Italy

I have been thinking about the crate again, but it feels different out here in Italy. Before, it was about how much it could hold. Now I am thinking more about what is actually putting pressure on it.

Everything here shifts your sense of scale. Not just physically, but time. You walk into a space and you are standing inside something that took longer than a lifetime to make. Sometimes multiple. Not one person figuring it out, but generations repeating the same process, refining it, committing to it without stopping to ask what it meant individually. It is hard to process that.

A lot of it does not read as art in the way I think about it when I am working. It feels like the result of something else. Belief. Power. Structure. The object is what remains after all of that has been applied again and again.

I met up with a former student while I was there and it shifted everything. The history is overwhelming, but it stopped feeling like the point. She is building something for herself. Taking risks. Learning through it. It felt familiar. What matters is not just what has been built, but what continues. The fact that people are still choosing this. Still learning it. Still committing to it without knowing where it leads.

Back then, the system carried most of the weight. You stepped into it, learned it, contributed to it. You were not responsible for defining the whole thing. You just had to hold your part. Now it feels like the opposite. There is no structure holding things up. No shared direction. The expectation is that the work comes from you. Total freedom, but nothing distributing the weight.

It sounds ideal, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels heavier. Which brings me back to the crate. I have been thinking about what it is actually holding. Not just material, but expectation, choice, and the need to define what the work is at all. It is not just carrying weight. It is carrying the absence of something that used to hold it.