October 2023 (copy pasted from www.danieleformica.hotglue.me)

Hello, I am Daniele Formica and this is my most recent website (October 2023) made with hotglue in October 2023.

 

First of all, I have been hesitant and pondering about weather a website is necessary to link to my self, work, practice, art, thinking, questioning, feeling, living, performing, etc... The website- as an idea, image, praxis and phenomenon, etc. - very spontaneously has been manifesting into my life (or I have ex-perienced it).

The practical question is: what do I want from it?

 

I do not know. I feel like I am throwing stones at the wind, perform talking about trees throughout the crisis, open myself to interpretation, questioning, dancing, improvisation and most importantly in a conversation with YOU, the other -I simply cannot perform alone (even if you may think that my operating resembles a self-love monologue), let alone leaving you with a website that is formally unravelling in front of your subjecting eyes. Arrogant, you say? I do not mean to stand out, but stand within. I want us to get naked. I could be the creepy guy sitting in the bench scribbling nonsense as you bike home from your busy work shift. Would you fear me then? Would I be invisible then? Yet isn't a website also a lonely bench in the stream of public operating, a bench with some graffiti and an empty paper cup and cigarette butts and perhaps a tin can or what else. Isn't a website this latent space, this empty space for most of the time, where somehow you ended up and all of the sudden this insignificance around you, totally alienated from your life -litteraly in-significant-- now this is proximal and you seem to become aware of it, maybe a little grossed out, or ignorant, or what else. Possibilities. Perhaps you came to this bench willingly, perhaps you wanted to find some answers here. Probably you are looking for me, probably you do not know me, you are trying to get in contact with me. Is this the place where I should leave you a way to find me? I think it is much more fun to let this part open. To let it all open.

 

All that this small verbal delirium is trying to say is: I do not know what I want from the website, and knowing what I would want from it would make my life surely a little more enslaved in automatic operating. And as I keep on pouring out improvised streams of thoughts and feelings on this typing mechanism> you get to know a part of me a little better. Of course perhaps you came here looking for something else. I have tried to be generous, I try to be generous, but also I fear I often tend to overwhelm others, and among all of them myself.

 

It is a process that is opening, disintegrating, decaying, liquefying. I hope we can meet in the middle, even if the middle keeps on moving.

Daniele Formica, Wednesday 18 Oct 2023, 15:43, The Hague

(April 2023) The Person is a prison.
I hide and imprison myself in a room for the most of my time, and I hate it. But I am also very afraid to step out and be completely torn apart. Yet sometimes I can't resist curiosity, or my libido, and I do step out, and I do get torn apart, and eventually I come back in my prison and heal. Sometimes I invite others to my prison, sometimes they ask to visit me out of their own will -which is very heartwarming.

The spectral precision of the universe (April 2022):

 

Artworks can, like magical portals, bridge the different epistemic preparation of people in the world (and in the world moving through time!!!) connecting cultures, points of view and experiences down to a single encounter between spectated and spectator. This open ontological conversation moves even beyond the limits of humanity’s self-rhetoric historicism, beyond in a way that the spirit prepares itself to and the body walks away from.

 

Such preparation for a threshold is something I call ‘The spectral precision of the universe’ and let me introduce it in this way:

 

You have a fireplace that is the artwork. The fireplace lives on also when the fire is extinguished -its ashes lie in wait until the fire is lit again (Ember and remember are connected by the blow).

You could say that a spectator is a gravitational center for points of view –actor of many scripts, but mirror of one vision. A stimulated and open spectator has probably more than one point of view orbiting around a quasi-stable nucleus that is their persona.

Furthermore, spectatorship is connected to the mirroring of light: you can have spectators that do not spectate the radiant direct source of light, yet still reflect it from other spectators or speculative sources.

 

This kaleidoscopic crystalline architecture of the epistemic spectacle mirrors the medieval theology of dispersion of the light of god, where god connects to truth and thus proximity to light means proximity to truth. Actors as mirrors take part in the psychedelic rainbow of truth. Void of power is created when actors pretends to behold the truth: because truth, like light, cannot be held, but only absorbed and reflected. There are spectra for light. There is warm light and cold light, the difference between stars and laptop screens. We measure time with light. Fire is our source of light at night. Night is the shadow cast by the sun. Zoroastrianism connects fire with truth. Alchemy encrypts the cult of fire. Prometheus stole the fire and Zeus condemned humanity. Enlightenment condemns the church that is void -holds everything but the truth, by casting the fulgurating lighting of natural sciences. St. Francis, Bruno and Bacon are their shining predecessors. Nature is proximity to god. Nature is zoe. Science and religion are bios. Nature is wild. This wilderness has darkness that is zoe, that is romantic. And Bruno is burnt in Campo dei Fiori because he is close to the light, but surrounded by darkness.

Like Daniel in the lion pit: spectatorship requires a certain level of vulnerability, as spectating means reflecting some of light’s spectra.

 

You are not producing light and you are not only absorbing it.

And remember this: if you are reflecting it, you are partly made of glass. You are partly fragile.

What is seen is divided in species.

A being of darkness is not a spectator but a sponge. It is more absorbent than reflective, ending the spectrum with a black hole -where light goes in and nothing gets out. Light goes only forward, and no more must be said. Nothing. Dark beasts are invisible when surrounded by the light. But darkness and light are not at fight, nor in conversation either. To some myths darkness, Nyx, was first. To some others the light egg hatched in an explosion of life. Science insists on giving measures to the narrative, so we call them white holes and they are only hypothetical, because light cannot get in them. Light cannot go backward; light goes only forward. The sun grows stronger in the cruelest month, and life follows behind its radiant light. Some actors question, some actors teach, but only spectators know when to do which one of the two.

Specificity is the law of light. Specificity is the law upon us: me and you. In(ti)mates. Passengers. Encounters. Crushers. Incidents. Those who move the light second by second, breath by breath, ember by ember, blow by blow. Specificity matters to the lenses that are used to bend the light. Zooming in, zooming out.

Specificity makes specimens special.

 

And specialty by specialty the spectacle looms over,

always forward and violently forward

–seeing is necessary and justice is blind.

Only justice is truly blind:

The spirit deals the blow and the spectre disappears.

 

