Photo by lilypenelope

Photo by lilypenelope

Photo by lilypenelope

Photo by lilypenelope

Yeah....if it wasn't already cold enough!!! Photo by lilypenelope

Significance. Simulacrum. Snob. Slack. Salvation. Sadness. Scale. Sinfulness. Sneaky. Stabber. Satisfaction. Sand. Self. Shady. Skeptic. Suggestive. Scrappy. Sapience. Scheme. Sideways. Sensibility. Simultaneous. Somewhat. Stroller. Schizofrenia. Shooter. Slum. Silly. Shy. Scrumptions. Shit. Steady. Symbology. Said. Sea. Servant. Snutty. Secret. Sketch. Seduction. Sculpture. Suspect. Stupidity. Photo by lilypenelope

A walk on the beach. The city behind me. The horizon in front of me. Water in-between. The sound-{s} of nature. Thoughts are flying. In space. The end of Land - "Finisterrae", the beginning of a new "state": Imagination. Photo by lilypenelope

It's raining. Everything is dark outside. Yet I see colors. I feel colors. But still. Outside it's dark. And raining. Photo by lilypenelope

Photo by lilypenelope

The sky is infite. That's what we all are used to say. Where is the line though that divides the limits of the infinite? As you all know I adore staring outside my windows. Not really in a voyeuristic way...really! I just look at the sky thinking "that freak of a weatherman was wrong again". I look outside, I admire the beautiful everchanging color of our everyday roof, the sky. I look at the birds flying, I listen to them sing. I look at the planes flying and I smile trying to imagine where they are going. I dream about me sitting on a plane flying somewhere. Hopefully not next to the old fat lady that made my flight turn into a nightmare. When I found this old picture I took from the top a building in Downtown Los Angeles with my friend Efrem a feeling of joy started running through my body. First of all remembering the adrenaline while we were illegally going onto the roof to shoot some pictures. Then remembering the beauty of the city from a different angle. Ohhh those old billboards!!! Such works of art! There, on top of the roof of a huge building the sky wasn't only above us but right in front of our estatic faces. The billboard was the arrival yet creating a new starting point for our endless imagination. A man made construction in the middle of the sky. In front of us. Sad to realize that from my apt, shifting my eyes from the infinite above to the reality in front of me the line is very visible. Not a line through the infinite. But the line of my bank account going lower and lower. In front of me the taxes Building!
Photo by lilypenelope

Sometimes reality and dreams cross path. On that particular path I found myself driving couple of days ago! Curiosity told me to keep going on a road I've never experienced further than my own home at the lake so, since I had nothing much to do I took the car and kept going. It was a rainy day and spring apparently was playing hide and seek! Would I find it on top of the mountain? Maybe that's what drove me!! While I kept going up I found interesting things to shoot. Strange trees, beautiful flowers, rain drops on grass (post below) and, on top of everything my tripp was surrounded with the typical smell of nature touched by the rain. I kept going higher (on the mountain!). Til I met Fog! To be said: I love reading mystery novels. Especially scandinavian ones (Mankell, Nesbo, Indridason, Nesser...). For some reasons, the landscape, all of a sudden, appeared to be those narrated in those fantastic books. With one little uncomfortable detail: "what if the killer jumps out of the woods and stabbs me to death?". Yep, sometimes I wonder if I maybe dont read too much of those books!! A strange feeling started to appear: fear. No houses near by. Only those of German tourist who come in the summer. But hey I said to myself. This Fog is amazing. The landscape is surreal. Fear can be managed! Then, details of life/fiction started to appear. An abandoned truck with a swiss licence plate (and I was in Italy). My mind started to flip: "Oh geeeee. What is this doing here?" "Where is the owner?" Al this thoughs were spinning in my head and, I decided never to live the car but shoot my pics from inside!!!
Ultimately I got til the end of the road. In a huge land covered by fog. Only a sign was visible. The name of the area and its height. "Acqua Minerale 590 m" ("Mineral Water 590m". That's when My already freaked out brain started to lose it! What if this one was the perfect place for a murder? What if this was a great place for those authors to set their stories in? Then worse of all.... "Oh geeeeee....what if this would be the perfect place for a real murder??" Seriosly I needed to come back to reality! While I turned my car a strange last (messed up) thought crossed my mind: "What if the (fictional) murderer just jumps out from the Fog and.... "Swiss architect found dead on top of a mountain in the region af the Lake Maggiore. Her body was found in "Mineral Water"". Yep...that would make the headline!! But would people ask "Who was she?" Or "Was the water sparkling?".
Photo by lilypenelope

Who are you? Where are you? What's your [hi]-story? I'm looking at you from above. The sky flaneur. And I'm wondering. And my mind is wandering. Where are you going? Towards the future? Back in the past? Or are you simply stucked in this present? Photo by lilypenelope

There I was! South of France. I could see the vineyards. I could feel the vineyards. There I was. In the Languedoc region. I could also sense the presence of the Greeks, of the Phoenicians and the Romans who started their settlements there. But I could also grasp a sense of history and wars remembering the Alamanni, the Visigoths, the Vandals, and the Saracens who invaded the area. My sense of place got deeper. My imagination started to wander. But then it just came to me. An hyperreal moment. I was in Venice, California! Photo by lilypenelope

This is the first post on the very interesting art I was able to see at the Venice Biennale. It's actually more about the art I was able to feel that I will talk about.What is art in the end? Just a mere representation hanging on a wall? Or a piece that, no matter where it's hanging, triggers, inside of us, a chain of reactions/feelings/memories and so forth.

