York

Life of a PhD student can be a little bit annoying from time to time. You spend all day in the library, 7 days a week, you read and you write, then you read and you write... you go for a coffee break or for a lunch, but then you go back to the library and you read and you write, you read and you write. And then you meet a friend and he asks you: how is your research going? And you want to kill him because you really can not think any more about your research and your thesis. You are always unsatisfied of your work. What you write never seems perfect to you, you want it better and better, different, more interesting. You are always so slow in writing and they ask you: how many words did you write today? 

When the frustration is to big you have to take a day off, do something different. You do not want to think about reading and writing and reading and writing, about counting words and about your supervisor who tells you that you have to work harder. 

You have to take a break.

After the first stressful period in Durham I took a break, I went with Lorenzo, Giulio and his friend Gabriele to York. I took my camera because for me taking pictures is the best way to relax myself. Guys were looking at it with jealousy. 

We had fun. We were wondering around the city, I took some pictures, guys took pictures of me taking picutres. 

It was on Sunday so we went also for a compulsory Sunday roast. We visited a very interesting exhibition at York Art Gallery: William Etty: Art and Controversy. I think we will never forget it... 

It was a perfect break! On our way back we were almost missing the library, our books and thesis. 

York, 2011.

Ruins

Every revival in visual arts starts with the cult of ruins.
Ruins are physical remains, traces of the past, tangible proofs of others activity. That is why they seam so concrete and real. At the same time every ruin contains a lack. It is never complete, full. Thanks to this lack a ruin is open to one's imagination, interpretation. It invites to write its history, to build a discourse around it.
Ruin has to be completed by somebody's creativity, it has to be actualized by it.
This is also why revivals are never repetition of the past. Renaissance art is different than ancient art, Gothic revival in England did not bring to the Middle Ages once again.

There is something fascinating in a ruin. It is so easy to mythologize it, to describe it attributing  to the past all the qualities that we fell missing in our present reality.

Looking at the English ruins I was thinking about romantic poets, writers and artists who were wondering between those rocks and dreaming about the return to social solidarity of Middle Ages, about the mystery of Gothic cathedrals and the beauty of true faith.

Poetry of a ruin, York 2011.