The travelling artist





Oskar Barrile
The travelling Artist
Notices to Mariners No. 1

The trip as a  liminal condition by definition ....
The traveling artist, between a contingent world inhabited by humans beings at a particular historical moment and an empathetic world, made up of several worlds, inhabited by memories, by playmates that only I know and only I meet ...
A world of worlds, synchronous, polysemic, simultaneous and undecidable.
The travelling artist is constantly passing trough, a bearer of gifts for those who remain here, for those who cherish the illusion of living in a single world ...
Gifts that are the remnant, that does not dissolve and are not detained by custom or return.
Gifts that are what is saved by the rapacity of smugglers ...
The traveling artist is more like a pendulum, backwards and forwards between a quarrelsome and constantly fearfull present and an enchanted world, elusive and magical.
The traveling artist has this task: to travel the paths used by smugglers looking for new or redescovered playmates. From their expertise springs the work, in front of which I can only say "I made it!" Nothing else.
The created work is a  little fire received as a  gift, what remains after the return journey is the greatest  talisman 
The created work is the tangible proof of the existence of a language ...
The traveling artist is grateful to the work that put him in empathic contact with the rest, but another task awaits him.
That of wandering along the paths of silent knowledge, as the alchemists knew, that of involving other travelling artists and not only them, to put together their own adventures and plan new ones, to re-use, recycle their own and others' experiences: the art of any true traveler.
More than a creator of works, however unavoidable, the traveling artist is a designer of worlds ...
No linear path, no growth, no development perhaps. To learn, to know, yes!
Very few still know the etymology of these verbs and their equivalents in other ancient languages, but none of them coincide with evolution, progress, grow up and mature ...
We must devise a linear and irreversible time to accept these false synonyms, had just been passed fit but now useless.
No desire to go back to regret distant past of course, only that the idea of cycles of mutation, of change rather than evolving, progressing, growing up and maturing.
I want to repeat,  a traveler then, an explorer even, but above alla a commuter: inside and outside the world ...
The travelling artist's life is also a series of projects and shipwrecks and missed trains. A continuous packing and unpacking your bags in front of the custom officers.
An attitude shared by all the frontier people, especially if it is a sea border, that of  not recognizing they are on the border, right on the edge ...
The frontier is always the legendary place where  the most unbridled selfishness and the most gushing hypocrisy cross...
But it is also the place where tales, stories, human lives, and  objects themselves acquire a new dwsign, are transformed, recycled taking new forms, new lives ...
The traveling artist prefers places like these where the easier it is to remain invisible, to shuffle the cards, to be a sailor, go for-nothing, and like the followers of ancient initiatory orders, to sometimes be derided for his actions as wella as for his opinions. 
What is then the artist's commitement?
The artist is incredibly committed to seek and identify new possible worlds and new routes,  along with millions of people around the planet in recent years, leaving to others the tedious task of deploying their works lined up in favour or against  new martyrs and heroes.

        Ancona, 26 June 2003
       Oskar Barrile












self portrait with a plotter _ 2003