I went back there yesterday, to Freud Museum, what is it that makes me feel so good there? The richness of the work, the extraordinary labour behind it, the sense of discovery, curiosity, the variety and sheer number of all those heteroclite objects, the rigour, persistence, openness, intelligence, the density of culture, the intensity of a certain knowledge. I don’t know, for the moment. Perhaps quite simply that this house has been a Home, a house of exile, something familiar? Perhaps a passion for human singularity in its universality… Turning lack into a habitable place?
Then I also went to Leake Street Arches, down in the graffiti tunnel, that ever‑changing corridor of colour. What is it that drew me there as well? The rawness of the walls, the overlapping tags and images, the layers of erased and rewritten names, the freedom and law of this authorised graffiti zone, the sense that everything can be repainted at any time. I don’t really know yet. Perhaps simply that, there too, something like a Home appears in the very place of transit, a house under the tracks, a fleeting shelter for what does not quite fit anywhere. Maybe it is the same passion for human singularity in its universality: this collective attempt to turn a leftover, forgotten tunnel into a space that can be inhabited, even if only for the duration of a gesture and a layer of paint….
And maybe that was the same movement again: after the house of exile and the graffiti tunnel, I went to 1901 Arts Club, this house built in 1901 revisited, where yesterday, Alberto L. Ferro, pianist, gathered around a single instrument, leaning over the keyboard, a sound that exists only once and then disappears. A different kind of Home, made of resonance and silence, of breathing and listening. Perhaps it is always the same question that takes me from one place to another: how a human being, with objects, books, walls, paintings, notes, writings, listening, nature, plants or animals, manages to turn lack into a habitable space… learning, discovering… And so on,