The Room I’m In

This short text serves as a premise for all the activities at this time and gives meaning to the title of the exhibitions in the Far East, in Hong Kong and Tokyo, and to who knows where next. It means that I am always inside a room, which undoubtedly refers to the room I am in now. Also, the mental room is the specific area in which I orient my perceptions, my curiosity, and the sense of what I am doing. I didn’t think about which room I ended up in when I was younger. I would wander from room to room, discovering that there were many, many rooms. Well, very well, I wanted to see them all, and I wanted to experience the different atmospheres of each room. To enjoy the morning and afternoon light in my rooms, the sunrise and sunset, the rainy days and the sunny days, the passing of the seasons and the feelings that each season arouses. They were always rooms in one house, a very large one, that just had no end, and I imagined, going around it, that one day I would be able to find the front door. Then I would go out and finally see the house from the outside, in one glance, and I expected I would understand everything.

That never happened, clearly, because I am still wandering around those rooms, enjoying the light that changes throughout the day and the temperatures that vary throughout the seasons. On the walls, I have attached so many memories, drawings, plans, photographs, writings, thoughts, theories, and nursery rhymes, and whenever I enter a room, regardless of the time of day and season, irrespective of the orientation of the windows and the amount of light that penetrates them, I discover bits and pieces of my past that comfort me, reassure me, and, thankfully, still motivate me to keep going. And fortunately, I do not stop. I know I probably won’t find the impetus one day, but so be it; for me, that day is still far away, and it is not up to me to decide if and when to make it come.

The skin with old age becomes thinner. We become more sensitive and alarmed at the unexpected. As we age, we lose the strength and ability to react energetically, and the fear grows that we will not be able to survive and cope with the demands of physical power that we had in our youth. In early adulthood, one does not think about this. One relies on a mysterious as well as nonexistent reserve, stowed away no one knows where, somewhere in the body certainly, the body that one does not know enough about and that indeed, one mistakenly thinks, hides extraordinary stores of strength stored well in youth and ready for them to be used at the appropriate time when one needs it. And then, year after year, it turns out that that mysterious part of the body where the stores for old age are, are not there, and those stores never existed.

So, as the skin becomes thinner, with a more careful mind and a little wisdom and prudence, which are my hallmarks, I measure strength and define ambitions. Instead of reducing, I recharge and pump them up to the most extreme limit, more or less aware but sure that those rooms are worth inhabiting. “The room I’m in”, in fact. On the walls hang so many artefacts, some valuable, some ordinary, some with no value except to refer to the value of something else. Those walls that border our rooms are like a skin. A skin that is not turned outward like our bodies that is not meant to demarcate our limbs and act as an interface with what is outside but turned inward. This skin serves to look inside, inside ourselves, inside the mind that belongs to us and to which we belong. I personally use this concept of “The room I’m in” a lot and distinguish each room carefully because each room is a place of inspiration and influence; it is the physical, mental and disciplinary context in which my ideas take shape.

Michele De Lucchi, May 2024