Davide Dormino from Rome
Your new daily ritual ...
For several years I have been getting up among the 5.00 not 5.30 to get to the studio, which is far from home 500 meters. At 6.00 I make coffee, I open the grates, I go out into the garden, my state, I drink it and smoke it. Until to 8.00 I reply to emails approximately, I check social networks, I read political news from the news sites I follow, then, I start my day. I've been teaching remotely for a couple of weeks, on Tuesday (drawing) and Thursday (sculpture) at the RUFA Academy – Rome University of Fine Arts. I go home for lunch and stay there with my family, continuing the activity from the computer. This was allowed to me until the last decree issued by the government 25 March 2020 being a "freelance professional with a VAT number".
Frankly, I don't know what I'll do without being able to go to the studio.
How your way of working has changed?
I have always looked for a way to tell a concept but this shared isolation forces us into a time that I personally have always denied.
I began to take care of the studio and meticulously arrange those areas that could have remained unfinished for many years. I worked as a craftsman, blacksmith, carpenter, and gardener, bothering mathematics and geometry, I acted as my own assistant by arranging part of the archive. I haven't worked on any projects, keeping any creative act at a distance by choice dictated by this uncertainty which forces us to have new eyes on the world to come. And then I wait, I let myself cross without resisting.
With which objects and spaces of your daily life are you interacting the most?
The fridge! It has never been so full. When I'm at home I alternate between the small balcony from which I observe the outside and my son Orlando with whom I live my inside.
What you're missing? Your personal experience of "absence" and "lack".
I miss the face-to-face relationship with my students at the Academy, remote drawing and sculpture lessons are a paradox. I told certain things by doing.
I miss the silence of communication, which through the telephone is occupied only by words, those unsaid things that can be read from gestures or expressions. Freedom is the daughter of sacrifice and this has never scared me but to what extent can one give up freedom in the name of what is happening??
To date, what have been the immediate consequences of the spread of Covid-19 on your work for you and what do you think the long-term consequences may be?
I do not know, I continue to do what I have to. However, I think of the thousands of elderly people who are leaving this world en masse, making us orphans of a historical memory. I think of the economic repercussions. I think we will only be saved if we continue to have freedom of criticism and expression. Every day I wake up to this buzz.
Davide Sleepy (Udine, 1973)
Sculpture is my practice. I have always worked on the idea of creating structures, supporting, ideals, physical or imaginary due to the intimate need to give a material representation to the resistance, To the load, looking for, in all my work to give lightness to the fight against every form of weight. In my public art works I am interested in monumentality (Poltergeist, 2019) the taking possession of space (Sailors_Monument to the imagination, 2017); in every job, furthermore, a search for meaning appears through reference to issues that are essential for Man (Atlas, 2019). https://davidedormino.com/