It was quite a great stroke of luck that I decided to go against the grain and start my expedition through the Giardini in the opposite direction as the majority of the group, for it was in this manner that I stumbled upon the Dannish exhibition first. (In all truthfulness this may have been a bad idea as it gave me high hopes for the rest of the show… but I think it was good that I saw it with the openest mind in the most curious of moods.)

As I walked in, the first piece of the work that I came across gave my heart a lurch. The words “I will never see you AGAIN!!!” written on a mirror with flowers under them struck my subconscious as if to lament someone deceased or perhaps the death of something more metaphorical. To be honest, my first thoughts were of the metaphorical death that happens in a loss of friendship. It’s quite funny how human nature grants us the need to connect disjunctive things in the pursuit of finding commonality. I just lost a good friend who I really loved, and therefore everything I think seems somehow to be connected to her. Yet perhaps this is part of the purpose of modern art at least, to forge meaning without necessary conscious intention. In any case, it soon came clear to me as I walked the rest of the exhibit that the theme more generally spoke of the loss of home, a concept which touched me just as nearly.

The next room, even at first glance, was quite captivating. The things which caught my attention most were the large table in the center of the room and the framed signs on the wall. This room specifically exuded a violent loss of solidity, perhaps best captured in the expression ‘broken home.’ At closer glance the framed signs on the wall could easily be identified as signs of desperation, signs of homeless people in dire situations. Some of them had families to feed and no money. Others simply had no direction. The worst off were starving as they wrote. It was hard for me not to shed some tears as I read these. All I could do was imagine the real people who had written these and where they probably were now. Maybe some of them found work and food, but in all likelihood the majority of them never found home again. Too hard. The table in the center of the room, which had a jagged separation down the center, confirmed the metaphor.

While the next room didn’t captivate me nearly as much at the time, I now think I understand some of its significance. This room was dark and had couches creating a perimeter around what appeared to be a children’s show playing on a small TV. I’m not sure of what language it was in, but the subtitles in English, at one point anyway, seemed to describe a child’s perception of his or her mother’s hypocrisy. Here the mother was conforming to a stereotypical gender role (it showed her on the screen talking to a Muppetish sort of creature stereotypically dressed as a stay-at-home mother) even while the subtitles portrayed her to be a women’s rights activist. I believe the general message was that through betrayal of ideals, however small, one can often loose faith in ones role models, and this, in many senses, is also a loss of home, for the solidity of one’s family is often very much determined by the solidity of one’s trust in the ideals of the family.

The last room I visited struck me just as hard as the first. There was a large broken staircase, books and documents strew around, and a small coffee table in the center with tall seats on either side and a large book in the middle. Under closer inspection it became clear that the book was a photo album of sorts. Each page had one Polaroid picture pasted onto it of something mundane, yet eerily nostalgic. With each turn of the page I felt more and more connected to each subject and place. I can’t say why exactly, it just hit me this way. I think the beauty of this piece came from its sadness. For me there’s always something wrenching in nostalgia for memories past even if they aren’t yours, for they, like innocence and the literal walls of your house, can hardly ever be reclaimed once they are gone. This got me thinking about memory as a physical part of yourself, and how much belonging factors into fondness of the moment, and of the past when you belonged. I’m realizing more and more that the places I miss most, the many places I call home, don’t really exist anymore. They had more to do with how I belonged in the family of people than in the place, and those dynamics, those fleeting collections of social togetherness, will never truly come again.

As I walked out of the exhibit and looked at the mirror one more time, I realized that this was the entrance and exit piece of the work for a reason; in looking at my own reflection and reading the words “I will never see you AGAIN!!!” it became clear that I was loosing images of myself with every moment that passed! Or perhaps I was loosing moments of myself with every image that passed… Either way, that’s definitely not to say that I don’t have moments left to gain. In fact, I would assume that I have the majority of my moments left to gain as I have that much of my life ahead of me. When it comes down to it, we’re all loosing and gaining parts of ourselves with every moment; change is a constant. It’s just that the bigger losses, the losses of the places where we feel we belong, are never truly lost! Because of their emotional importance to us, they act as markers, monuments, and descriptors in the greater portraits of ourselves. And thusly, my many homes are my many selves.

-Tyler Centanni