Many moons and oceans ago, when I was a small boy, I read a book – a standard children’s adventure, as it were – with a rather standard morality story and standard bad and good characters… The only thing that was truly different was a narrative device: a time machine. A small gizmo looking like a pocket watch: but instead of the winding crown, it had a long, sharp needle… If you were to put this watch in your hand, and press on the needle with your thumb, the time stopped…
It would stay stopped as long as you were willing to continue pressing your finger onto the needle and bleed…
I have so many memories from my childhood that seem absolutely real and solid, – like cartoons I remember watching, or books I remember reading – and yet, when I try to track down these things, I come up empty-handed. I can’t help but think that these memories come from another world, the world that I was able to sneak out into when I was a small child… Over the years this has become a bit of an obsessive idea: did I imagine all this? Did I invent these stories? Did I manage to let my imagination take me outside, through the looking glass?
When I came across this small, weird neighbourhood in Venice, something triggered my memory: I recognized this place, I had most certainly been here before. At first I thought it was just a superficial familiarity to the places I knew as a kid, but as I study these buildings, look at these streets, and walk through courtyards, I am no longer sure…
There are obvious similarities, maybe due to the fact that architectural/urban planning trade has its own epochs, trends and fashions – and this neighbourhood was built at the right time for me to be able to encounter and remember an analog of it – but it seems to me that there must be more.
I am going forward with the notion that it references, somehow, my childhood dreams – or perhaps a memory of a different life. I knew that I needed to record this experience.