The only one who knows this ounce of words is just a token, is he who has a ton to tell that must remain unspoken. ET VERBUM CARO FACTUM EST. 22 02 2022: Si chiede tutto alla polvere e ai vortici di vento, e la domanda è l’unico conforto -che forse in queste dannate danze ci si trovino risposte. Ma si domanda non perché si deve, ma perche si è. Si è e ci si sente chiamare. Chiamare a ululati, a sospiri, a mormorii. Ci si sente chiamare e si va, si va e si parte verso I vortici di polvere. Si naviga e si naufraga in tempeste fatali, dove uno manco sa se è più polvere o più vento. Persi cosi col tempo, tempo che è anche spazio, che è anche punti e punti che sono anche stelle, le stelle stesse che brillano sui campi come un tempo hanno brillato anche le lucciole: si campa. Le lucciole hanno campato, le stelle campano, ed I punti anche camperanno poco o a lungo. Ed in questo campare ci si trova a disegnarsi solchi spaziali, arature come autoritratti, automati-ritratti, o come sepolcri, o semine. Si sotterra e si va, si guarda solo avanti. Si va solcando passaggi di ombre come autostrade, e le ombre sono la, ma nessuno deve guardarle. Si seppelliscono i figli come i chicchi di grano. Si stendono coperte di polvere sui campi e si lascia che il vento le faccia danzare. Il futuro è l’antitempo e la storia un castello di polvere. Per noi che nei castelli ci troviamo solo sepolture, per noi che vaghiamo persi nei vortici, quando il vento ci danza incontro con violenza fatale, quando ci si sente debellarsi in ogni contraria direzione, allora forse si è quasi certi di esser vivi. E si dona al vento un ultimo respiro, come sopra-vissuti, come naufraghi e vivi: granelli di polvere che danzano, coi vortici davanti e i solchi dietro. (ENGLISH TRANSLATION, ad litteram) You ask everything of dust and vortices of wind, and your question is the only comfort –that perhaps in these damned dances you would find answers. But you demand not because you must, but because you are. You are and you are feeling called. Called by howls, by whispers, by murmurs. You feel called and you go, you go and you depart towards the vortices of dust. You navigate and you shipwreck in fatal storms, where one can’t even tell whether they’re dust or wind. Lost as such with time, time that is also space, that is also points and points that are also starts, the same stars that shine upon the fields, as once upon a time had shone the fireflies: you get by. The fireflies have gotten by, the stars get by, and even points will get by for a short or long while. And in this getting by you find yourself drawing spatial grooves, ploughings as self-portraits, automated-retracted, or as sepulchres, or sowings. You bury and you go, looking only ahead. You go grooving passages of shadows like highways, and the shadows are there, but no one must look at them. You bury children like grains of wheat. You lay blankets of dust upon the fields and you let the wind having them dancing. The future is the anti-time and history is a castle of dust. For us that in castle find only burials, for us that wander lost in the vortices, when the wind dances against us with fatal violence, when we feel smashed in every opposite direction, then perhaps we are almost certain of being alive. And we gift to the wind a last breath, like sur-vivors, like castaways and livings: dancing grains of dust, with vortices ahead and grooves behind. “Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβνλλα τί ϴέλεις; respondebat illa: άπο ϴανεΐν ϴέλω.” Was sind das für Zeiten, wo Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist. Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt! E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle. August 2021: Daniele Formica develops a repertoire of poetic claims and schizophrenic theories on the universe and its people by combining cross-disciplinary knowledge with empirical occurrences. By forming and performing art Formica extends his repertoire, translating it and involving others in such movements. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am drawn towards the realm of the ephemeral, ethereal, metaphysic, epistemic, empyrean and mythic. This urges me to comprehend literature, mythology, philosophy, epistemology, human and natural sciences outside political academic restraints. I ultimately seek meaningful shelters for my existence, and in doing so I contribute meanings and perspectives to the existence of the other. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Art is my existential metabolism and the common I forward. Thus, I imagine, realize and perform forms that expel my abstract thinking and place it within the currents of time. To do this I must study content and simultaneously research mediums, techniques and materials that can contain it in the empirical realm. The works become vessels imbued with poetry, imaginary philosophy and addictive curiosity. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Art is an exercise of stumble, a careful expression in the least conventional way. Placed within worldliness and empyrean, artists share the urgency of those interpreting their existence. There is a veil to lift from the surface of things: art discovers, and things bear a new essence. May 2021: Daniele Formica’s work comes from the impulse to internalize and re-propose the universe to its people. Combining cross-disciplinary knowledge and everyday banality he composes a repertoire of linguistic revelations, schizophrenic theories and poetic claims. Through sculpture and performance, Daniele orbits around his repertoire and involves others in such movement. <<It often begins with the unsettling feeling of being about to discover something. Intuitions, whims, delusions and realizations are everyday experienced with reason and emotion. They are encounters with the universal unexplainable that keeps calling for my curiosity, seducing my manic imagination. This can happen banally, like suddenly realizing that my dead skin particles are still on my clothes when I don’t wear them; or be very elaborate, like suspecting that the mythical qualities of bay leaf aren’t only historical fiction, but consistent anthropogenic alterations to the essence of the plant itself. As soon as it starts calling, the sculptural process begins. To sculpt is to transform those realizations into physical matter, attempting to breach the gap between the universe’ empirical and epistemological dimensions. First of all, the sculptural gesture has to transpire immediacy. Immediacy is the direct transcendence of a manic thought into form; not that I want to perform impulsivity, but rather aim for transparency in the forms around me. Transparency, comparable to clarity in the thought process, is obtained when a sculptural gesture is as close as possible to its original intuition. With and for immediacy, practicing sculpture explores and stretches the limits of transformation. Sizes, mediums and dimensions are specifically chosen and accordingly change. Transformation comes together with an obsession for a material and form epistemic background. (as philosophy, art and science grow older; the knowledge around materials, forms and phenomena also grows vaster). Combining subjective (memory, friends and acquaintances) and objective data-banks, my research schizophrenically juxtaposes all sort of references to satisfy my thirst for knowledge and comprehend the intrinsic existence of my physical surroundings. This research makes it so that traces of any episteme are found in the work, and a specific sculpture consists of a specific cluster and amalgam of multidisciplinary knowledge. With the work founded upon immediacy and transformation, sculpting is experienced through its sensorial, emotional, linguistic and epistemic registers. Handwriting, drawing, cutting, sewing, molding, appropriation, selection of ready-made, painting and photography are found to behold such principles. The sole restriction to the sculptural process is then its proximity to the body, bodily proportions and measures. The repertoire can be seen as an ongoing process that manifests as an extension of the conscious, a physical re/construction of the mind. I poetically approach it as a cosmological phenomenon to underline its universal motion and its transcendental nature. As music scores, I repeat sculptural processes and interpret new aspects from their registers. As compositions, series of works and processes are selected and combined in installations to test different constellations of a thought or new possibilities of an older intuition. Through this installing process works often happen to be repurposed and revisited to stretch even further their transformative potential. Performance comes with a whole new element added to the repertoire: the vulnerable declamation, when I publicly reveal a part of the repertoire and demonstrate it to the audience. It is vulnerable because the repertoire is undressed of its physical shells –and so am I, as its medium. It is a declamation because I publicly speak out excerpts of the repertoire. The repertoire, as of today, does not exist in written text form, but only in its transcendental form (I believe writing the repertoire can be very harmful for its autonomous life). This is to say that my performances are never scripted and that all that comes out of my mouth has never been read, only spoken and heard. When I rehearse, I therefore have to dive into my mind (while still keeping control of my body) to drag to the surface the neural pathways containing the required cluster of knowledge. It is not farfetched to say that one performance happens on the outside -in the real- and one performance happens on the inside, through the brain electric impulses and their metaphysical projections. This is why I speak of the conscious action of orbiting. Adopting a natural and comforting attitude and an explicative language, I take the audience by the hand to flow together through the open repertoire. In doing so we think together and draw our own meanings, experiencing our human condition of floating in an ever expanding universe somewhere between the stars and the nervous system. Sometimes this metaphysical dimension is also literally part of the work, like in “The Death of The Death of The Death of BILL” (2019) where particles of my sweat and dead skin are paradoxically sealed alongside my yellow tracksuit; sometimes it is conveyed in the narrative, like in “A chair walks into a house” (2019), where through my voice 7 inanimate IKEA Gunde chairs are transformed into travellers, explorers, invaders, dictators and revolutionaries of domestic social furniture environments; and sometimes it is a combination of both, see “A comedy for 3 Dantes” (2020) where 3 humans wearing red capes and caricaturist noses perform a series of improvised conversations and through absurdity, paradox, theatre and poetry, they attempt to incarnate Dante himself. >> Formica’s repertoire is ultimately composed with the intention to share his passionate perception of a multi-layered and polidimensional universe; and played for other humans to cultivate genuine curiosity for a life embedded in the occurrence of space-time; with the awareness that to contemplate is to set in motion new possibilities of the universe’ revolution.  