someone else's words that move me, words that do the speaking for me, words that somehow catch the essence of tonight

Enrico Lunghi
wrote this for the 52. Venice Biennale

"So here I am in an indistinct place filled with strange sensualities. I abandon myself to feelings that are welling up into my consciousness after obscure stays in the depths of memory. Shameful desires reverberate in the indefinable scents that surround me.

And yet the approach was vague, around the back of a courtyard full of promises. Venice makes so many of them, and keeps so few. Then, without warning, a corridor indirectly puts me on the threshold of a sense of deja-vu. Here, a fan breathes air that has come from afar. The colours and materials also seem to have become stranded in the present. Sounds, again, remind me of elsewhere, of evenings, of other evenings.

I move forward. I can feel my heart pounding. My skin brushes against an atmosphere charged with possible touches. The rhythms interlace like lovers' sighs. Outside, the daylight, the water, the boats. Maybe I don't even see them, but it is enough that I am imagining them.

I let myself be carried along by the passing time. I open up all the pores of my being to what is reaching me from outside. I trust in what I am, in what I want, now, in this place. On the other side of the wall, across the windows, work follows its course, as does the day, and the water, too. Lives pass. But it's on the other side.

Then, as desire at last pushes me further, I find myself in front of two door leaves. there, the presence of the other, although inaccessible, becomes palpable. Like memory of a sweating body from an unforgettable film. I remain, for an undefined moment, the perpetual desirer, while the disturbance that permeates the walls moves away like the foghorn of a ship leaving the misty quayside.

Now, another, different story begins, for me and me alone.