To say Absence is to give Presence to that which is removed from Presence.
Absence is a topos of literary relevance, based on the roots of European culture and civilization. The theme of travel is strictly connected to that of separation, of disruption and of the inevitability of making the farewells. The reverse of these feelings is the attempt to neutralize or even annihilate the evidence of severance through a series of stratagems, which are methods that voyagers, travelers, and migrants have perfected over the millennial history of humanity or, individually, during the course of one’s existence. Following the concept of a curatorial project titled “Poetics of Absence” (Dubai, 2017), which premise was based on a number of figures of absence that I then identified as relevant (among them, “The Farewell”, “The Horizon”, “Nostalgia”, “Exile”, “The Sound of Absence”), and ambitioned to collect into a treatise, in my research project I intend to focus on the interconnection of notions of absence, blindness, and camouflage, to be declined into an artistic outcome which will privilege the use of negative space and liminality to explore these very ideas.