January 2020: To discover something is to work frenetically in the hope of ending with a stumble. The stumble is that unexpected link twisting the whole equation. Art is an exercise of stumble, a study of discovery in the least conventional way. I particularly like the idea of stumbling upon something so enlightening to be unbearable and so banal to be almost invisible. Banality is the veil to lift from the surface of things: art discovers, and things bear a new essence. My practice is an ongoing discovery of the relations between tangible and intangible things. My studio is a private exhibition and continuous experiment of such relations: objects and references, drawings, writings, sculptures, placements, materials, readings, prints and leftovers are polymers that I link, combine, de-structure, order and reorder according to my intuition in composing a vision of the world. This process of manipulation of both tangible and intangible matter is a sort of alchemical, semiotic and physical reconfiguration of some segments from reality. I would then ultimately define my practice as an act of sculpting: the exhibited is the tool, the sculpted is the occult and the sculpture is the link. December 2019: Daniele Formica is fantasizing about being himself. He is three hours and a half of means of transport away from where he was himself the first time. He believes he enjoys reading the space-time bubble delineated by the limits of his perception –reality. He thinks of such space-time bubble as a role play game, a chessboard, assemblage of Lego bricks or a huge all-swallowing titanic monster (when he feels sad). This makes him feel powerful. He also is sure that there is something too healthy and sweet going on in the playground, something that got into all the children, he included. Practicing art is for Daniele Formica both diagnosing playgrounds and performing prescriptions. He is also a researcher, testing different methodologies in different playgrounds. Daniele Formica is now dwelling upon the performative necessities of being an artist, thinking of himself as a transformative energy-and-matter-forming entity encrypted in a body and mediating with the outside through a consciousness. August 2019: To find the most pondered madness, I travel through language' infinite realms. To twist the eye and bend the pupil, I deal out broken lenses and revolting orbits. Like omelets, coins, or medals, I work to flip the beds where we sleep at night: everything will be topsy-turvy, maybe annoying, disturbing, infantile, or provocative... but at least we'll have something to talk about. As an overexcited reader of reality, I read its text to the limits of interpretation. As a fool semiotician, I drench readings with references and associations. As a romantic linguist, I dance with language and its formulation: emancipated from rigid orders, erupting free in the realm of the world, crystallized in the nest of visual arts. Critic of practice and practitioner of critique, I cannot but keep reinventing my labour, questioning its ecological network and the positioning of its outcomes. Such outcomes are then always temporary resolutions for contemporary provocations. It follows that mediums change according to circumstance: I was ant farming in May 2018, serving food on a toy road in January 2019, humanizing an IKEA GUNDE chair during Easter Day later that year, and ending up realizing that a huge entity exists parallel to me and is made of all of my bodily leftovers -from particles of sweat to dead skin- that I have been spreading around since birth. (I then trapped a small amount of this entity -visible through the vessel of a yellow suit- with plastic seals, and began analysing its physical and metaphysical existential structure. I decided to give the entity an identity, identifying it with the name of BILL.) I like to call my provocative yet intellectual yet hypocritical attitude: “Don Quixote Activism”. This can be taken as a tribute to the fools and a standpoint against the righteous, a subtle strategy to subvert power, a subterfuge to defend the deep Daniele, or maybe just some stuff that lives better if left un-enunciated. March 2018: My biggest concern is to research upon the mechanisms of encountering, perceiving and understanding occurring reality. By occurring reality, I mean an instance of reality taking place, therefore connecting to a future becoming present state, becoming the eye’ and mind’s view. The mechanisms of encountering, perceiving and understanding are three temporal instances of the action of “seeing”. Seeing is hereby intended both in a physical sense (gazing, the view) and metaphorically (understanding, the reason,). The act of seeing is human in itself: • It is connected to embodied cultural capital through experience (habitus) • it proceeds by the re-discovery of recognizable signifiers (therefore the information is read and combined only according to the composition of such signifiers) • it is constituted of and therefore structured by a language (system of reference, set of values, relational algorithms) Researching seeing means fragmenting it in parts and recomposing its wholeness. The first division within my practice finds the three instances of seeing: encounter, perception and reflection. There is something in seeing essential to magic and madness. Materials or objects manipulated in a certain way can induce the subject to reason combining different pathways in the language of seeing. Somehow all the elements needed in order to read occurring reality seems always to be at human disposal, at all times, and developing phenomenologically side by side with the subject. At the same time all that is not present in the language of seeing simply cannot be seen. Subject and object, observer and observed, perceiver and percept, thinker and thought, are not so easily distinguishable outside the limits of a timeframe. They both have an active and passive nature. The subject is active in producing, looking, thinking, perceiving the object. The object is active in shaping the language of seeing, in dictating how the subject will approach it. (Think of a fork, there are a many forks in my possession, yet every time I eat outside or at a friend’s house, their forks I will use and not mine. It is a given of the fork). I want to confute and reassert the acts of encountering, perceiving and understanding. If there is a problematic, I want to expand the field in which such problematic and the subject of it are placed. My works are combination of weird processes and recognizable products. Or vice versa. Or in between. The importance is in the insertion of hooks for the combination of different planes and languages of seeing. With my writings and publications, I create a framework and expand the discourse upon the essence and function of my works. It is therefore not about the works themselves, but about how they are approached, what happens in that encounter, perception and understanding between subject and object. These are the major aspects which compose my degree of engagement, an engagement very much eradicated in the research of manifestation and transmission of culture and experience. My hyper-criticality induces me in a limbo state between a Cartesian doubt, a prominent arrogance and the annihilation of knowledge. To sum up everything, I would say my practice is a sort of Don Quixote Activism: a nonsensical yet committed fight for the celebration of magic and madness in existence.  October 2017: STATEMENT MADE OF STATEMENTS ON AUTHORSHIP, THE SELF If autobiographical is the voluntary narration of the history of the self, my work is not autobiographical. If subjectivity is an arbitrary position taken by the author, I am unaware of being subjective. If the self is what makes work, practice, and labor “my own”, I try to remove myself from my practice. The necessity of a definition of “own practice” is linked to the identification of the author. The author is aware to be seen as an identity, and this identity is necessarily a reduction of knowledge. The author is aware as a container, keeper of knowledge. The author is aware as a producer, researcher of knowledge. To define “own practice”, I start with defining just “practice”. It is a motion, a constant exchange of information, a cycle, a dialogue. Inwards: the zeitgeist penetrates me. Outwards: the zeitgeist manifests through me. “My own” in “practice” is me, the self. Self is microcosms and zeitgeist is macrocosms. Trying to remove myself from my practice postulates the self-manifestation of the zeitgeist. It seems most likely absurd and impossible, superb and hypocrite, and tremendously stupid to deny to art the notion of self, since this, first of all, is a decision committed by the self. This is a deliberate attempt to criticize the individualist perspective connected to the commodification of the author and the capitalization of art. The author is a necessity. The basic direction I believe should be taken is towards absolutes systems that disregard the notion of authorship, the investigation is directed beyond a limited identity. The fundamental matter in this discourse is the notion of awareness, to be aware of the self and to be unaware of being aware of it, and so on… Artistic labor includes all sorts of activities that are obviously initiated, directed and executed by selves, but in an overview these selves tend to blur together. The gaze makes the self. A persona is a prospective of another persona, we are never one but many. I am a tool that does not belong. I am a medium between same poles. I am always myself, an ignorant of the self. May 2017: I like to think that my expression relies on getting constantly distracted. Distraction as a way of thinking, applied thought and materialized ideas. Earlier today I put colourful candies and a cinnamon stick inside a tapper wear, and left the lid on the side with a small bended metal bar on top. Now I am feeling frustrated because I cannot find the reason of this action. Or better what did I want to communicate? Now step by step. This tapper wear has been with me for a long time, I used to put my tobacco filters and rolling papers inside, to bring them to school. I used to call it “packed lunch” even though there was nothing to eat. The cinnamon stick was belonging to an old collection left inside the big moving box in my studio, and rested there for half a year untouched, then suddenly one day I decided to give some air to my collection of cinnamon sticks and realized they had been there with me the whole time. Now the candies. These candies were just placed on the shelf of a shop in town, and their colourfulness attracted me, so I decided to buy them (approximately a week ago) and bring them to my studio. What about the metal bar? I did not know I had it and today I have found it among my things, nearby a pink rope. Tapper wear, cinnamon stick, candies and metal bar. Strangers to each other, that share a common denominator: me (The bastard who decided to put them together). Now from being separate entities that never met (except maybe for the potential of cinnamon and candies in a strange cake) they became a group of friends, close one another, unable to move. Maybe damned to be unnoticed for the rest of their existence together, as four simple elements that stood side by side for a period of time. The smile of a spoiled child, the sweet smell of a spice, the precariousness of a thin metal and the failed preservation of an opened box. Each element has meaning in the associations formulated with the language, where we can swim around contents and produce messages. Therefore, these four elements alone are a sum of associations based on the individual experience of each of them. Wittgenstein says in the “Tractatus logico-philosophicus”: Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connection with other things. Seeing something is like composing a symphony, creating a puzzle. An object communicates in relation to others. We never conceive only something, but its relations with many things. Experience therefore plays a big role in associating This could be enough to elaborate on the existence of these four entities, but still I wonder where the act of relating them to each other comes from. I like to think it as a distraction, as a frivolous way of creating a combination of the smallest nonsensical actions. A distraction from life, about life. I think of the book by Robert Creeley “Was that a real poem or did you just make it up yourself?”. Is there any distinction between making something up and writing a real poem? I wonder whether the lightness in the intention would arm the value of a final result. It is poetic though to value best the most frivolous things. Therefore, the spirit, the soul, spread out almost unconsciously, unnoticed every time, and leave something to be experienced.

