WORK IN PROGRESS (alla maestra Luciana Doglioni)

I thought again of an incident that happened to me at primary school and that really shocked me. As I was a very shy child I did not dare raise my hand in front of my classmates to ask permission to go to the toilet. I was afraid that everyone would be watching and staring at me. I would very often become very red with embarrassment for very small, trivial reasons. I would not go to the toilet for hours using huge control and I would wait for the bell to ring before leaving the classroom. But the inevitable happened one day and I wet my pants!
The teacher noticed what happened and without any sensitivity ordered me to the door. The shame and embarrassment I felt were enormous.
This work is both an attempt to relive and analyse this painful incident that has unconsciously influenced my personality and to serve to display my anger against my teacher and act as a sort of delayed revenge which I can finally show now I am an an adult. To reconstruct the scene I have used a young girl, who stands for my teacher, and I have made her experience the shock, anger and embarrassment I suffered. In this way the roles of victim and “persecutor” have been switched. At the same time the use of a young girl reflects my childish fear of being mistaken for a girl instead of a boy. That fear was due to my shyness and weakness that paved the way for the wickedness and mockery of cheeky children.
On the top of everything I covered the entire scene with a protective cloth, similar to the one used by painters to preserve furniture when painting. This means that every strong emotional experience will be imprinted in our memory, protected and preserved for good. Therefore it will influence our future and our being, our fears and our frustrations. Walls can be painted, scrubbed and cleaned through the years as fashion and tastes change; but with furniture the scratches, chips and knocks of the house will remain under the cloth visible and unchanged.

What I have rebuilt here is in fact a small cell in my memory, and the unconscious is the invisible painter who covers and protects every single experience of our life with the cloth of memory.