frame 46 December 2023
Luce di Trieste
by Matilde Cerruti Quara
MATILDE CERRUTI QUARA is an Italian & British multimedia artist, poet, performance-maker, actor and writer whose practice expands across experimental theatre, text-based artworks and immersive installations. Rooted in language and storytelling, her work investigates identity, archetypes, systems of belief, natural forces, spirituality and rituals, sexuality and power dynamics. Matilde lives and works between London, UK and Trieste, IT.
'LIGHT OF TRIESTE'
I rustle through the pages of a tiny poetry collection I’ve been eager to read. Flip flip flip. Words go by as if looking out the window on a train. My mind is elsewhere. It is the opening line to a title-less poem that finally catches my eye.
It recites: Where do you come from ?
Trieste is unique. It exists on a double frontier: between countries as well as between elemental forces. Proudly facing the Adriatic Sea, where a mysterious world of rocks and subterranean caves meets the expanse of water that is the big blue. Accessible only via high coastal roads, carved into the Karst Plateau. Sitting on the last limb of Friulian land, a few miles before Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Turning its back to the remains of realms bygone, such as the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, strangled together by ferocious dictator Tito.
A place with the qualities of a non-place, it exists and yet it feels imaginary, a neverland out of space and time. It speaks to the seeker or to the inner pilgrim within ourselves. It welcomes the inner contradictions in us all.
Sunset on the dock | Fishing boats on the marina
I should clarify I’m not from Trieste. I’m only writing from here. I arrived in mid-August. Every sunset, every day I’ve swam free, feeling the sea getting more and more under my skin. The sea, my healer.
It’s the last act of a strange summer now finally dissolving into the mush of an autumn which, I hope, will rot it all and brew everything anew in the eternal, blissful process of transformation and rebirth. I’ve been reflecting on the universally subjective topic of identity: as someone born on a border, as an immigrant and now a dual citizen. Perpetually oscillating in a state of in-between.
Like the wind that blows through Trieste, writing doesn’t ask for permission, doesn’t make an appointment or knocks politely on the door to be ushered in. Writing has to do with being a medium. To offer oneself as a selfless and capable carrier vessel, to become a fishing boat, like the ones docked at the marina here. Throwing nets into the unknown in the hope of catching some kind of truth; ferrying words between a world of invisible energies, from the deep silver lake of the collective unconscious into the tangible realm of articulation. Lived life energies leaving their marks on the hull over the course of countless nights spent casting the glow of conic lamp shades onto the Adriatic’s dark waters. A desperate, innate urge to communicate, to tell all the stories, counteracted by an equally profound need for solitude and, at least in my case, an awkward extroverted introversion.
All hues of blue | My notebook & the sea
Trieste is a great place to write. The noise in my head stops every time I come here. I feel I can drift away and rest in a concrete bubble of nowness. Of all places, perhaps because we are very similar, I feel this one understands me without judgement.
A deep, open port. Grounding, watery, poetic. Magical. Unapologetic. A thing of its own. Its own thing. A place of passage, crossroads & discovery.
Trieste is a theatrical hideout, a nest where the peculiar and spectacular lights of Friuli Venezia Giulia shine mystically from dawn to dusk. Shafts of lemon-gold burst from the sky into the clear, azure sea, glaring reflections upon the waves’ crests. Its rocky pebble beaches, like Le Ginestre, named for the sunflower-blonde shrubs of gorse, are only reachable after a perpendicular descent. It’s rough walking there, particularly on delicate urban feet, eternally trapped in shoes.
Trieste is an orchestra, a swirl of languages. A free-spirited matriarch. A Slavic-Italian goddess.
Trieste is the restless, ecstatic dance of its wind. Blowing and puffing up to 180-200 km/h on a moody day: rebellious bora, the only wind of female gender in my mother tongue. Il vento is otherwise male, free to shed responsibility.
The streets & their spirits | Cloudy day at Le Ginestre
My mother tongue has also chosen for all cities to be women, for reasons I can understand: forced as they are to mother their inhabitants, to tolerate the exploitation of their energies.
Where do you come from?
