One cannot help but begin with the Ferdinandea (which, in Gulino’s work, has become almost a graphic sign—an embedded icon, a coded signature: a small boat with a puff of steam above it), in order to arrive at his “Domus” within the ruined yet evocative space of the Church of the Spasimo. For this time, that millenary sea from which the island re-emerges, as though reabsorbed into primordial magma—the African sea of Pirandello—is the very sea that returns letters that never reached their destination. Envelopes ochre like sand, brown like earth and rust, blue like water; worn envelopes, envelopes with a triangular flap open in the shape of a house—a house as children draw it, with a pointed roof—that Domus which Mediterranean migrants so often seek in vain, but also that Domus which, more broadly, we all seek, often in vain as well. The last, the excluded, the defeated—but not only them. For we are all migrants or— to use Gulino’s own words— we are all clandestine. Clandestine within life itself, in search of a landing place, of an embrace, of a home.
Painted paper, iron, cardboard. Letters sent to bid farewell to one’s homeland before facing the Mediterranean. Letters sent to give news upon arrival. Letters never sent—like those so often found (and this is history) in the pockets of those who did not survive, preserved as their most precious possession, sealed within waterproof envelopes, pressed against the skin.
Letters that almost become part of the ruined belly of the Church of Santo Spirito, the very church that hosts the exhibition like a Domus: they blend into the peeling walls, they enter into dialogue with the precious yet worn majolica tiles of the floor, with the light filtering through the windows (…).
Laura Anello
