Sono io la mano, la piuma, il tronco

He sometimes came to think of him as having different senses and instincts from us. Certainly the constant contact of the tree rinds, the eye attached to the movement of the feathers, to the hair, to the scales, to that range of colors that this appearance of the world presents, and then the green current that circulates like a blood of another world in the veins of the leaves: these borders of the wild in which he had gone so deeply, could now shape his soul.
(Italo Calvino, Il Barone Rampante)

 

Cosimo chose to spend his life in trees. He does not fall because he does not want to fall, he does not come down because he does not want to go down. Suspended between the earth and the sky, in an elastic balance of opposite tensions, the desire for coexistence with the world below remains entangled between the leaves and swings with the wind sets.

 

Texts: Italo Calvino, from Il barone rampante. Mariangela Gualtieri, from Fuoco centrale.
Music: René Aubry, Acid Rain. Brambles, To Speak Of Solitude.
Photograph: Nikoline Schoch