Pollens They leave by detachment one by one and in clusters, layering. A seeming fragility. Pollen grains and their microspores are one of the most resistant substances in the plant world. Under anoxic conditions, they linger in ponds and fens for thousands to millions of years. They mirror the past in the future. A story of earlier vegetation and climate status. Pollens waft through me. They intersect my white the mesmerising orange-blue flight of the kingfisher and the bee-eater on the Bacchiglione. Absence wafts through us. Our persistent morphology gradually degraded. Walls and apertures to indicate our structure. Lie down on the ground with me like a layer. The woolly soil teasels the substratum and the soles. Moisture wets palms holding the leash. It’s so windy lately.
Make Me Ready Make me ready for the arrival of the rain which is expected heavy but needed. Show me what I can get rid of pruning shrubs along the fluvial corridor. And if we must leave the fourth industrial revolution behind this augmented social reality to repair our notion of mortality help me not to falter. We may remain one day one last day.
Red Giants What if this is the time the non-negotiable self, the sacred. The line we already crossed. Nothing is more real than the wind in the winter when it cracks the skin and clenches the throat, when it forces each frequency. On the riverbank, it lashes the floodplains and then it pauses. You told me about these years the fatigue, and I do nothing but ponder over our presence. Where were we? What are we bringing along? History is a tale within a tale a series of omissions, hypotheses and mitigations. And we may desecrate remembrance and contaminate our becoming but the urge to outlast the death of the sun slams us. Entrenched in the anxiety to get lost evolving away from the main sequence like red giants. A few decades down the line we will meet, I will sit down across from you and I’ll ask once more do you know my name?
Ilaria Boffa: How I write
My artistic work is mainly based on observation, research, experimentation and language “contamination”.
For me, observing subjects and objects, living and non-living beings, means to pay attention, listen, care, and look with an open mind, compassion, tolerance and curiosity. This entails asking questions and raising doubts about the Anthropocene era.
I write in Italian and English. My sono-poetry combines poetry and field recordings of natural and human-produced sounds that I take with a zoom H6 recorder during trips around the world, or in the Euganean Hills in Italy where I live.
Ilaria Boffa is an Italian poet and sound recordist. She writes bilingual poetry and has published three poetry collections to date. She is one of eight authors included in NeMLA Writing in a Different Language Vol XL 2018. Her sono-poems, which combine poetry and field recording, have been broadcast on Radiophrenia Glasgow radio art festival and Clyde Built Radio Glasgow. Three of her collaborative audio-video installations have been exhibited at Mahalla Festival Murmuration 2021 in Turkey, Nature&Culture Poetry Film Festival 2021 in Sweden, !Flick! International Film Festival 2023 in the US and MK Architektur Exhibition 2023 in Germany.
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All images, text and recording copyright © Ilaria Boffa, 2023. Images taken taken in the Euganean Hills (Italy) by Ilaria Boffa.