Stair of a threshold (portable) - Scala di soglia (portatile)

An object as a symbol of our certainty, an half that represent the Man, built by a Man, used by a Man to face the truths that torment him. A portable Stair of a threshold as a symbol of research. A safe place, made by our experiences. A place where becoming aware of. Climb to leave the past without fear. Three steps at the end of which the Man turns to a tomorrow that is everywhere, as everywhere is the stair in front  of the threshold. Get up to watch, to get away from something, to change the point of view, to get away from reality, without ever getting lost. Toward something, in search of questions sometimes inaccurate but necessary. Hope. Fear is a faceless evil except the one that we want to give her, it has no place except the one that we identify with her, does not exist except when we decide to make her win. My threshold is the gaze that I turn elsewhere when I find that I can face my fears. There is no place or a specified time, it happens everywhere. The Stair is the medium that brings me to that threshold, is a hint, a gesture, a short path, a simple movement, physical, mental, to go out trying to find some answers: "Where am I?" Without fear, here.

Prequel

House’ stairs in the Delta area of ​​Louisiana are the only thing connected to the foundations of houses. It 's a depressed area and marshy and houses are mostly on stilts or on wheels. I noticed it last summer traveling by car between the back roads in the area just outside New Orleans up to Venice. Stairs of cement, wood, bricks, without any threshold. Steps into space. Solid structures surrounded by rubble, fields as squares with a monument. I was struck by the very simple symbolism they represented. I also climbed on one of them, trying to understand their meaning, I have tried because I wanted to see if anything looked different from up there. It’s happened a few days before I understood what they were.

Five years before Katrina swept away houses, boats, people, animals. What I saw were traces. But why keep a monument to death in the garden? Many of the new homes stand next to the skeletons of the old ones, some just a few meters. What drives someone to remember a tragedy every day? I was looking at them, all those stairs, waiting for a response. I met a man, a sailor and I asked him if he could give me a reason. He looked more surprised than me and he said: "Nobody cares to remember a tragedy, if you can still tell you care about tomorrow. You don’t want to lose time because you were close to loose it forever, then you raise your head you roll up your sleeves and you keep going, the past was yesterday, this morning. And then to dispose of all that rubble cost so much, let them not cost anything." It 'was a phrase so simple in its apparent cynicism, that I no longer felt the need to ask the meaning of those stairs. They weren’t invisible Stair of a threshold no more, were places from which to reflect, to look beyond that, where hope for something. They were the symbol of a new path.  

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle (Dante Alighieri – La Divina Commedia) San Fedele Artivisive Award 2010-2011