“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“All his cravings combine endlessly.”
It’s hard to think of a heart that isn’t also a battle. Some are long and devastating, others small and petty, but the heart always seems to have the space needed to accommodate even the most incomprehensible of pains.
“Small body” is the crack in the door through which we can spy a heart in struggle: against absence, against loss, against fatality. It is a long story (100 pages) about how a wound can settle into a body and inhabit it well beyond the surface of the scars. It is the story of a woman who builds her life aware of an unavoidable void, the story of a love that generates two daughters and then questions herself, about the directions of life, about the evident impossibility of not making mistakes, not to be afraid. “Only spruces don’t tremble.”
The questions he asks us are always concrete, solid – motherhood is serious, contradictory, never idealised, the most complex processes find consistency in a bottle of tonic water. Relationships, in gestures. Emotions: in the bodies.
The language that Tarini chooses to tell this story evokes the image of a forest that grows in front of the merciless lens of a timelapse: slowly and inexorably the layers of vegetation grow, change, overlap, create mutual relationships, suffocate and support each other. Every word is decisive and precise in describing the moment in which something is happening (“The handle had melted while we hugged each other in confusion.”) – It is a word that she loves and that suffers and that she feels responsible for her choice.
One gimmick, in particular, cannot go unnoticed, in its funny obviousness: all the protagonists have a name that begins with A. Trying to avoid risky flights of fancy, we like to think that this little coded message recalls Love as it can manifest itself in a thousand ways, intensities and different people; as if it possessed many faces, all legitimate, any attempt to fit it into a rigid form is futile. We can be wrong, suggested by reading this three-dimensional family album, short and yet sufficient, poignant in its realism, brutal in its nakedness. We can be wrong.
And yet: “I know that feeling. Love has this shape”.
Written by Delis
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Gaia Tarini, Piccolo corpo, Barta, Pisa, 2022