These pieces are among several art creations I certainly enjoyed "reading". The Morocco's contribution for this year Art Biennale "Making Worlds".

Work by artist Fathiya Tahiri:

Work by artist Mahi Binebine:

A very important factor in any exhibition is the location. In this case, being able to enjoy this fantastic art in a church - Santa Maria della Pietà - added one more ingredient to the entire experience.

While finishing up to assemble all the cabinets I got at Ikea, I started, once again, thinking about the big blue box we all read as "swedish design at a low cost". Me and my collegue had to go there to buy cabinets for the office. What a surreal experience! As I talked about it before, Ikea is indeed a trip into your mind, a psychological tour into your own home. As we entered the big blue box I started wondering "I saw that kid here in the children space the last time I came here", and that was at least 6 months ago...some leave their children there while they cruise around the store...maybe some leave them there while cruising around life! As we start walking, following the arrows, you suddently realize you are not technically in switzerland anymore!! Words, style and advertisments no longer belong to your everyday. It feels like you are in a science fiction novel mixed with a document on natural species... ohhh those names...so, you find yourself between a "Trollsta" and a "Skruvsta" so interesting! Can you imagine at a dinner in your own home you welcome your guest speaking "Ikea-ish": "Hey guys, welcome! Please go and put your stuff in Pax, then feel free to go on the Tylosänd...I have to go in the kitchen to finish cooking some Köttbullar"! So, while searching for a cabinet I found myself filling up the yellow plastic bag with so many useful things: two sets of "Drömmar", I mean...not one, two sets of pastries cutter in the shape of swedish animals!! So nice looking...! I got a "Pröjs" just for the name...a desk pad...I hate desk pads but how could I resist to something named "Pröjs"?? A "Strila"...a damn citrus zester...why? But it will look good in my red kitchen! And the best, a jewel in the kitchen...a must...the complete set of "Plastis" ice cube trays...so happy I can now make icecube in the shape of a fish, a flower, a star and a heart! I totally forgot I have a full center fridge..!!Then, after buying everything I don't really need, we got to the cabinets/bookshelf section...awesome! Selfservice! Heavy like a dinosaur! We pay, put the stuff in the car and drive back...knowing that there were many floors ahead of us! We mounted everything in 2 hours! At night, I was sad. Not only becuase Brooke Shield broke my heart with her speech at the Micheal Jackson memorial, but because, while crying (damn Brooke) I suddently realize that this red "Expedit" insert with door was the last piece of the "swedish experience"! I knew I should have bought a "Bygga" , a "Mula", a "MÅLA" or a "Pyssla" so I could have kept going playing the swedish life...at a low cost!

A Person. The Eye. A Camera. The lense. Parallel entities. Eye vs. Eye. The City. The Body. Parallel volumes. Buildings vs. Bodies. The city. A mirror. Reflecting Hi-{stories}. Thoughts (distorted?) Trends. Ideas. Experiments.
Facades reflect moods, like bodies. They change moods. They have moods. Weather. Materials. Constantly changing their appearances and our perception of them. Shiny happy facades. Faces. Weather. Life. Do we also make the urban environment change its perception of us?
Layers. Juxtapositions. Ephemeral over permanent. Constructed over imagined. Oneiric over real { w-h-a-t is r-e-a-l}. Spaces. Places. Thoughts and behaviours.
Like a double exposure photograph the everyday is indeed a juxtaposition. Of event. Of moments we cherish or not. Of details we carefully put together creating the final piece. Our world.
Walking in the streets we become a new layer writing our stories on them. Our wandering. Our stops. Our dérives. Our un-{conscious} maps and plans. The ground is our new drawing. Everyday tabula rasa. We start again. By the end of the day, of the week, of the month of the year we own a huge collection of drawings. The everyday our museum where they hang on its imaginary walls.
A wall. A hand holding a camera. Eye capturing eye. I had a plan. We had a plan that day. The plan was double exposure. In this photo I can localize our thoughts in that particular moment. The place is remembered by them. Not by the place itself. Thoughts and maps. Thoughts and places. Localization. GPS system can easily localize them. But GPS cannot yet localize thoughts and feeling we experienced during our wanderings. Not yet. Juxtaposition or {Just}-a-{position}

It used to be a long time ago when I first got knowledge of this word. It was through an amazing instructor (remember Margaret?) that we started developing the concept of the "subjective city" through the eyes of the flaneur.

Who is a flaneur (or flaneuse)? Is a person who is having a key role in understanding, participating in and portraying the city. The exemples we studied at school all happened in the beautiful city of Paris, because that's where the real flaneur was born thanks to Charles Baudelaire. He/she is part of the city but at the same time detached from it. The flaneur would sit at a café watching and analizing what happens around him/her. Would walk around and drift (la dérive as we used to say) through the city experiencing moods and feeling different states of mind depending from the location he/she would find himself/herself in. Today the flaneur still exist, but instead of just sitting at a café he/she would also walk around, maybe with a camera (like I would do!) depicting what lays around his/her existence from a one shot point of view. A shot of reality bound by the frame of the camera and discover hidden layers of society and of the urban landscape.

Like someone once said (I have this quote but I do not recall who said it!) :

"The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque".

I can't wait to go to Paris! Sit down au Café de Flore like Hemingway and watch people during their everyday routines. Take out my notebook/sketchbook and just write, write and write. Whatever comes to my mind. And then walk around the Quartier Latin, go eat at the Brasserie Lipp or at La Coupole. Go to the Beaubourg, to the Fondation Cartier, to every corner of this amazing city and just enjoy it's everyday essence.