Lasciami Stare/Stare Con Me (Redux)
This piece is part of the Tenda Series: Lasciami stare/Stare con me, Redux, Fuga and Halo(Nimbus): These pieces address ideas of the exterior and interior, community and isolation, privacy and surveillance, longing and escapism, and play on the theatrical scrim-like nature of discarded found objects such as curtains and sheets that were salvaged and repurposed in the following manners.
Lasciami Stare/Stare con me - Redux: Cyanotype on cotton sheeting derived from hand-cut textile, 1.5 meters by 4 meters, variable edition of 2. (Courtesy Cade Tompkins Projects). Installation view, Magazzini Notarili Project Space, Tusa, Sicily, 2023 and solo exhibition Accept the Omen, Cade Tompkins Projects, Providence, RI, 2023.
For Redux, the hand-cut textile piece Lasciami stare/stare con me was used as a stencil to create a new iteration of the piece as a cyanotype on antique cotton, Lasciami stare/stare con me: Redux. This is a giant cyanotype photogram, creating the negative of the original, where the negative space becomes blue and the positive remains white.
Lasciami Stare/Stare con me: Hand-cut veranda curtain with text and arabesque botanical motif, installation view, Magazzini Notarili, Tusa, Sicily, 2021, 60x160" (Courtesy Cade Tompkins Projects). Text is cut to be read from both sides - from the front is read Lasciami Stare, from behind is read Stare con me. Lasciami Stare/Stare con me is a hand-cut veranda curtain with text and arabesque botanical motif, measuring 4 meters long. The text is read (boustrophedon-style) from both sides: leave me be/be with me, mimicking the permeable boundaries of ambivalent desires and contradictory longing for isolation and inclusion. I wish to discuss this work and related pieces involving notions of trespass, isolation and confinement, surveillance, privacy, and escape, straddling the boundary between testimony and omertà (a particularly Sicilian code of silence) referencing vernacular stories that reveal themselves in conversation with a series of related works. The balcony curtain creates community while also allowing for societal control as a shield, camouflage, an agent of subterfuge and conspiracy. As a dual-citizen raised between two cultures, dualities of being within and without become a unifying thread in my attempts to understand place via subtle but indelible signs legible by those who are “initiated” in a culture - learning to recognize these is a form of seeking belonging, deep and secret knowledge, a symptom of dislocation.
Here is an excerpt by Sarah Nedir, Architect and Exhibition Designer at the Museum of Art Brut describing the two works (translated from the French):
“An old patio curtain in green and white stripes is completely cut out, the heavy opaque protective fabric becomes a transparent netting. An ornate arabesque design works its way between the vertical lines recalling the art of cut paper practiced in the Pays d’en Haut in Switzerland or even moreso, the decorations adorning Sicilian towns during the feasts, composed of ornate suspended wood lattices painted white that appear like lace on the sky and building facades. Entangled in these flexible leaves and in these rigid vertical bars, letters appear, a first message that winds up in a second sentence linked and unlinked from the first. Two scripts, an injunction, a prayer, an order, the other turning around like a resolution or ouroboros. Lasciami stare/Stare con me, Leave me be/Be with me. The canvas serves as shade, protection, cover, concealment. The canvas is the support which bears this plea to keep one’s distance. In perforating the support, the canvas intended to protect becomes a transparent net. The canvas can do nothing - everything is heard, everything is seen, everything is known.
A blue, blues, those of the sky, of the sea, intense, varied, where waves appear, and we perceive letters that make up a sentence, imprisoned in other letters forming a second sentence. We read it forwards, we read another backwards, mirrored, as if there were an inside and an outside, as if there were a separation that the interlacing defines. This sheet carries a plea that appears in negative, like a secret and intimate message, as if beyond the botanical design, the flowers, the leaves, one discerned intimacies accepted, shared or refused. The laundry sheet exposed to the sun reveals the inner world of intimacy on the outside. Traditionally in Sicily, the bright white of hand-woven sheets is enhanced by adding a powder called azolo to the wash which turns the natural fibers very slightly blue. Azolo is also added to lime and applied to window embrasures to ward off mosquitoes, but often considered a deterrent also for the evil eye or heavy eye. The process used by the artist is that of cyanotype. After having applied a photosensitive mixture to the surface of the white sheet, it is exposed to the sun under the stencil matrix which is the original work, the hand-cut striped canvas. After several minutes the sheet is then rinsed thoroughly with water which brings up the image. The work indirectly refers to the tradition perpetuated by women. Like an echo, the blue of the cyanotype subtly recounts intimate stories of love and labor without completely revealing them.”