The Significance of Neighbourhood

Posted on February 28, 2020 by Art for Housewives

A home is also about place. The physical location of your home is an extension of your identity. Characteristics such as oriental or occidental, polar or tropical, urban or rural, swanky or slum will all affect the way the home is perceived. And experienced.

In a world full of dissociations, of Us versus Them, a neighbourhood has a special significance. It implies an interconnectedness with those who are part of the same place.

L'arco di via Doria

Our home in Rome is in the Trieste-Salaria neighbourhood. Long before we lived here, the area was inhibited by Neanderthals. But much has happened in the past 250,000 years. Such as the early 1900s construction of a fairy tale complex known as Coppedè. Named after the Florentine architect who designed it, Gino Coppedè, it’s a mix of Liberty, Gothic, Medieval, and Baroque. The area makes me think of Judy Garland walking around Oz saying “Lions and tigers and bears” as the buildings are embellished with murals and relief sculptures depicting all kind of hybrid animals. Since he was a freemason, Coppedè was fixated with esoteric symbols such as the huge chandelier hanging from the via Doria arch at the complex entrance. From the arch you can see the Fontana delle Rane (frogs) at Piazza Mincio inspired by Bernini’s Fontana delle Tartarughe (turtles) of Piazza Mattei. (Bernini is considered by some scholars to be a freemason, too.) It’s like walking into a picture book.

The European city is quite different than the American one. Most people live in apartment buildings surrounded by commercial activities. From my living room window, I can often smell the roasted coffee or the baking pastries coming from shops across the street. And anything necessary for daily life is within 100 meters so we don’t need a car. Walking helps me create a rapport with my neighbourhood. And going to the same shops all the time creates a feeling of familiarity making it almost mandatory to spend a few minutes “shooting the breeze” with the shopkeepers.

Neighbourhoods are a means of helping people stay connected.

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Related: Coppedé, a magical neighborhood in Rome + The Coppede’ Quarter in Rome – an insider’s view of unusual architecture

P.S. Legend has it that the Beatles, after a concert at the nearby Piper Club, threw their clothes into the Fontana delle Rane.

(“History of a Home”  Cynthia Korzekwa ©)

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History of a Home

Posted on February 26, 2020 by Art for Housewives

History of a Home

Our first home is our mother’s womb from which, at birth, we are evicted. In the womb, biology manages our needs but, once out of the womb, all that changes. Some are luckier than others and continue to be nurtured wheres others are left homeless. It is a fundamental moment in our lives because our childhood follows us wherever we go acting as a compass to give us a direction. And if our compass is broken, it’s easy to get lost.

To be at home with oneself, it’s imperative to have a concept of home. A home is not just a material structure. It’s an equilibrium (and a dialogue) between the part that’s within us and the part that surrounds us.  It’s a reflection of who we are. Thus, as a form of self-analysis, I’ve decided to study the history of my home. But here “history” isn’t about when or by whom the house was constructed. Or about who lived in it before me. The “history” is about me and the personal history I’ve created while living within the physical space I call home. Since I don’t live alone but with my companion, it’s also about the history of the two of us together. It’s the history of the door that we both have a key to. It’s the history of the sofa where together we sit and watch films or cringe to depressing newscasts. It’s the history of the bed where we make love or where we peacefully and sometimes not so peacefully sleep. It’s the history of the bathroom where we care for our bodies or look in the mirror to see the passing of time on our faces. It’s the history of the kitchen where we drink coffee in the mornings or where we prepare meals that will become parts of our bodies.

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Related: Psychology of the house by Marc, Olivier available on Archive.org HERE + Reconfiguration and my Birthday Post.

(“History of a Home”  Cynthia Korzekwa ©)

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Self-Isolation

Posted on February 18, 2020 by Art for Housewives

House on a Hill

Once upon a time, I wanted to live high on a hill with a view of the sea. But then I realized it meant having a car and being organized enough to buy everything I needed all at one time and not being able to casually have aperitifs with my friends on the waterfront. Plus all those movies about serial killers made me afraid of the isolation. So was the choice to be poetic or to be practical?

Is it possible that practical can be poetic, too?

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Alternative Thinking

Posted on February 17, 2020 by Art for Housewives

Relativity

This morning I told my goldfish “it’s all relative.” He’d been looking out the window and saw the sea. “I could be there instead of here”, he’d said to himself wistfully. Reading his thoughts I said “or, instead, you could be here on my plate.”

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Beauty is Not Just for the Eyes

Posted on February 3, 2020 by Art for Housewives

Basil, Apples, and Volver

The other morning I was at the dining room table working on some notes. In front of me was a newly potted basil plant, a bowl of apples, and our cat, Volver, who was taking a nap on some of my drawings. “How lovely”, I said to myself, and smiled. This simple scene had elevated my spirits.

Beauty gives us a sensation of happiness. But if we are surrounded by ugliness and degradation, we, too, feel degraded. It’s like the Broken Window Theory—a car with a broken window is more likely to be robbed and vandalized than is a car with windows intact. Similarly, we are less likely to litter in an area that’s clean than we are in an area that’s full of trash. If our surroundings influence our behaviour, then simply being surrounded by beauty can make us a better person.

The cultivation of beauty in everyday life modifies our mind. But beauty is not just visual. In his Nobel Prize acceptance lecture, Russian-American poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky said that aesthetics is the mother of ethics. In other words, beauty is also about the way we live our lives.

Our personal aesthetics are constantly being expressed by the way we interrelate with the world around us. Smiling, expressing gratitude, or even politely waiting our turn are, for example, extensions of these aesthetics. And have you ever noticed that, after doing a good deed, you feel a pleasant sensation? Or that altruistic people seem to be happier than egotists? Could it be that practicing moral beauty can create new neurological paths and transform us into a better person?

Unfortunately, I have no time now for further reflection as pragmatic duties demand my presence. However, one thing is certain– for the Age of Reconfiguration, I want to learn how to live my life as if it were a work of art in progress.

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Related: Joseph Brodsky’s Nobel Lecture + Pyotr Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution + Art as Experience by John Dewey + Art and Neuroscience

Posted in Age of Reconfiguration, Beauty, Lifestyle, Volver the cat | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments