Here it is: the bare, making room for possibility, for the inner uncanny.
Perhaps the emptiness from which imagination arises is what we still have left to find ourselves again, to rebel against the functional logic of the present, a realm of rationality, extraction, and productivity.
To rediscover doing nothing, the interval of the plausible, where thresholds slide over one another.

Cut-outs of shimmering minerals (magnesium, sodium chloride, quartz) elements hidden at the threshold of visibility, minute components of what exists around us and within us.
Chemical elements present in the waters and sand of Marina Romea.
Revelations of the landscape’s unconscious, fantastical intuitions.

I play with the landscape, with my cut-outs. I take them out for some air, steal them from the internet, drag them into real life, wet them at the water’s edge, bury them in the sand, wedge them into brambles, and photograph them again in the darkness of film, taking them back for myself.

Unwrapping an image, discovering it, collecting it and perhaps placing it in an album, or perhaps letting it haunt the hidden corner of your parents’ wardrobe, where you will find it again when you are grown.

A picture card that will not come off even with solvent, leaving behind the sticky trace of its materiality, unsettling the inhabited space: a poignant, iridescent trace of childhood, the time of dreams, of frightening images.