Daniele Formica
The only one who knows this ounce of words is just a token, is he who has a ton to tell that must remain unspoken. ET VERBUM CARO FACTUM EST. 22 02 2022: Si chiede tutto alla polvere e ai vortici di vento, e la domanda è l’unico conforto -che forse in queste dannate danze ci si trovino risposte. Ma si domanda non perché si deve, ma perche si è. Si è e ci si sente chiamare. Chiamare a ululati, a sospiri, a mormorii. Ci si sente chiamare e si va, si va e si parte verso I vortici di polvere. Si naviga e si naufraga in tempeste fatali, dove uno manco sa se è più polvere o più vento. Persi cosi col tempo, tempo che è anche spazio, che è anche punti e punti che sono anche stelle, le stelle stesse che brillano sui campi come un tempo hanno brillato anche le lucciole: si campa. Le lucciole hanno campato, le stelle campano, ed I punti anche camperanno poco o a lungo. Ed in questo campare ci si trova a disegnarsi solchi spaziali, arature come autoritratti, automati-ritratti, o come sepolcri, o semine. Si sotterra e si va, si guarda solo avanti. Si va solcando passaggi di ombre come autostrade, e le ombre sono la, ma nessuno deve guardarle. Si seppelliscono i figli come i chicchi di grano. Si stendono coperte di polvere sui campi e si lascia che il vento le faccia danzare. Il futuro è l’antitempo e la storia un castello di polvere. Per noi che nei castelli ci troviamo solo sepolture, per noi che vaghiamo persi nei vortici, quando il vento ci danza incontro con violenza fatale, quando ci si sente debellarsi in ogni contraria direzione, allora forse si è quasi certi di esser vivi. E si dona al vento un ultimo respiro, come sopra-vissuti, come naufraghi e vivi: granelli di polvere che danzano, coi vortici davanti e i solchi dietro. (ENGLISH TRANSLATION, ad litteram) You ask everything of dust and vortices of wind, and your question is the only comfort –that perhaps in these damned dances you would find answers. But you demand not because you must, but because you are. You are and you are feeling called. Called by howls, by whispers, by murmurs. You feel called and you go, you go and you depart towards the vortices of dust. You navigate and you shipwreck in fatal storms, where one can’t even tell whether they’re dust or wind. Lost as such with time, time that is also space, that is also points and points that are also starts, the same stars that shine upon the fields, as once upon a time had shone the fireflies: you get by. The fireflies have gotten by, the stars get by, and even points will get by for a short or long while. And in this getting by you find yourself drawing spatial grooves, ploughings as self-portraits, automated-retracted, or as sepulchres, or sowings. You bury and you go, looking only ahead. You go grooving passages of shadows like highways, and the shadows are there, but no one must look at them. You bury children like grains of wheat. You lay blankets of dust upon the fields and you let the wind having them dancing. The future is the anti-time and history is a castle of dust. For us that in castle find only burials, for us that wander lost in the vortices, when the wind dances against us with fatal violence, when we feel smashed in every opposite direction, then perhaps we are almost certain of being alive. And we gift to the wind a last breath, like sur-vivors, like castaways and livings: dancing grains of dust, with vortices ahead and grooves behind. “Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβνλλα τί ϴέλεις; respondebat illa: άπο ϴανεΐν ϴέλω.” Was sind das für Zeiten, wo Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist. Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt! E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle. August 2021: Daniele Formica develops a repertoire of poetic claims and schizophrenic theories on the universe and its people by combining cross-disciplinary knowledge with empirical occurrences. By forming and performing art Formica extends his repertoire, translating it and involving others in such movements. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am drawn towards the realm of the ephemeral, ethereal, metaphysic, epistemic, empyrean and mythic. This urges me to comprehend literature, mythology, philosophy, epistemology, human and natural sciences outside political academic restraints. I ultimately seek meaningful shelters for my existence, and in doing so I contribute meanings and perspectives to the existence of the other. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Art is my existential metabolism and the common I forward. Thus, I imagine, realize and perform forms that expel my abstract thinking and place it within the currents of time. To do this I must study content and simultaneously research mediums, techniques and materials that can contain it in the empirical realm. The works become vessels imbued with poetry, imaginary philosophy and addictive curiosity. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Art is an exercise of stumble, a careful expression in the least conventional way. Placed within worldliness and empyrean, artists share the urgency of those interpreting their existence. There is a veil to lift from the surface of things: art discovers, and things bear a new essence. May 2021: Daniele Formica’s work comes from the impulse to internalize and re-propose the universe to its people. Combining cross-disciplinary knowledge and everyday banality he composes a repertoire of linguistic revelations, schizophrenic theories and poetic claims. Through sculpture and performance, Daniele orbits around his repertoire and involves others in such movement. <<It often begins with the unsettling feeling of being about to discover something. Intuitions, whims, delusions and realizations are everyday experienced with reason and emotion. They are encounters with the universal unexplainable that keeps calling for my curiosity, seducing my manic imagination. This can happen banally, like suddenly realizing that my dead skin particles are still on my clothes when I don’t wear them; or be very elaborate, like suspecting that the mythical qualities of bay leaf aren’t only historical fiction, but consistent anthropogenic alterations to the essence of the plant itself. As soon as it starts calling, the sculptural process begins. To sculpt is to transform those realizations into physical matter, attempting to breach the gap between the universe’ empirical and epistemological dimensions. First of all, the sculptural gesture has to transpire immediacy. Immediacy is the direct transcendence of a manic thought into form; not that I want to perform impulsivity, but rather aim for transparency in the forms around me. Transparency, comparable to clarity in the thought process, is obtained when a sculptural gesture is as close as possible to its original intuition. With and for immediacy, practicing sculpture explores and stretches the limits of transformation. Sizes, mediums and dimensions are specifically chosen and accordingly change. Transformation comes together with an obsession for a material and form epistemic background. (as philosophy, art and science grow older; the knowledge around materials, forms and phenomena also grows vaster). Combining subjective (memory, friends and acquaintances) and objective data-banks, my research schizophrenically juxtaposes all sort of references to satisfy my thirst for knowledge and comprehend the intrinsic existence of my physical surroundings. This research makes it so that traces of any episteme are found in the work, and a specific sculpture consists of a specific cluster and amalgam of multidisciplinary knowledge. With the work founded upon immediacy and transformation, sculpting is experienced through its sensorial, emotional, linguistic and epistemic registers. Handwriting, drawing, cutting, sewing, molding, appropriation, selection of ready-made, painting and photography are found to behold such principles. The sole restriction to the sculptural process is then its proximity to the body, bodily proportions and measures. The repertoire can be seen as an ongoing process that manifests as an extension of the conscious, a physical re/construction of the mind. I poetically approach it as a cosmological phenomenon to underline its universal motion and its transcendental nature. As music scores, I repeat sculptural processes and interpret new aspects from their registers. As compositions, series of works and processes are selected and combined in installations to test different constellations of a thought or new possibilities of an older intuition. Through this installing process works often happen to be repurposed and revisited to stretch even further their transformative potential. Performance comes with a whole new element added to the repertoire: the vulnerable declamation, when I publicly reveal a part of the repertoire and demonstrate it to the audience. It is vulnerable because the repertoire is undressed of its physical shells –and so am I, as its medium. It is a declamation because I publicly speak out excerpts of the repertoire. The repertoire, as of today, does not exist in written text form, but only in its transcendental form (I believe writing the repertoire can be very harmful for its autonomous life). This is to say that my performances are never scripted and that all that comes out of my mouth has never been read, only spoken and heard. When I rehearse, I therefore have to dive into my mind (while still keeping control of my body) to drag to the surface the neural pathways containing the required cluster of knowledge. It is not farfetched to say that one performance happens on the outside -in the real- and one performance