You know that you walk but you do not notice well where. You look to one side, to the other, you stop for a few seconds in front of something and then you continue. This general and permanent way of being constitutes the most extended sense of habit. This is not just a state, but rather a disposition towards a change, engendered by the continuity or repetition of that change. We do not know how we internalize it, or when. The place can be the house, the street, the door that we open every day, an art room. There is a blind memory that allows us to relate to objects. The longer we stay, the more we get used to it, the more invisible things are. The gaze, for example, configures our image of the world, but that image is not only visual, but also substantially bodily, and the body is erect, vertical. The world is then presented at eye level: everything passes from that dimension, to the images, to the pictures on the wall, one by one with a little distance, or half tight like the clothes on the clothes rack in the store . Be that as it may, everything is at our height to distinguish each thing, to rest on differentiation.

One day you get up and feel that you step on the ground to walk. You always stepped on it, only now you feel like you step on it. The usual pace of traffic is modified by obstacles or drawings on the ground. Those marks always were, only now you see them. This permanently makes you doubt. They give you some flashlights to see and you try to spy on some portion of the illuminated, a small spectrum. To de-inhabit is to seek, to highlight the forgetfulness, it is to restore or invent a new look at the things of every day as a signal, a new indication. After this, the walk stopped being on the comfortable plain and began to be an increasingly pronounced slope that makes your body move, that you need your hands to support you or your arms to balance. You notice that the horizon is not a straight line parallel to the line of your two eyes, but a variable on the disposition that the body establishes in-with the space.

Something falls under the bed and you look out with the expectation of seeing that object but in reality you discover a hidden world at ground level, a low-light worldview. When matter is present, not as an element for representation but as an exhibition of its qualities, it requires a specific way of approaching us. From now on, the eye rests on the proximity, on the body that approaches things among an irregular network of almost invisible threads. Then, looking is no longer what is presented to us, but what is sought. A gymnastic gaze exercise that involves a decision on how to position yourself to see. You jump, you crouch, you find yourself in the reflection, you move your head from side to side to try to see an elusive, mobile, variable, unstable image. Materials are tricky, they never give us an image of themselves, rather they return something of their environment, of the context, of their quality, but distorted, discontinuous. Its disposition is to present itself in a prepositional way to the space it inhabits. It expands it at the same time it repeats it: it folds back, unfolds, disperses.

Clarisa Appendino