Potato from Material Choreographies

The funny thing about Australia, is that the gum trees still grow through the cracks in the concrete.

My Father’s father crossed the vast seas dividing Italy and Australia by boat. When he stood upon deck it was for months at a time that he would stare across the dividing liquid wastelands, crystal blue and lapping at the hull – an expanse that can sink this ship but does not sink this ship. I was raised in a family that loved me. Really, truly, madly, deliriously. So much so that I saw the far reaches of this world, long before I was near old enough to know what they meant. We boarded the ship that would carry us off the coast of Queensland, so we could cruise between the Pacific Islands, I would stand between the hot tubs, or perhaps under the wide screen TV’s, or sink into some forgotten corner of balcony space. I would look out over that same barren wasteland and think how it might be possible that we have as little means of survival at sea as we do in our hot deserts, yet we are fool enough to claim them opposites. My grandfather does not think like this. My mother and I can...

A Brief History of Me

Sometimes I go to the house at the end of the street and sit there for hours, picking at the wallpaper. It flecks off piece by piece and no one knows that I’m the reason why the house looks like that. No one believes that I could have done it. I make tears big enough to walk through. I have no need for them, but I hold them up to the light and watch them flake away from themselves. Weathering around the beams. Soon this will all be nothing but a skeletal structure. A picture of a lifetime. The finest thing you have ever seen . I draw a match to my tiny hairs. I glow in the light, for as long as I can bare it. I couldn’t tell you what’s changed. I couldn’t tell you why instinct says was, instead of is. Why I won’t be beautiful anymore when I’m all glacial and melting. When it misses me. When it comes back to me. It waits in its comfortable silence to see how I will react because it doesn’t want me to be afraid. But I am afraid. And ...

Under Construction

The first time I went through our doors I was carried. The house was then a literal skeletal structure, bare bones, exposed foundations and frames in need of not a fresh coat of paint but every coat. I imagine before I was born there was no end to the similarities that could be drawn between my existence and this house. Possibilities wrapping around the foundations as the skin and cells coiled around my body. Personality and character simmering between the air in the rooms as I slowly became someone within myself, and little revelations in a finger or floorboard allowed us both to slowly take form. Having a baby is a big step. For my parents, I was no longer an idea or a concept, I was a person. They didn’t have any time left to prepare, there was no going back, I was here and I would be for a very long time. Looking around at the house we were in just...

Allegra Pilati

Search This Blog