VAGABOND LETTERS | 04.02.24

Performative event featuring Edvige Cecconi Meloni, an epistolary artist with a passion for everything related to paper, correspondence, archives, and diary forms. A sweet afternoon tea dedicated to painting and mapping on the skin of generous spectators, witnesses to an intimate artistic intervention, followed by a dinner where the audience’s doubts and stories blended with the dreamlike worlds of the artist’s research.

Coddled by the crackling of firewood and the aromas of teas from distant lands, participants offered their hands, backs, and legs; in exchange for stories and writings that unfolded like paths through the soul, transforming every touch into a shared journey between the tangible and the intangible.

Clocks ticking at times unpredictable for logic but not for the heart; the lights flickered, leaving us with only the glow of the fireplace.

From a delicate case of colors, maps of the world emerged; deserts, oceans, photographs, drawings… it’s all there, on our skin, if only we know how to ask.

The intrusive love of parents, the seductions and hesitations of friendship and desire, the negotiation of our place in the world.

Young loves too mature, distant fathers, an ABC of our sorrows.

A cartography of life.

What letters taste of sugar on our lips? What words hold our fears?

If you were to ask us what our favorite moment is as curators, we would have to confess that it’s always the magic of the conversations that follow the events, when the guests have left and we remain.

It is there, among the burned and bare branches, where the fading light traces its promises, sealing them to our bodies.

We consider conversation sacred, though it is a dying art.

The pinnacle of our relationship with art.

Edvige smiles.

"As we know, when one loves, they live in melancholy. Time, then, crystallizes everything and frames the moments in some room. So tonight, let us eat bread and melancholy."