A room of my own is exactly that—an idea, rather a standalone assemblage, or tangible or visible walls, windows, and ceilings, with which only I am intimately acquainted, and one whose construction and demolition I can exact as memories and dreams fuse, or untangle. The profundity from which all things grow within it is unknown; the mechanism of its bloom is enchanting; its secrets are mine.
A room of my own is a portal to worlds of my creation, and within it are every color, scent, and feeling I’ve come across passing through one another; like whirling dervishes, both precise and unrestrained, yet moving in tandem. It is sensitive as I barrel through moments of fantastical sorrow; it cradles me when the disjointed ecstasies that form my turbulent Humanness tire me; I trust it to keep me safe.
A room of my own is a reckoning. There is nowhere to hide, and nothing that begs for masking. There is no need for reprieve any less than there is no place for me to stand and simply witness the state of my life without needing to confront that which I’d like to alienate myself from. Weary fragments from my past and anxious projections of the future cohabitate here, sharing everything from a white, iron daybed like the one I had when I was a child, to a sweet café con leche the way my mother makes it.
Its shape is just as immutable as it is fluid, and only as aged and learned as I may be at any given moment, should I choose to be. It cannot be defined by, anymore than I cannot be defined by, a singular word or facet of its contents. This room absorbs its previous shapes, those lost to time, with the same force it swells as I add roles—daughter, friend, confidante, lover, stranger—and experiences to the canon of my own history.
This is to say that I write, not inhabiting a specific physical location, but searching for the limits of the ever-expanding universe that begets my own imagination’s boundlessness. A room of my own is a place in my soul that manifested the moment I recognized a daydream as something I could take to paper, penning every feeling that sprung from the fount nestled in the garden of this idea, this “room” where the depths of my heart and the archives of my intellect both soar and find their footing, respectively; an idea that never goes away. And this idea, this room within me, is real.
This room lives and breathes, regardless of my misplacing of its entrance, intentional or otherwise. A room of my own has no fixed point and knows no time and place, simply the imagined confines of this room, this One Big Idea I have been building, brick-by brick, that which I have no recollection of beginning and no knowledge of when I’ll be so lucky to adjust its last block; it’s alive because I’m alive.
A Room of Our Own begets imagination, asking its participants to take stock of their own rooms. It is an offering which stakes its own position, element by element, fiber by fiber, as an idea for the future. Each of the artists in this exhibition, and every visitor, come as a representative of the room they carry and the roles they play within it. I ask that you take your time here, too.
Curation and statement by Maria Gabriela Di Giammarco
