Collaborations

It happened by chance. It always happens by chance – the important things in life always come by chance (if you believe in such a thing), you cannot plan schemes and plots with the same accuracy and ingenuity as life. One day I was reading an Instagram post and few months later I found myself collaborating to the gentle soul that answered my questions to that post. The person that answered is Simone Lettieri, Artistic.centre CEO, one of the sweetest guy I ever met, a true force of nature. Together we are working at a very large project in art self-education, spanning over some years, to say the least. It will gather my friend Dario Rivarossa’s help for the English version of my writings and my old dream of working only with friends will come true. All is working until now, the three of us do hope for the best because each of us is working a lot in their field of specialization – me writing, drawing and painting, Dario translating my words, Simone organizing. An entire life waiting for this to happen. Oh my, it took so long…

I met Dario Rivarossa, the Sea Tasso Driver on the chat of a common G+friend. For me it was not a good time, I had serious health problems and I was confined home without being able to go out. Dario offered me his company on the web and his availability as a scholar. From that first moving message of solidarity others have passed, as many as I could not even say. Chat but above all emails, and then talks about art, poetry, how to translate a text, and then opinions (his) on texts (mine) and then (his) revisions of texts (always mine) and then also a collaboration in a book, of which he wroite a review there, and then, more recently, also an exchange of images. By now Dario is my literary confidant, my keyboard-friend, my favorite translator and my first reader. His wit, his brilliant intelligence, his enormous culture and his great humanity that he disguises with his Piedmontese detachment made him very dear to me. I would gladly entrust all my books to him so that he could translate them as perfectly as he does because he is the only one who knows how my literary mind works even better than myself. Of course, due to practical reasons, we never succeeded to meet in person ˗ things of the internet time, I suppose. Sooner or later it will happen, though. Who knows. And will we ever go back to working together? Who knows, there are ideas. If they are roses, as my friend Dario likes to say, they will bloom ...