For nine months, I worked on a site-specific project for the Fendi store on Via Montenapoleone in Milan, inside the building designed by Emilio Lancia, for which I designed the four foyer ceilings. The title I chose for the project, Walking through clear water in a pool painted black, is borrowed from an autobiography by Cookie Mueller. I carried it with me throughout the entire duration of the work, although — for reasons I still do not fully understand — I never managed to get beyond page twenty. Despite this, or perhaps precisely because of it, the title became an integral part of the process: like a soundtrack one listens to without ever truly grasping the words.
The project evolved into a broader collaboration with Fendi. I created a version of the Peekaboo — the iconic bag designed by Silvia Venturini Fendi — in pigmented concrete, worked with a piping bag: a manual, decorative gesture that breaks the surface down into gestural, organic traces, almost improper in relation to the rigidity of the material.
At the same time, a concrete painting of mine was translated into fur, using exclusively production offcuts, with the contribution of the maison’s master furriers. Here too, the gesture of transformation was central: from a hard, heavy material to one that is tactile and mobile, from a building element to a fragment of the body.
I chose concrete for the entire project, from the bag to the ceilings, a material that, throughout the postwar second half of the twentieth century, represented an idea of strength, modernity, virility. It is grey, structural, functional. Working it with a piping bag — a domestic, almost childlike tool — or with my hands is a way of defusing that muscular rhetoric. Pigmenting it, manipulating it, bending it into useless gestures makes it a lighter, sillier, more vulnerable material.
Finally, there is a biographical dimension. I grew up in a family of Trotskyists. My mother is also a Franciscan Catholic. Working with a luxury multinational, imagining a fur piece, was not a neutral gesture for me. I moved through many contradictions and decided not to evade them, and perhaps it was there that I came to understand something about Cookie Müller. The title of her book became my response: walking through clear water, in a pool painted black. A way of inhabiting complexity without simplifying it.
