"Wandering lonely,
Departing as a cloud,
Knowing only what must be known,
Unaware of what is yet to come.
As soon as we take the path,
The ego starts to fall apart;
The landscape unveils itself,
Its landmarks becoming our bones.
Our tone, our vessel and our soul.
A song carried by the wind,
Resonating across places,
Awakening each one into being.
What we see is what we are,
And what we sing is what will be alive.
To abandon this would be a sacrilege —
For the landscape breathes only when carried in song-line."
In Australian Aboriginal culture, songlines — or Dreaming Tracks — are invisible paths that traverse the entire continent. Traced by the Ancestors during the Dreamtime, they connect sacred sites, communities, and distant territories. Each stretch of the path is a verse, each place a passage of the song: together, they form cosmic maps that are not read with the eyes, but through memory and voice.
Following a songline is an act of responsibility: it means keeping the landscape alive, moving through it with gestures, rhythms, rituals, and stories that have sustained it for thousands of years.
Belonging to this world is the tjuringa, a sacred object that preserves the essence of an individual: a carved board or stone containing the ancestral spirit responsible for conception. It does not represent — it is. It is presence, identity, a line of continuity between the person, their place of origin, and their community.
The tjuringa is the threshold through which one recognizes where they come from and what they are called towards.
These principles — the invisibility of the path, origin as a preserved energy, and responsibility toward the land — guided the creation of the Songlines series, developed during my last period in Australia in 2024. The project does not reproduce Aboriginal songlines, nor does it reference them directly: it embraces their universal significance.
The journey, attentive listening, engagement with materials, and intuitive understanding of the landscape become forms of orientation, as if the path itself produces a trace.
The canvases made in places that are significant to me in Australia arise precisely from this gesture: laying them on the ground, allowing the soil to absorb them, letting sand, wind, ash, and matter imprint the surface. Each canvas becomes a restitution, a sensitive map of what the place carries — a surface that does not represent the landscape, but records it, letting its textures, imprints, and stories speak.
The theme of the desert also returns in the series, marking an end to it. There, the funeral takes place in a waterless place, where every rebirth must confront aridity, absence, and silence.
It is the desert as an original space: a field of transformation where what is taken away allows something new to emerge. In songlines, as in my practice, traversing the void becomes a necessary passage to redefine oneself.
Songlines is therefore a dialogue between places, materials, and gestures.
A path built in relationship with what is encountered: ocean-borne wood, stones, sands, and surfaces that have already traveled and carry traces of other movements.
The work thus becomes an extended form of listening, allowing oneself to be guided by what the land tells and preserves.
