I wrote the following text for the catalogue of Molteplicittà, an exhibition on the city and urban spaces curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, which took place in Rome, at the Fondazione Adriano Olivetti, in 1999.

Territory, Autobiography, Community

I am a city girl, just like my mother, and just like my grandmother has always been—those with whom I grew up. During my childhood and adolescence, I conceived only the sea as a possible alternative or antithesis to the city. Over time, and through my work, I discovered that between the sea and the city, and between one city and another, there is land, the road, and the countryside.

An ideal trajectory, leading from one point to another and from one psychophysical state to another, possesses the two-dimensionality of a line. Conversely, paths can acquire a three-dimensional quality when the movement made becomes a true crossing, involving contact with and the definition of a territory, one that extends to include different places and states.

The territory thus traversed and experienced becomes the pathway of life. Fluid and multifaceted, this terrain takes shape as the mobile space of personal and collective existence, a place of daily experience and imagination, dotted with bonds that tighten and unravel, with repeated actions, collapses, and epiphanies.

The city—agglomeration, key word, emblem, symbol, measure, hub, connection, crossroads, field of forces—condenses within itself encounters, clashes, movements, and flows. I watch the people passing by, the cars flowing past: someone turns, another crosses, someone stops, someone slows down and then speeds up. I look at all this as a dynamic process of communication: an unfolding and evolving of energies, events, and interactions that mirror the course of my life and that of others, in the participatory and active waiting for the “timing” and the joy it brings me.

Rome, New York, Naples, San Francisco, Kinshasa, Tehran…: my thoughts turn to the names of some key places in my life, which bring to mind streets, buildings, smells, sounds, and the impressions, ideas, and sensations associated with them. I see faces again, I hear snippets of conversations again, I reconsider possible choices, situating each event with precision. I scan the various times and many places that crowd my mind in unison; the synchronicity of my autobiography clashes and marries with my physical presence in Rome: today, Monday afternoon, at my desk.

The need I feel for inner nourishment, for synchronicity, and for clear interpersonal communication presupposes the presence of engaged interlocutors. Those who, like me, move through cities, traverse territories, and recount their biography want to find themselves in others. I wish to feel embraced by a community—not one I conceive as a closed group bound by ties of kinship, ethnicity, language, generation… but rather one characterized by a diffuse sense of affinity.

I write, and in doing so I bring clarity to the territory of my mind. But in fixing the path of my thoughts onto the computer screen, I realize I am following the modes of oral communication: in telling, I am driven, above all, by the search for an unconscious relationship with the world and by the desire—mixed with fear—for deep contact with it.

October 1999
Giovanna Trento