Casa/Portale

Casa/Portale is a photographic self-portrait series created in the countryside of Verona, Italy, where I was born. The project explores my relationship with the notion of native paternal home, in collaboration with Chris Cozier’s Home/Portal project.

La Casa/Il Portale _ Home/Portal

This is an artistic collaboration between the artist Christopher Cozier, a contemporary artist from Trinidad (Tobago, WI), his red steps installation titled Home/Portal, and my interpretation of the meanings of Home, in a photographic self-portrait photo-performance.

I was born in Italy and left my birth country twenty years ago, living, studying, and working on different continents. Since then, I have spent more than half of my life as a perpetual migrant chasing and escaping the notion of Home. 

Being a North-Italian emigrant in a post-fascist « plain» mentality of the Pianura Padana, as a woman and an only child, has always made me feel remarked on and judged. In the Italy I know, migration and the diaspora have never been viewed favorably; it sounded to me like its historical fascist vision never left. 

The national discourse toward emigration, and that of some of my family members too, embodies a contradictory mix of pride, nationalism, local inferiority, and escapism. 

On one side, you (the emigrant) are a traitor: I left my country, left my father alone, left my family, its legacy, for “adventure”. On the other side, you are the brave person who believed in their dreams. I embody a contemporary representation of my aunts, who left their country in the 60s, thinking they could find better outside. One of them stayed; the other two came back with fear and debts. 

I represent a traitor to the meaning of family unity, of patriotic love, of obsession with campanilism and dialects. In the Italy I was born in, if you are a woman and an only child as I am, you are expected to stay when your mother passes away, in order to take care of your father. You should have carried on your father's career; if you are not, you are a traitor to your family's efforts. 

I have always imagined empathizing with those soldiers who never wanted to return to Italy after leaving the country for the Horn of Africa in the final years of Italy's colonial period. Once the British Empire arrived, some Italians preferred to stay in their new “home” (Eritrea and Ethiopia) rather than return to their native country. Many of their fascist family members preferred to believe that they were dead, rather than accepting that they decided to stay despite the national defeat, with their racially mixed newborn families.

In Italy, I have always heard on my back those comments like: “Emigrants think they are better than us! We are the ones who are left behind, and then they come asking for support!”  Italy, my Home native country, at times behaves as a 1st-world country and at others as « the South ». Its racist, parochial, and missionary status quo is embedded in its complex Mediterranean mixity, and a smiling, welcoming habit, full of care, joy and empathy. I have always felt « the weight of history » at “home”; a weight that squashes the youngest generations into a dichotomy: never being enough compared to the grandeur of the past, and being too lazy for a future that is impossible. 

Thanks to this collaboration, with the art installation Home/Portal, the meaning of Home has always shifted for me to other places. Home, in fact, is a portal more than a place. It is a condition of comfort and safety to pass through, to go to other places. Home in Italy, it is more like a childhood home; France and Trinidad and Tobago were my young adult homes, with all their complexities. Now, Colombia is a new home where I must create security and stability.

Casa/Portale took place in northern Italy, in the countryside of Verona, where I was born. My mother, a symbol of the transregionality of the family, passed away eleven years ago, and what it means as a childhood home now is my father's world: a countryside environment, full of antipodes, economic, cultural, and educational ones.  

Chris Cozier's work, Home/Portal, allowed me to pass through my father’s home, a part of myself that appears when I return to visit my biological family.

Identity con-fusion, facing a family routine that is not mine; adjustments, disappearance, and hypervisibility; love and inadaptability. This project is a photographic self-portrait about myself and the meanings of that Home. Rage mixed with a condition of gratitude for a sense of family that is far and close beyond its geographical conditions. A Home that knows you when you were a child, but disregards and doesn’t know your adult identity. Pain, calmness, space for newness, stagnation, sense of care mixed with anxiety.

I am Home, I am Portal.