Desires deserve space: when you miss the stars

Some experiences draw out the best in us, and for me, this kind of emergence often takes the form of creative ambushes. My favourite genre of art incursions is the artist residency — those programs that offer hospitality in exchange for producing a work that engages with the territory being temporarily inhabited. An artist residency is, essentially, an invitation to listen. To the place, to the people, and to oneself. This summer, for the third time – and the second alongside Ilaria Leva – I took part in the artist residency L’Elba del Vicino.

We’re not professional artists, but we combine our knowledge and methods to create multimedia works that weave together research, participation, and collective creation. In our shared poetics, we often reflect on the value of deep aspirations, unspoken desires, and intimate needs. I, as an anthropologist, explore how trauma shapes places. Ilaria, as an architect, focuses on designing spaces as a way to mend the fractures within territories.

This year’s theme was borrowed from Dante: “We came forth to see the stars again”. We chose to explore this through what we consider the most fragile and powerful human gesture: desire.

Desire: a lack of stars

Desiderare is my favourite Italian word. Its Latin root – de-sidera – literally means “a lack of stars”: that sensation of yearning for something beyond our reach, which moves us precisely because we cannot hold it. It happens when we long for something intangible, elusive — like the stars. We conducted 10 interviews with residents of Elba – both those born there and those who chose to live there – asking them what they desire. Desire, in their voices, became absence and rootedness, departure and return, wound and light.

A landscape for listening

Our research then took the form of a sound performance designed for a seated outdoor audience. We stitched together local soundscapes, micro-narratives, silences, and words: a poetic audio documentary that guided listeners on a still journey into the island’s desires. Ilaria designed the setting to be ephemeral and chaotic, amplifying the contemplative and immersive dimension of the experience. Soft lighting, local materials, asymmetrically arranged chairs — some facing away, some in a circle — as if to say: there’s no single direction from which to listen. Everyone could find their own position.

Each person, their own rhythm.

Shared desires

At the end of the listening experience, we invited the audience to give something back: a desire. Each person received a small card cut into the shape of a rock, like the ones jutting out around the island. We asked them to write or draw a desire — anonymously. Then we assembled a blue canvas dotted in white, like a constellation of shared longings.

At the end, everyone took home a paper rock, to inhabit or disinhabit. Each participant picked a desire that wasn’t theirs — and carried it away, as a way of holding and mirroring someone else’s inner world. Because perhaps no desire is entirely ours alone.