Fantastic of the Shelter. Project for a House of Poetry in the places of Valentino Zeichen

The pandemic that has swept the world has exacerbated the condition of contemporary living, in a time suspended in the perfect dichotomy between hyper-connectedness and self-isolation. The house as a shelter is transformed into a place to stay rather than a place to return to, an enclosure that hybridizes the place of life and that of work, a syncretic element of accumulation of objects and tools of affection. Observed from the place of isolation, the image that the world gives us back is filtered by the means that our altered perception allows us. This image, losing all relationship with matter, sublimates into a horizon in which the senses and the progressive time give way to the imagination and memory of cyclical time. This paradigm of the house as a place of accumulation and fantasy, in balance between John Soane and Piranesi, is perfectly embodied by the hut-house of the poet Valentino Zeichen in Rome. “Nomad by genetic inheritance, but sedentary de facto”, Zeichen lived in perfect balance between these two apparently opposite conditions of precariousness and permanence, from his youth until his death in 2016. A house as a prosthesis of itself, inhabited by books and very few objects of daily use, totally turned inside out and stripped of every superfluous element, in which the poet, as in Thoreau's famous aphorism, defines his richness in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. In 2017, the DiAP and DSDRA departments of Sapienza University of Rome promoted a project for the construction of a House of Poetry in the place inhabited by Zeichen and presented the results at the Biennale Arte 2017 in Venice. The proposal works by subtraction an addition on the now inert matter of a house without any owner, releasing the pages of a dream book into the rarefied space of his imprint. An aviary for verses, which embodies and stages the isolation and the desire for sharing that every artistic operation expresses and yearns for.