Travel Notes 06: Move

Travel Notes 06 – A series of daily entries about being abroad for 60 days

What is it about wide open spaces, be it a meadow, a sports field or even a plaza that captures the imagination or freedom that seems deeply embedded in each one of us? Perhaps with all that space there is just the possibility of movement that calls for our bodies to go and walk, run, dance and pace back and forth across these great expanses.

The front of San Marco is something like this, a large square they sprawls before the grand architecture of this historic building that now is a hotel. I sit outside for a moment, reading, and doing a few scribbles in my sketchbook.

The next stop on my agenda is the Museum of contemporary art better known MUSAC. Galleries and museums often frame the cultural destinations that make it onto my list of places to visit in foreign cities.

MUSAC is a pretty building with wonderful panels that refract and shimmy with colour. Inside, the expansive gallery spaces play host to three different artists, focusing mainly on sculptural installations and contraptions that juxtapose the familiar into a new unusual amalgamation of context and meaning.

Outside, a wrecked truck serves as an opening exhibition piece; which rewinds the assumption that there was this unusual vehicle parked really close to the wall.

There are certain elements of modern art that understandably I see people not ‘getting’, and I certainly can resonate with having that view. But perhaps this is something that ultimately I have learnt to love about the mysteries, analogies and imperfect interpretations of material colliding together. The conversation between the audience and the artist is as individual as an author and a reader.

Adding museums onto the travel agenda seems to complement the inspiration I seek from being abroad. Exposure to art amplifies this sense of being moved. And this is all one can really ask for when they embark on a travel adventure.

Notes from Saturday, 8 October, 2016