Playtime at the Meeting of Rimini

University

The part of the post before the picture is just a short story of my “relationship” with a couple of the Catania university departments. The actual story of the picture is written below it.

I didn’t go nuts, the first part of the post can be a way to learn a bit more about “reasons” that made me take that pictures.

I’m not good with words, especially in English. Sorry.

I study at the University of Catania but I know some of its departments since I was a little girl. That’s because my mother is an university professor.

For the first 19 years of my life I’ve considered that place an something closer to playground than a place where you were supposed to work or study.

In that place I’ve taken some of my first pictures and video.

Actually the video is probably just one, recorded in late October 2002, during one of the first of “those” days that Mt Etna had been really active.

Those days the city was almost totally blocked by Mt. Etna “sand”, thus even schools had been closed for a few days.

Yeah. In other cities schools close due to snow, here in Catania due to “sabbia vulcanica”.

Since schools were closed I had not to study a lot, thus I didn’t resist going with mom to “the big playground” in order to record that big event with my camera and daddy’s camcorder.

(Soon or later I’ll publish the pictures).

There are places in that big “playground” that can get so dark to appear pretty dangerous after sunset.

Some of those places are the “corridors” in the the teachers’ studios area, that is usually kinda empty in late afternoon (7.00 pm or so).

That day of 8 years ago, when I’ve decided to go back to mom’s studio because sun was almost down and it wasn’t safe to stay outside the department, I decided to take a kind of video in the “insides”.

The idea came because everything was first lit by a strange light at sunset (effect of the Mt. Etna sand suspended in sky) and after sunset everything was kinda dark.

The video is only few seconds long, it wanted to represent the quick steps made by a girl who was running in dark to get safe behind those studios. I also enjoyed the camera effect of “night vision” to show my hands looking for (seriously doing that because I couldn’t see well) the right key to open the studio.

A silly video, something I’d never show to someone!

Despite this  I enjoy recalling of it because it is one of the closest “representation” of the sense of desolation and solitude that those empty corridors arise in me.

The same feelings that now are always present in my heart even when those places are well lit and full of students and teachers because, in less than 6 months, the playground turned into “the place that reminds me of my biggest mistakes”.

Into the place of what “it could have been but will never be”.

Yeah. University make me thinking very happy things…

It will pass. Time washes away everything, except Eternity.

The picture you can see here was taken in a late afternoon in summer 2005, but the place is the same.<

My father unconsciously helped me to get a picture of those corridors.

I had find a way to edit this picture only today. This editing, that is just a playing with lights, makes the corridor looking shorter and less spooky, but I love the way my daddy’s silhouette looks like in there.

It is undefined, reflected on the floor in a way that is even more undefined…. it looks like kinda the same way I feel there: an undefined shadow out of its place.

The thinker

My brother pretending to be thinking

Java-the-cat looking around (or at “that damned flashing thing!”), from a new point of view.

I’m still trying to figure out who is the wisest of the two…

Jumping water

Today has been raining for about 30 minutes in the afternoon. I had the great unwise idea to go out on the balcony to play with water and light instead of staying at home, in a warm place, studying

I do think it was worth!

Boom!

Or better “pof”!

That’s the sound that both mom and I have heard today. We’ve been looking around the house to understand what was the cause.

A coke bottle exploded “flooding” the surrounding area and making everything around it sticky. What a joy!

Someone had shaken it very badly…

Robot, gas mask or…

just a LNB (part of the satellite dish)?

My territory

The English man with the lupara

An old stuff coming from Grandma’s house.

I guess it meant to be an English man with a shotgun, but the gun is broken now, so it looks more like an “English man with a lupara [sawn-off shotgun].

I hope the gun was broken due to an incident and not to a “creative” action made from a relative of mine.

Note

I didn’t pick the camera today. It had been a crazy day.

What a coincidence considering the fact that 54 days ago I created a post for today. I’m not kidding, it has been a crazy day that gave me no time to take pictures and I had anyway a 26th March picture. The  year is wrong but ok.

I think I’ll forgive me if sometimes, hope no more, I will find no time to pick the camera but I’ll be able to publish an old picture taken in the same of another year + another “extra picture” I’ve taken since march 13th 2010 that I had not published yet.

There is a new gallery for this project. “A picture a day… keeps blackness away”.

How the day looked like today.

I guess “eyes on fire” are a problem for everyone, but, for someone who has to study and who loves taking picture and gets contact with people mainly through the web, a day of “eyes on fire” sounds more like a “standby day”

I just bothered my mother and my boyfriend and wasted water with a shower.

It’s a lovely day, isn’t it?

Sunny day today!

It’s growing up fast!

A flower of which I’ve not been taking a picture of since spring 2008

To end up with a post lunch “walk on the balcony” with parents to get the last sun rays and, to bother mom while she was eating her mandarin orange

The sunflower and the webmaster

Finally the first sunflower, of the two I planted the 3rd March, come out:

and the webmaster came to solve some little problems with my computers

I bothered him a little to take this picture but he didn’t complain too much. He can be lovely, can’t he?