Incontri in luoghi straordinari | Giulia Crispiani

Incontri in luoghi straordinari was created during the first Italian lockdown imposed against  the spread of the Coronavirus pandemic: a natural need to communicate prompted Crispiani to write and send the same letter to sixty recipients, then combine the different responses in the manifesto and the small pieces of fabric that make up the work. The same letter was also printed on three thousand pizza boxes, distributed by various pizzerias in Rome during the lockdown.

Incontri in luoghi straordinari, like other works of Crispiani, it’s not  just about reading and writing. The words that create the work, which takes the form of a poetic manifesto and the fabric on which the words are embroidered, conceal a complex process of realisation, whose fundamental moments can be identified in the phases of sending and receiving the letters.

Thus, the work becomes the result of this complex process of creation based on the interaction with the Other through the model of communication – in some ways melancholic – of the letter. The relational mechanism that it triggers is nourished by the thoughts of those who participate in it, and at the same time by the gestures that make it possible – the act of writing, or the acts linked to sending or delivering the letters in the form of the pizza boxes. At a time when the relationship with the other has been severely worn out, anonymous individuals have thus found themselves, perhaps even unconsciously, building and inhabiting the same space: that of Incontri in luoghi straordinari by Giulia Crispiani.

©cover image: VV. AA., Lettere, 2020, part of Incontri in luoghi straordinari, 2020.
Photo Giulia Crispiani. Courtesy the Artist

13/07/2021