One of my favorite moments in working with embroidery is when I take the pieces out of the washing machine. I hang them out in the fresh air, on the terrace, on their sturdy hemp cords. Without soaps or softeners, natural fabrics have a dry, bare scent. A dear friend of mine often says they smell like pepper.
I’ve shifted again. After the three small archipelago embroideries I told you about last time, I felt the urge to work on something bigger again, after the cloud and the wind. I remembered a pastel drawing I made in Rome back in 1997, when I was attending one of the very first Italian web agencies, the legendary Uhuru.
The drawing portrayed a giraffe in a fetal position, as if in the womb, almost life-sized, on a sheet of tracing paper. It covered an entire wall. Then life became more complicated than it already was. I stopped going to the studio, which changed locations several times. The fragile work was lost in the chaos of moves and the agency’s history.
That image stayed with me, and when a few months ago I came across a stunning photograph from a video showing an elephant fetus in the womb, the idea of embroidering it on a large sheet began to take root in me, surfacing in early October.
Working on such a large scale is exciting. It forces me to face my limits in so many ways. And it teaches me to silence my mind—the part that judges what I do, weighs me down, demands constant attention. The mind is passive-aggressive; it must be tamed, it must know who leads the herd, or it will devour you at the first chance.
All this to say that a few days ago, while I was immersed in my threads, I finally understood the warning that the boy gives Neo in the Oracle’s waiting room: “Don’t try to bend the spoon. It is impossible. Instead, try to get to the truth: the spoon does not exist. Then you will realize that it is not the spoon that bends, but you yourself.”
As I wrote nearly two decades ago in my thesis at IED, it’s up to me alone to bypass the mind. Only by doing so can I become a channel for the purest, most selfless energy and open the door to the vast field of the possible—where magic is real, tangible, quantum. That’s it.
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