happens on the inside, through the brain electric impulses and their metaphysical projections. This is why I speak of the conscious action of orbiting. Adopting a natural and comforting attitude and an explicative language, I take the audience by the hand to flow together through the open repertoire. In doing so we think together and draw our own meanings, experiencing our human condition of floating in an ever expanding universe somewhere between the stars and the nervous system. Sometimes this metaphysical dimension is also literally part of the work, like in “The Death of The Death of The Death of BILL” (2019) where particles of my sweat and dead skin are paradoxically sealed alongside my yellow tracksuit; sometimes it is conveyed in the narrative, like in “A chair walks into a house” (2019), where through my voice 7 inanimate IKEA Gunde chairs are transformed into travellers, explorers, invaders, dictators and revolutionaries of domestic social furniture environments; and sometimes it is a combination of both, see “A comedy for 3 Dantes” (2020) where 3 humans wearing red capes and caricaturist noses perform a series of improvised conversations and through absurdity, paradox, theatre and poetry, they attempt to incarnate Dante himself. >> Formica’s repertoire is ultimately composed with the intention to share his passionate perception of a multi-layered and polidimensional universe; and played for other humans to cultivate genuine curiosity for a life embedded in the occurrence of space-time; with the awareness that to contemplate is to set in motion new possibilities of the universe’ revolution.  January 2020: To discover something is to work frenetically in the hope of ending with a stumble. The stumble is that unexpected link twisting the whole equation. Art is an exercise of stumble, a study of discovery in the least conventional way. I particularly like the idea of stumbling upon something so enlightening to be unbearable and so banal to be almost invisible. Banality is the veil to lift from the surface of things: art discovers, and things bear a new essence. My practice is an ongoing discovery of the relations between tangible and intangible things. My studio is a private exhibition and continuous experiment of such relations: objects and references, drawings, writings, sculptures, placements, materials, readings, prints and leftovers are polymers that I link, combine, de-structure, order and reorder according to my intuition in composing a vision of the world. This process of manipulation of both tangible and intangible matter is a sort of alchemical, semiotic and physical reconfiguration of some segments from reality. I would then ultimately define my practice as an act of sculpting: the exhibited is the tool, the sculpted is the occult and the sculpture is the link. December 2019: Daniele Formica is fantasizing about being himself. He is three hours and a half of means of transport away from where he was himself the first time. He believes he enjoys reading the space-time bubble delineated by the limits of his perception –reality. He thinks of such space-time bubble as a role play game, a chessboard, assemblage of Lego bricks or a huge all-swallowing titanic monster (when he feels sad). This makes him feel powerful. He also is sure that there is something too healthy and sweet going on in the playground, something that got into all the children, he included. Practicing art is for Daniele Formica both diagnosing playgrounds and performing prescriptions. He is also a researcher, testing different methodologies in different playgrounds. Daniele Formica is now dwelling upon the performative necessities of being an artist, thinking of himself as a transformative energy-and-matter-forming entity encrypted in a body and mediating with the outside through a consciousness. August 2019: To find the most pondered madness, I travel through language' infinite realms. To twist the eye and bend the pupil, I deal out broken lenses and revolting orbits. Like omelets, coins, or medals, I work to flip the beds where we sleep at night: everything will be topsy-turvy, maybe annoying, disturbing, infantile, or provocative... but at least we'll have something to talk about. As an overexcited reader of reality, I read its text to the limits of interpretation. As a fool semiotician, I drench readings with references and associations. As a romantic linguist, I dance with language and its formulation: emancipated from rigid orders, erupting free in the realm of the world, crystallized in the nest of visual arts. Critic of practice and practitioner of critique, I cannot but keep reinventing my labour, questioning its ecological network and the positioning of its outcomes. Such outcomes are then always temporary resolutions for contemporary provocations. It follows that mediums change according to circumstance: I was ant farming in May 2018, serving food on a toy road in January 2019, humanizing an IKEA GUNDE chair during Easter Day later that year, and ending up realizing that a huge entity exists parallel to me and is made of all of my bodily leftovers -from particles of sweat to dead skin- that I have been spreading around since birth. (I then trapped a small amount of this entity -visible through the vessel of a yellow suit- with plastic seals, and began analysing its physical and metaphysical existential structure. I decided to give the entity an identity, identifying it with the name of BILL.) I like to call my provocative yet intellectual yet hypocritical attitude: “Don Quixote Activism”. This can be taken as a tribute to the fools and a standpoint against the righteous, a subtle strategy to subvert power, a subterfuge to defend the deep Daniele, or maybe just some stuff that lives better if left un-enunciated. March 2018: My biggest concern is to research upon the mechanisms of encountering, perceiving and understanding occurring reality. By occurring reality, I mean an instance of reality taking place, therefore connecting to a future becoming present state, becoming the eye’ and mind’s view. The mechanisms of encountering, perceiving and understanding are three temporal instances of the action of “seeing”. Seeing is hereby intended both in a physical sense (gazing, the view) and metaphorically (understanding, the reason,). The act of seeing is human in itself: • It is connected to embodied cultural capital through experience (habitus) • it proceeds by the re-discovery of recognizable signifiers (therefore the information is read and combined only according to the composition of such signifiers) • it is constituted of and therefore structured by a language (system of reference, set of values, relational algorithms) Researching seeing means fragmenting it in parts and recomposing its wholeness. The first division within my practice finds the three instances of seeing: encounter, perception and reflection. There is something in seeing essential to magic and madness. Materials or objects manipulated in a certain way can induce the subject to reason combining different pathways in the language of seeing. Somehow all the elements needed in order to read occurring reality seems always to be at human disposal, at all times, and developing phenomenologically side by side with the subject. At the same time all that is not present in the language of seeing simply cannot be seen. Subject and object, observer and observed, perceiver and percept, thinker and thought, are not so easily distinguishable outside the limits of a timeframe. They both have an active and passive nature. The subject is active in producing, looking, thinking, perceiving the object. The object is active in shaping the language of seeing, in dictating how the subject will approach it. (Think of a fork, there are a many forks in my possession, yet every time I eat outside or at a friend’s house, their forks I will use and not mine. It is a given of the fork). I want to confute and reassert the acts of encountering, perceiving and understanding. If there is a problematic, I want to expand the field in which such problematic and the subject of it are placed. My works are combination of weird processes and recognizable products. Or vice versa. Or in between. The importance is in the insertion of hooks for the combination of different planes and languages of seeing. With my writings and publications, I create a framework and expand the discourse upon the essence and function of my works. It is therefore not about the works themselves, but about how they are approached, what happens in that encounter, perception and understanding between subject and object. These are the major aspects which compose my degree of engagement, an engagement very much eradicated in the research of manifestation and transmission of culture and experience. My hyper-criticality induces me in a limbo state between a Cartesian doubt, a prominent arrogance and the annihilation of knowledge. To sum up everything, I would say my practice is a sort of Don Quixote Activism: a nonsensical yet committed fight for the celebration of magic and madness in existence.  