Die Lange Nacht der Illustration 2019
My Studio Apartment – The Clothes Dryer
Aviatrix Atelier, 27. September
The project explores the everyday life of living alone in a studio apartment, where visual chaos is easy to generate. With an ironic and melancholic intention, I used traditional colored pencils to photograph and transform the corners of my studio into illustrations, telling not only the intimacy of my space but also the small daily difficulties.
The objects around us reveal stories and roots that, although sometimes escaping our awareness, continue to be part of who we are.
A key element of the project is the clothes dryer, a symbol of one of the many small inconveniences that life in a northern city brings.
Growing up in a province in southern Italy, where spaces are larger and hanging laundry outside is a common practice, this simple object becomes a metaphor for the cultural and practical distance I feel between my past and my present. Its presence in a studio apartment, where space is limited, often feels like an uncomfortable but indispensable roommate, with whom I share an already cramped space. It is an additional element that disrupts the order, and in a deeper sense, it brings me back to the small aspects of my past daily life, as well as to the everyday challenges of a more impersonal and anonymous environment typical of a large northern European metropolis.
The project also invites us to smile at the small things that make us human, things we often hide from ourselves, overwhelmed by the ambitions that drive many, especially those from the provinces, to seek a different life in the city. These ambitions, however, sometimes distance us from simplicity and from the small details that are part of our essence.
The objects around us reveal stories and roots that, although sometimes escaping our awareness, continue to be part of who we are.
Among the objects depicted is the “cuccumella”, a traditional Neapolitan coffee pot, which in its original context is ordinary but, when placed in a studio apartment in Berlin, becomes exotic and curious, seen through the eyes of someone from another part of the world.
ValeTalea 