WALKWAY stems from a continuous relationship, dialogue and exchange between inside and outside, between the intimate world and the environment, between man and nature, between existential experience and natural cycles, with particular attention to ancestral symbologies and spiritual archetypes that connect man to the magic forces of natural world since ancient times. Usually my landscape artworks proceed through the reworking of natural and recycled materials that I personally collect through a performative act. Through the Humanimal Community Art Projects residency, for the first time, I had the opportunity to interact directly and in creative way with the animals, and in particular with dogs, for a long period of time. It has been an occasion to establish an intimate contact with the labradors rooming free around the residency; and it was surprising because I was a little scared at the beginning…because I am more familiar with cats.. However the 100 Labradors and Golden around me won my sympathy. I let myself go when some of them constantly approached me with curiosity and affect. They choose to accompany me for all the process of the artworks. Following me with affect and protection as close friends; and this is visible from the following photos (see the Humanimal Art Project Website). The result of this intimate bond is the installation ”Walkway”. It is a sort of wooden platform built with recycled wooden elements recovered by the waste material of the Labrador breeding. I painted these broken or almost broken wooden structures with white color to neutralise their appearance as ordinary objects an turn them in abstract forms; then I have inserted them in a naturalistic landscape at the outskirt of the residency to form a white walkaway. One of the dogs has interacted (golden retriever Aria ) with the structure as if in performance. Walkaway is an environmental intervention stylistically and chromatically close to all my artistic research that is oriented to a spiritualised classic and minimalistic nature; a series of photos and a short video were taken from the sky. The images portray the dog interacting freely in the yellow field in which the white catwalk is inserted. The dog look like a living drop of white detached from the structure. The idea was to create an image from the sky to catch this assemblage of installation and performance in a sort of abstract painting with fields of color in tension and harmony.

The aesthetic rendering of the intervention is close to minimal art due to the conciseness of the shapes and colors but the resulting images carry strong symbolic messages tied to our existence enfolded into enigmas. The walkway indicates precisely the passage from one point to another, as a bridge of sense in the mystery of life. In this suspended scene, a dog emerges to accompany the human path as a guide, a personal friend and “companion species”. Numerous qualities and feelings are associated with the figure of the dog. These range from the most total loyalty to the most profound friendship (think of the dog Argo from Greek mythology who recognized his master Ulysses after an absence of twenty years, when no one had recognized him). During the residency I have observed how dogs live in symbiosis with humans. I was able to see and feel the immediate affective exchange that passes between two living beings. With walkaway I want to bring out the importance of the dog as companion in the “existential journey of our fragile and ambiguous presence”. Man and dog walk on the same walkaway, as inhabitants of the same mysterious destination.