Drawings (watercolors and/or pencils) + notes, 2020
From left: Mom’s cuddle, dad’s kiss, Stefano’s hug – Out of Memory
The drawings are the documentation of a practice that has touch and proximity at its core.
I pay attention to what gets in contact with my body. Other bodies. Their proximity, the pressure, how this all feels. Holding this contact, I scan the surface between us, defining as many nuances, differences as similarities as possible. It might take a minute, or maybe 10. While listening to the haptic stimuli, the apparently simple task reveals a large scale of emotions. I then draw what I remember of this encounter, I visualize the data I have collected. Every color in the key corresponds to a specific touch and the whole color scheme to a feeling.
I started this practice of analogic “scanning” to deeply focus on physical proximity and to record how the body is in contact and shares a surface with other bodies (human bodies, objects, ..). Like when as children we were placing our hands in the copy machine: the white figures printed were simply the contact points between the glass surface of the apparatus and our body. Since now I am in quarantine, I am now drawing some data visualization out of memory. I try to remember how the kiss of my brother feels, or the cuddle of a loved one. Even the handshake of that new colleague.