05 Apr Floating Cities by Umberto Dattola
Some time ago I listened to an interview with Federico Fellini released in the 1960s. He was asked what was the stimulus that most inspired his way of expressing himself and the director replied:
“Perhaps the attempt to resume, to be able to listen again to a discourse that has been interrupted, that little by little has been made with an increasingly weaker voice until the point that I was no longer able to hear… to tend the ears and the heart to something blurred, to something that is almost forgotten“.
It often happens, not only in the hearts of artists, to feel something indefinite. A sort of nostalgia for something that seems like a fuzzy memory, with too blurred contours; something that who knows if it ever existed and never will. Something ideal, desirable for the distant future; a golden place, an invisible city, beautiful and full of light.
I like to think that the object of my nostalgia are perhaps ideal cities, the ones I call Floating Cities, for which I feel a sort of melancholy that makes me remain absorbed for an indefinite time sometimes near a window, enraptured, with a yearning heart.
Already Aristotle wrote a text on the subject, which has come down to us under the title of Melancholy of the Man of Genius, that sort of nostalgia for something elusive, that urge to create in order to try to give a face to an orientation to the beautiful, the just, the meaningful.
Here, my Floating Cities are the representation of that something of which I sometimes, unmotivatedly, feel nostalgia. That something of which I have no memory, ‘that discourse interrupted and made with an ever-weaker voice‘ of Fellini’s memory. They are for me an optimistic vision of the future, an ideal orientation for mankind, on a perpetual journey towards the highest civilisation, that of the golden cities.
Daniele Mencarelli, poet and writer, describes very well what that state of mind is like, which one feels and which always drives one to search:
“I am like a dog inside me that has lost its master, with that nostalgia, as if it had lived with him. And it looks for him everywhere. At certain moments the scent of the master becomes more intense, then everything becomes a loving presence, but they are flashes, burns of light…“
Umberto Dattola