October 2017: STATEMENT MADE OF STATEMENTS ON AUTHORSHIP, THE SELF If autobiographical is the voluntary narration of the history of the self, my work is not autobiographical. If subjectivity is an arbitrary position taken by the author, I am unaware of being subjective. If the self is what makes work, practice, and labor “my own”, I try to remove myself from my practice. The necessity of a definition of “own practice” is linked to the identification of the author. The author is aware to be seen as an identity, and this identity is necessarily a reduction of knowledge. The author is aware as a container, keeper of knowledge. The author is aware as a producer, researcher of knowledge. To define “own practice”, I start with defining just “practice”. It is a motion, a constant exchange of information, a cycle, a dialogue. Inwards: the zeitgeist penetrates me. Outwards: the zeitgeist manifests through me. “My own” in “practice” is me, the self. Self is microcosms and zeitgeist is macrocosms. Trying to remove myself from my practice postulates the self-manifestation of the zeitgeist. It seems most likely absurd and impossible, superb and hypocrite, and tremendously stupid to deny to art the notion of self, since this, first of all, is a decision committed by the self. This is a deliberate attempt to criticize the individualist perspective connected to the commodification of the author and the capitalization of art. The author is a necessity. The basic direction I believe should be taken is towards absolutes systems that disregard the notion of authorship, the investigation is directed beyond a limited identity. The fundamental matter in this discourse is the notion of awareness, to be aware of the self and to be unaware of being aware of it, and so on… Artistic labor includes all sorts of activities that are obviously initiated, directed and executed by selves, but in an overview these selves tend to blur together. The gaze makes the self. A persona is a prospective of another persona, we are never one but many. I am a tool that does not belong. I am a medium between same poles. I am always myself, an ignorant of the self. May 2017: I like to think that my expression relies on getting constantly distracted. Distraction as a way of thinking, applied thought and materialized ideas. Earlier today I put colourful candies and a cinnamon stick inside a tapper wear, and left the lid on the side with a small bended metal bar on top. Now I am feeling frustrated because I cannot find the reason of this action. Or better what did I want to communicate? Now step by step. This tapper wear has been with me for a long time, I used to put my tobacco filters and rolling papers inside, to bring them to school. I used to call it “packed lunch” even though there was nothing to eat. The cinnamon stick was belonging to an old collection left inside the big moving box in my studio, and rested there for half a year untouched, then suddenly one day I decided to give some air to my collection of cinnamon sticks and realized they had been there with me the whole time. Now the candies. These candies were just placed on the shelf of a shop in town, and their colourfulness attracted me, so I decided to buy them (approximately a week ago) and bring them to my studio. What about the metal bar? I did not know I had it and today I have found it among my things, nearby a pink rope. Tapper wear, cinnamon stick, candies and metal bar. Strangers to each other, that share a common denominator: me (The bastard who decided to put them together). Now from being separate entities that never met (except maybe for the potential of cinnamon and candies in a strange cake) they became a group of friends, close one another, unable to move. Maybe damned to be unnoticed for the rest of their existence together, as four simple elements that stood side by side for a period of time. The smile of a spoiled child, the sweet smell of a spice, the precariousness of a thin metal and the failed preservation of an opened box. Each element has meaning in the associations formulated with the language, where we can swim around contents and produce messages. Therefore, these four elements alone are a sum of associations based on the individual experience of each of them. Wittgenstein says in the “Tractatus logico-philosophicus”: Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connection with other things. Seeing something is like composing a symphony, creating a puzzle. An object communicates in relation to others. We never conceive only something, but its relations with many things. Experience therefore plays a big role in associating This could be enough to elaborate on the existence of these four entities, but still I wonder where the act of relating them to each other comes from. I like to think it as a distraction, as a frivolous way of creating a combination of the smallest nonsensical actions. A distraction from life, about life. I think of the book by Robert Creeley “Was that a real poem or did you just make it up yourself?”. Is there any distinction between making something up and writing a real poem? I wonder whether the lightness in the intention would arm the value of a final result. It is poetic though to value best the most frivolous things. Therefore, the spirit, the soul, spread out almost unconsciously, unnoticed every time, and leave something to be experienced.
The only one who knows this ounce of words is just a token, is he who has a ton to tell that must remain unspoken. ET VERBUM CARO FACTUM EST. 22 02 2022: Si chiede tutto alla polvere e ai vortici di vento, e la domanda è l’unico conforto -che forse in queste dannate danze ci si trovino risposte. Ma si domanda non perché si deve, ma perche si è. Si è e ci si sente chiamare. Chiamare a ululati, a sospiri, a mormorii. Ci si sente chiamare e si va, si va e si parte verso I vortici di polvere. Si naviga e si naufraga in tempeste fatali, dove uno manco sa se è più polvere o più vento. Persi cosi col tempo, tempo che è anche spazio, che è anche punti e punti che sono anche stelle, le stelle stesse che brillano sui campi come un tempo hanno brillato anche le lucciole: si campa. Le lucciole hanno campato, le stelle campano, ed I punti anche camperanno poco o a lungo. Ed in questo campare ci si trova a disegnarsi solchi spaziali, arature come autoritratti, automati-ritratti, o come sepolcri, o semine. Si sotterra e si va, si guarda solo avanti. Si va solcando passaggi di ombre come autostrade, e le ombre sono la, ma nessuno deve guardarle. Si seppelliscono i figli come i chicchi di grano. Si stendono coperte di polvere sui campi e si lascia che il vento le faccia danzare. Il futuro è l’antitempo e la storia un castello di polvere. Per noi che nei castelli ci troviamo solo sepolture, per noi che vaghiamo persi nei vortici, quando il vento ci danza incontro con violenza fatale, quando ci si sente debellarsi in ogni contraria direzione, allora forse si è quasi certi di esser vivi. E si dona al vento un ultimo respiro, come sopra-vissuti, come naufraghi e vivi: granelli di polvere che danzano, coi vortici davanti e i solchi dietro. (ENGLISH TRANSLATION, ad litteram) You ask everything of dust and vortices of wind, and your question is the only comfort –that perhaps in these damned dances you would find answers. But you demand not because you must, but because you are. You are and you are feeling called. Called by howls, by whispers, by murmurs. You feel called and you go, you go and you depart towards the vortices of dust. You navigate and you shipwreck in fatal storms, where one can’t even tell whether they’re dust or wind. Lost as such with time, time that is also space, that is also points and points that are also starts, the same stars that shine upon the fields, as once upon a time had shone the fireflies: you get by. The fireflies have gotten by, the stars get by, and even points will get by for a short or long while. And in this getting by you find yourself drawing spatial grooves, ploughings as self-portraits, automated-retracted, or as sepulchres, or sowings. You bury and you go, looking only ahead. You go grooving passages of shadows like highways, and the shadows are there, but no one must look at them. You bury children like grains of wheat. You lay blankets of dust upon the fields and you let the wind having them dancing. The future is the anti-time and history is a castle of dust. For us that in castle find only burials, for us that wander lost in the vortices, when the wind dances against us with fatal violence, when we feel smashed in every opposite direction, then perhaps we are almost certain of being alive. And we gift to the wind a last breath, like sur-vivors, like castaways and livings: dancing grains of dust, with vortices ahead and grooves behind. “Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβνλλα τί ϴέλεις; respondebat illa: άπο ϴανεΐν ϴέλω.” Was sind das für Zeiten, wo Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist. Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt! E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle. August 2021: Daniele Formica develops a repertoire of poetic claims and schizophrenic theories on the universe and its people by combining cross-disciplinary knowledge with empirical occurrences. By forming and performing art Formica extends his repertoire, translating it and involving others in such movements. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I am drawn towards the realm of the ephemeral, ethereal, metaphysic, epistemic, empyrean and mythic. This urges me to comprehend literature, mythology, philosophy, epistemology, human and natural sciences outside political academic restraints. I ultimately seek meaningful shelters for my existence, and in doing so I contribute meanings and perspectives to the existence of the other. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Art is my existential metabolism and the common I forward. Thus, I imagine, realize and perform forms that expel my abstract thinking and place it within the currents of time. To do this I must study content and simultaneously research mediums, techniques and materials that can contain it in the empirical realm. The works become vessels imbued with poetry, imaginary philosophy and addictive curiosity. