When I'm happy

It seems to me that there is a certain general distraction in the air that leads us to no longer focus on anything. We scroll through life as we do with our cell phones on certain social networks in search of more interesting content. We remain suspended at the mercy of an algorithm that decides for us what is important and what is not at all. Because of an idea of ​​the world that I have formed, I believe that a certain effort is necessary even to recognize happiness when it casually touches us. I don't know about you, but it happens to me to be happy and not realize it or - worse - to discover it a long time later, when that feeling has evaporated and vanished into thin air. I have my own method to try to stem the phenomenon mentioned above. Quite simple: I try to archive. I put aside anything that attracts my attention. I have been doing it since elementary school, with the help of my teacher, Mrs. Ada Garetto, born in 1919. She passed away a few years ago. It was a combination of severity and sweetness that I never found again in the years to come, at least not in that perfect dosage. Some people are an alchemy, compasses to orient oneself when one is lost in the deserts of life. They are a certainty, both the compasses and the deserts. Fifty years have passed since then and I have archived everything. It is quite simple when it comes to words found in a book or read on a wall or heard in a song, I transcribe them in a notebook. It is less so when my archive ends up with smells or colors to which I have to associate a name.

I have discovered that there are a considerable quantity of shades for each color that would be worth remembering. Yves Klein, for example, discovered one for blue and patented it with his name IKB (International Klein Blue). He made paintings using only that blue. He possessed a certain ability to synthesize that sometimes it would have been useful to have at hand. In my archive there are also large portions of landscape. I realized that I have a certain preference for urban ones. Do you know when you look out in the city and see the building in front? Every window contains a story, a life. A dizzying sensation. The lights deserve a separate chapter in my personal archive and it is perhaps because of my curiosity towards light that I later became a photographer. You can also recognize a city by the light that it sends through its streets, that bounces off the walls of its buildings. Turin, Naples, Seville, Buenos Aires, each with its own light, each with its best time to be visited, experienced and photographed. Then there are the gestures of the people I have met in my life, even those of strangers, especially those, I dare say. A girl who runs a hand through her hair, a person who smiles, a lost gaze reflected in the window of a train. I have also archived the first time I saw the Sistine Chapel. The list of books I would like to read. when I received a typewriter as a gift or flew a kite on the seashore. I remember the sound of the bell tower of the town where I was born and that time I won hide and seek. The last day of vacation with my parents. I try to think about it, they come from places I had forgotten. No algorithm could return them with such precision. Archive, they are moments of happiness, they will be useful to me to cross the deserts.


Roberto Cristaudo
NP October 2024