Daniele Girardi from Verona
Your new daily ritual ...
Honestly, my daily life hasn't changed much. Years ago I had embarked on a very specific direction made up of isolation, essentiality, silence and in constant contact with nature. I live close to a wood far from the city and its communicative noise. A "silent subversion" made up of daily gestures and choices that reflect the will to undertake and verify, through artistic practice, alternative and sustainable models and rhythms of life. Even now I tend to limit the number of actions to increase the depth of each experience.
How your way of working has changed?
I think it is too hasty to consider a different way of working, change now, it would be like abandoning when the dynamics become complex. Adapting is inevitable but maintaining consistency in research is essential, especially now.
I have always alternated moments of preparatory stasis with a phase of immersive action in the territories, even if it sets right now, it adheres to my way of working. Personally, I wait below deck for the wind to return in order to get back on track as soon as possible.
What you're missing? Your personal experience of "absence" and "lack".
I consider this moment an extension of a symbolic winter and I cultivate the art of being in the shelter. Reflecting on it, I think that we are not what we possess but we are the sum of all the experiences we live; personally this absence is an unknown value added to experience. “How many things I don't need” wrote Socrates.
Daniele Girardi (Verona, 1977). In 2000 he moved to Milan where he studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts; in 2006 he is awarded a scholarship at the ISCP in New York City, initiating his interest in travel and residences in remote and wild places. His current research is based on the relationship between experience and vision in the direction of a progressive and all-encompassing interpenetration between art and life. His works are part of private and public collections such as that of the MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome and that of the GAM Achille Forti in Verona. Among the most recent projects are mentioned: “North Way”, transversal research work to the experience that, from 2014 to the 2019, led him to explore the Scandinavian countries with a cycle of outdoor residencies (Norway, Sweden, Finland) and show it “Everyday Life” at the MART Civic Gallery of Trento. Lives and works in Verona. www.danielegirardi.com