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Art is an exercise of stumble, a careful expression in the least conventional way. Placed within worldliness and empyrean, artists share the urgency of those interpreting their existence. There is a veil to lift from the surface of things: art discovers, and things bear a new essence. May 2021: Daniele Formica’s work comes from the impulse to internalize and re-propose the universe to its people. Combining cross-disciplinary knowledge and everyday banality he composes a repertoire of linguistic revelations, schizophrenic theories and poetic claims. Through sculpture and performance, Daniele orbits around his repertoire and involves others in such movement. <<It often begins with the unsettling feeling of being about to discover something. Intuitions, whims, delusions and realizations are everyday experienced with reason and emotion. They are encounters with the universal unexplainable that keeps calling for my curiosity, seducing my manic imagination. This can happen banally, like suddenly realizing that my dead skin particles are still on my clothes when I don’t wear them; or be very elaborate, like suspecting that the mythical qualities of bay leaf aren’t only historical fiction, but consistent anthropogenic alterations to the essence of the plant itself. As soon as it starts calling, the sculptural process begins. To sculpt is to transform those realizations into physical matter, attempting to breach the gap between the universe’ empirical and epistemological dimensions. First of all, the sculptural gesture has to transpire immediacy. Immediacy is the direct transcendence of a manic thought into form; not that I want to perform impulsivity, but rather aim for transparency in the forms around me. Transparency, comparable to clarity in the thought process, is obtained when a sculptural gesture is as close as possible to its original intuition. With and for immediacy, practicing sculpture explores and stretches the limits of transformation. Sizes, mediums and dimensions are specifically chosen and accordingly change. Transformation comes together with an obsession for a material and form epistemic background. (as philosophy, art and science grow older; the knowledge around materials, forms and phenomena also grows vaster). Combining subjective (memory, friends and acquaintances) and objective data-banks, my research schizophrenically juxtaposes all sort of references to satisfy my thirst for knowledge and comprehend the intrinsic existence of my physical surroundings. This research makes it so that traces of any episteme are found in the work, and a specific sculpture consists of a specific cluster and amalgam of multidisciplinary knowledge. With the work founded upon immediacy and transformation, sculpting is experienced through its sensorial, emotional, linguistic and epistemic registers. Handwriting, drawing, cutting, sewing, molding, appropriation, selection of ready-made, painting and photography are found to behold such principles. The sole restriction to the sculptural process is then its proximity to the body, bodily proportions and measures. The repertoire can be seen as an ongoing process that manifests as an extension of the conscious, a physical re/construction of the mind. I poetically approach it as a cosmological phenomenon to underline its universal motion and its transcendental nature. As music scores, I repeat sculptural processes and interpret new aspects from their registers. As compositions, series of works and processes are selected and combined in installations to test different constellations of a thought or new possibilities of an older intuition. Through this installing process works often happen to be repurposed and revisited to stretch even further their transformative potential. Performance comes with a whole new element added to the repertoire: the vulnerable declamation, when I publicly reveal a part of the repertoire and demonstrate it to the audience. It is vulnerable because the repertoire is undressed of its physical shells –and so am I, as its medium. It is a declamation because I publicly speak out excerpts of the repertoire. The repertoire, as of today, does not exist in written text form, but only in its transcendental form (I believe writing the repertoire can be very harmful for its autonomous life). This is to say that my performances are never scripted and that all that comes out of my mouth has never been read, only spoken and heard. When I rehearse, I therefore have to dive into my mind (while still keeping control of my body) to drag to the surface the neural pathways containing the required cluster of knowledge. It is not farfetched to say that one performance happens on the outside -in the real- and one performance happens on the inside, through the brain electric impulses and their metaphysical projections. This is why I speak of the conscious action of orbiting. Adopting a natural and comforting attitude and an explicative language, I take the audience by the hand to flow together through the open repertoire. In doing so we think together and draw our own meanings, experiencing our human condition of floating in an ever expanding universe somewhere between the stars and the nervous system. Sometimes this metaphysical dimension is also literally part of the work, like in “The Death of The Death of The Death of BILL” (2019) where particles of my sweat and dead skin are paradoxically sealed alongside my yellow tracksuit; sometimes it is conveyed in the narrative, like in “A chair walks into a house” (2019), where through my voice 7 inanimate IKEA Gunde chairs are transformed into travellers, explorers, invaders, dictators and revolutionaries of domestic social furniture environments; and sometimes it is a combination of both, see “A comedy for 3 Dantes” (2020) where 3 humans wearing red capes and caricaturist noses perform a series of improvised conversations and through absurdity, paradox, theatre and poetry, they attempt to incarnate Dante himself. >> Formica’s repertoire is ultimately composed with the intention to share his passionate perception of a multi-layered and polidimensional universe; and played for other humans to cultivate genuine curiosity for a life embedded in the occurrence of space-time; with the awareness that to contemplate is to set in motion new possibilities of the universe’ revolution.  January 2020: To discover something is to work frenetically in the hope of ending with a stumble. The stumble is that unexpected link twisting the whole equation. Art is an exercise of stumble, a study of discovery in the least conventional way. I particularly like the idea of stumbling upon something so enlightening to be unbearable and so banal to be almost invisible. Banality is the veil to lift from the surface of things: art discovers, and things bear a new essence. My practice is an ongoing discovery of the relations between tangible and intangible things. My studio is a private exhibition and continuous experiment of such relations: objects and references, drawings, writings, sculptures, placements, materials, readings, prints and leftovers are polymers that I link, combine, de-structure, order and reorder according to my intuition in composing a vision of the world. This process of manipulation of both tangible and intangible matter is a sort of alchemical, semiotic and physical reconfiguration of some segments from reality. I would then ultimately define my practice as an act of sculpting: the exhibited is the tool, the sculpted is the occult and the sculpture is the link. December 2019: Daniele Formica is fantasizing about being himself. He is three hours and a half of means of transport away from where he was himself the first time. He believes he enjoys reading the space-time bubble delineated by the limits of his perception –reality. He thinks of such space-time bubble as a role play game, a chessboard, assemblage of Lego bricks or a huge all-swallowing titanic monster (when he feels sad). This makes him feel powerful. He also is sure that there is something too healthy and sweet going on in the playground, something that got into all the children, he included. Practicing art is for Daniele Formica both diagnosing playgrounds and performing prescriptions. He is also a researcher, testing different methodologies in different playgrounds. Daniele Formica is now dwelling upon the performative necessities of being an artist, thinking of himself as a transformative energy-and-matter-forming entity encrypted in a body and mediating with the outside through a consciousness. August 2019: To find the most pondered madness, I travel through language' infinite realms. To twist the eye and bend the pupil, I deal out broken lenses and revolting orbits. Like omelets, coins, or medals, I work to flip the beds where we sleep at night: everything will be topsy-turvy, maybe annoying, disturbing, infantile, or provocative... but at least we'll have something to talk about. As an overexcited reader of reality, I read its text to the limits of interpretation. As a fool semiotician, I drench readings with references and associations. As a romantic linguist, I dance with language and its formulation: emancipated from rigid orders, erupting free in the realm of the world, crystallized in the nest of visual arts. Critic of practice and practitioner of critique, I cannot but keep reinventing my labour, questioning its ecological network and the positioning of its outcomes. Such outcomes are then always temporary resolutions for contemporary provocations. It follows that mediums change according to circumstance: I was ant farming in May 2018, serving food on a toy