three-day painting workshop in conjunction with Codice Italia, the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial

Padiglione Italia
Biennale Arte di Venezia
June 2015

A great three days. I was in a group of sixteen students from fine arts academies across Italy, chosen among hundreds we were told. Under the direction of Neapolitan artist Luigi Caccavale (is that like ‘House of the Horse?’) we carried out projects on the theme of the written word: At what point does a word become a mark, a form inscribed on some kind of surface, a symbol? And what happens to these forms as they are translated across languages and cultures? The ‘Profe‘ insisted on the importance of translation in any and all areas of perception. Everything we takes in comes to us through a filter, nothing exists which does not contain myriad suggestions, glimmering at the surface of our observation, depending on how we translate the signal. I decided to make an unconscious series of hieroglyphs drawn automatically without erasure. I call the figures Tanguy Houseplants.