Back in the late ’90s, I followed a rather unusual dance company for a while. I designed their logo, created poster graphics, handled a few stage setups, and helped out with various other things. Occasionally, I also snapped photos during rehearsals and performances. More often than not, I ended the night watching their shows—performances that always left me unsettled.

The choreographer was devoted to research and experimentation, building a personal poetics that intrigued me while also making me deeply uneasy. The leading dancer was often physically impaired, moved awkwardly, or performed in a clumsy way. That clashed with the beauty of the music and the precision of the dance, creating a dissonance that took my breath away.

It was the kind of feeling empathetic people get when someone does something embarrassing. You’re unsure whether to look away, step in to help, or distract others so the awkward moment slips by unnoticed. Or you just want to hide your head in a pillow and wait for it to end.

Somehow, it also took me back to childhood in Naples, walking with my mother—always rushed and worried—past those ground-level openings in old buildings. They were covered with wire mesh, breathing out the smell of moss, mold, and dust. For me, weakness, ugliness, oddity, obscenity, deformity, irritation, clumsiness, rejection—have always carried a strange power. Men with unusual faces, physical irregularities, dwarfs, deformities—all of it repelled me and, at the same time, pulled me in with irresistible force.

Only now do I begin to understand why, despite the discomfort, I stayed glued to my seat and would have watched those scenes again and again. They echoed inside me. It was a missing piece of knowledge I needed: the awareness that there is no poetry, and therefore no art, in perfection. I had to read it in black on white before I could truly grasp it.

For more than two years now, embroidery has been my path into non-control. Into the organic in the Cronenberg sense, into deliberately ignoring what the world asks of me. It is not an easy path, shaped as I am by my planets and my childhood. I struggle to be a neutral channel, able to translate energy into embroidered illustrations while keeping it clean, pure, and uncontaminated. I’ve wrestled with this forever. Especially since, as Elémire Zolla once wrote, “to remain in this state you must have no interests to defend, no fears to soothe, no needs to satisfy.”

My choice to depict nature, unless I’m deliberately seeking the abstract, also comes from this. A plant, an animal, the wind, the sea, the clouds do not chase beauty. They exist, and that is enough. They can be furious, messy, unpredictable, utterly indifferent to anyone’s opinion. Or astonishingly symmetrical, hypnotically perfect—without trying to be, simply because existence itself is enough. As in Borges library . And if it works, it survives and replicates, skipping generations or breaking through with the brute force of desperation.

In the end, this is the only way I can create works that don’t turn against me. Pieces I can look at without hating, that don’t mirror only me, that aren’t narcissistic expressions. Works that give me peace instead of making me so anxious I need to hide or destroy them. What I once only intuited is now before my eyes, printed on my heart, opening new horizons. It’s like standing on a cliff above the sea, finally breathing with full lungs. I expect wonders — along with new challenges.