road in January 2019, humanizing an IKEA GUNDE chair during Easter Day later that year, and ending up realizing that a huge entity exists parallel to me and is made of all of my bodily leftovers -from particles of sweat to dead skin- that I have been spreading around since birth. (I then trapped a small amount of this entity -visible through the vessel of a yellow suit- with plastic seals, and began analysing its physical and metaphysical existential structure. I decided to give the entity an identity, identifying it with the name of BILL.) I like to call my provocative yet intellectual yet hypocritical attitude: “Don Quixote Activism”. This can be taken as a tribute to the fools and a standpoint against the righteous, a subtle strategy to subvert power, a subterfuge to defend the deep Daniele, or maybe just some stuff that lives better if left un-enunciated. March 2018: My biggest concern is to research upon the mechanisms of encountering, perceiving and understanding occurring reality. By occurring reality, I mean an instance of reality taking place, therefore connecting to a future becoming present state, becoming the eye’ and mind’s view. The mechanisms of encountering, perceiving and understanding are three temporal instances of the action of “seeing”. Seeing is hereby intended both in a physical sense (gazing, the view) and metaphorically (understanding, the reason,). The act of seeing is human in itself: • It is connected to embodied cultural capital through experience (habitus) • it proceeds by the re-discovery of recognizable signifiers (therefore the information is read and combined only according to the composition of such signifiers) • it is constituted of and therefore structured by a language (system of reference, set of values, relational algorithms) Researching seeing means fragmenting it in parts and recomposing its wholeness. The first division within my practice finds the three instances of seeing: encounter, perception and reflection. There is something in seeing essential to magic and madness. Materials or objects manipulated in a certain way can induce the subject to reason combining different pathways in the language of seeing. Somehow all the elements needed in order to read occurring reality seems always to be at human disposal, at all times, and developing phenomenologically side by side with the subject. At the same time all that is not present in the language of seeing simply cannot be seen. Subject and object, observer and observed, perceiver and percept, thinker and thought, are not so easily distinguishable outside the limits of a timeframe. They both have an active and passive nature. The subject is active in producing, looking, thinking, perceiving the object. The object is active in shaping the language of seeing, in dictating how the subject will approach it. (Think of a fork, there are a many forks in my possession, yet every time I eat outside or at a friend’s house, their forks I will use and not mine. It is a given of the fork). I want to confute and reassert the acts of encountering, perceiving and understanding. If there is a problematic, I want to expand the field in which such problematic and the subject of it are placed. My works are combination of weird processes and recognizable products. Or vice versa. Or in between. The importance is in the insertion of hooks for the combination of different planes and languages of seeing. With my writings and publications, I create a framework and expand the discourse upon the essence and function of my works. It is therefore not about the works themselves, but about how they are approached, what happens in that encounter, perception and understanding between subject and object. These are the major aspects which compose my degree of engagement, an engagement very much eradicated in the research of manifestation and transmission of culture and experience. My hyper-criticality induces me in a limbo state between a Cartesian doubt, a prominent arrogance and the annihilation of knowledge. To sum up everything, I would say my practice is a sort of Don Quixote Activism: a nonsensical yet committed fight for the celebration of magic and madness in existence.  October 2017: STATEMENT MADE OF STATEMENTS ON AUTHORSHIP, THE SELF If autobiographical is the voluntary narration of the history of the self, my work is not autobiographical. If subjectivity is an arbitrary position taken by the author, I am unaware of being subjective. If the self is what makes work, practice, and labor “my own”, I try to remove myself from my practice. The necessity of a definition of “own practice” is linked to the identification of the author. The author is aware to be seen as an identity, and this identity is necessarily a reduction of knowledge. The author is aware as a container, keeper of knowledge. The author is aware as a producer, researcher of knowledge. To define “own practice”, I start with defining just “practice”. It is a motion, a constant exchange of information, a cycle, a dialogue. Inwards: the zeitgeist penetrates me. Outwards: the zeitgeist manifests through me. “My own” in “practice” is me, the self. Self is microcosms and zeitgeist is macrocosms. Trying to remove myself from my practice postulates the self-manifestation of the zeitgeist. It seems most likely absurd and impossible, superb and hypocrite, and tremendously stupid to deny to art the notion of self, since this, first of all, is a decision committed by the self. This is a deliberate attempt to criticize the individualist perspective connected to the commodification of the author and the capitalization of art. The author is a necessity. The basic direction I believe should be taken is towards absolutes systems that disregard the notion of authorship, the investigation is directed beyond a limited identity. The fundamental matter in this discourse is the notion of awareness, to be aware of the self and to be unaware of being aware of it, and so on… Artistic labor includes all sorts of activities that are obviously initiated, directed and executed by selves, but in an overview these selves tend to blur together. The gaze makes the self. A persona is a prospective of another persona, we are never one but many. I am a tool that does not belong. I am a medium between same poles. I am always myself, an ignorant of the self. May 2017: I like to think that my expression relies on getting constantly distracted. Distraction as a way of thinking, applied thought and materialized ideas. Earlier today I put colourful candies and a cinnamon stick inside a tapper wear, and left the lid on the side with a small bended metal bar on top. Now I am feeling frustrated because I cannot find the reason of this action. Or better what did I want to communicate? Now step by step. This tapper wear has been with me for a long time, I used to put my tobacco filters and rolling papers inside, to bring them to school. I used to call it “packed lunch” even though there was nothing to eat. The cinnamon stick was belonging to an old collection left inside the big moving box in my studio, and rested there for half a year untouched, then suddenly one day I decided to give some air to my collection of cinnamon sticks and realized they had been there with me the whole time. Now the candies. These candies were just placed on the shelf of a shop in town, and their colourfulness attracted me, so I decided to buy them (approximately a week ago) and bring them to my studio. What about the metal bar? I did not know I had it and today I have found it among my things, nearby a pink rope. Tapper wear, cinnamon stick, candies and metal bar. Strangers to each other, that share a common denominator: me (The bastard who decided to put them together). Now from being separate entities that never met (except maybe for the potential of cinnamon and candies in a strange cake) they became a group of friends, close one another, unable to move. Maybe damned to be unnoticed for the rest of their existence together, as four simple elements that stood side by side for a period of time. The smile of a spoiled child, the sweet smell of a spice, the precariousness of a thin metal and the failed preservation of an opened box. Each element has meaning in the associations formulated with the language, where we can swim around contents and produce messages. Therefore, these four elements alone are a sum of associations based on the individual experience of each of them. Wittgenstein says in the “Tractatus logico-philosophicus”: Just as we cannot think of spatial objects at all apart from space, or temporal objects apart from time, so we cannot think of any object apart from the possibility of its connection with other things. Seeing something is like composing a symphony, creating a puzzle. An object communicates in relation to others. We never conceive only something, but its relations with many things. Experience therefore plays a big role in associating This could be enough to elaborate on the existence of these four entities, but still I wonder where the act of relating them to each other comes from. I like to think it as a distraction, as a frivolous way of creating a combination of the smallest nonsensical actions. A distraction from life, about life. I think of the book by Robert Creeley “Was that a real poem or did you just make it up yourself?”. Is there any distinction between making something up and writing a real poem? I wonder whether the lightness in the intention would arm the value of a final result. It is poetic though to value best the most frivolous things. Therefore, the spirit, the soul, spread out almost unconsciously, unnoticed every time, and leave something to be experienced.