I’m neither a Triestinian, nor a Londoner. When I’m in England, I’m too Italian. When I’m in Italy, I’ve apparently become too English. My paternal ancestors: Italian & French with a proclivity to bankruptcy and pretentious surnames. My maternal ones: an inextricable entanglement of Austro-Hungarians & Eastern Europeans with a likely pinch of Kazakh.
Questions crowd and race along the circuit of my mind. What does it mean to live in-between? To dance at the intersection? To exist on the borderland?
We live in an epoch of utter separation, divisions, compartmentalisations, algorithms segmenting us into thinking the real world is as we want to think it is. The margins are clear, and we are called to choose sides. Then the absurd abstraction of man-made borders continues. Traces of graphite on geopolitical maps. Divide and conquer.
Box box box. Label label label. Little space for the human conundrum. For the paradox we are.
The door to my hideout | Suffolk Song Cycle & my writing table
Where do you come from?
I grew up an only child in the often-forgotten, mystical region of Friuli Venezia-Giulia, in the North-East of Italy in a tiny village of 15,000 people.
I don’t remember very much of my childhood which apparently is a trauma-induced response. To cancel history makes one able to rewrite it according to their own version. My father died in a car crash when I was 7 years-old. From that moment onwards, our household was shattered and I understood there exists no such thing as certainty. Better to prevent ugly surprises by being as unpredictable as I could myself. I became my own caravan, though perhaps not my own home.
Where do you come from?
My mother is convinced we must have some traveller blood. When I was a child she used to tell me that all it took to make any room a home is a bunch of fresh flowers. After my dad’s passing, though, she stopped journeying.
Where do you come from?
I’ve spent my life living nomadically, and am reassured by constant change. I have a few good habits, or rituals, and used to have some tricky ones too. I oppose comfort, reliability, routine. I don’t own a television. I ignore my sofa. Everything is unexpected, all is uncertain. Instinctively, I resist becoming a functioning thread of the social tapestry. I’m a sociable loner. For a long time, there was chaos.
Where do you come from?
I was born and raised on an aquamarine river of white gravel. Today, in London, I live on a grey river with a doubtful, opaque bed. The grimy Thames. Poor Thames. Not its fault. London: I think of what feels like a codependent, masochistic relationship with a city built of bricks, concrete hopes and intersections. An island on a river made of microcosmos and hidden in plain sight inside another island. The ultimate matrioska.
View from my bedroom | Cute car and cinema sign
In 2019, I fell in love with an old apartment in Trieste. Simple, monastic, high ceilings, few rooms, full of light. Even more charming after I stripped it of the house-decadence of grandma’s wallpaper. A refugium peccatorum, perched steps away from one of the city’s oldest theatres and all its cinemas.
It felt like a natural place to find safety. Where all fluvial ripples converge to become larger than life.
Here, the living seem to be on a daily mission to celebrate life’s finest: a never-ending collective banquet is always taking place, fuelled by some ravenous sense of conviviality. The language itself is a myriad of sounds, a phonetic constellation: Italian, Slovenian and German steer the way, accompanied by sounds from the Balkans and Eastern Europe. There is even a little Greek, as well as Fûrlan—the idiom spoken by one third of the region’s population. Beware telling a native they are Friulian though, or vice versa.
Triestinians welcome everyone but suffice to themselves. They are assertive about it. After all, they only became Italians in 1954, by which time Italy had been a country for 93 years. I always think of Trieste as a kind of Slavic Naples: there is here a certain attitude, and love of its own inner rules.
Daily joy | Viale XX Settembre
During summer, at each dawn, a serious competition takes place – reminiscent of seagulls fighting over a herring – to secure a spot alongside the pavements giving way to the rocks descending into the sea. Welcome to the public beach. Its cinematic quality, bronzed bodies of all ages, colourful swimwear, foldable deckchairs, towels, tupperwares of food makes me think of a Fellinian carnival. Not to mention El Pedocin, the tiny louse, aka La Lanterna which even made it to the Cannes Film Festival: a folkloristic pebble litoral separated by gender by a wall since 1890, the last-standing of its kind in Europe. Fear not, passionate lovebirds; you can coo together again in the deep swimming area. A local eccentricity and treasure, it is proudly defended by old & new generations alike. Panic spread when the entrance toll was abruptly raised from 1 to 1.10 euros.
Religions mix beautifully too. There is something magical about a chanted vesper in ecclesiastic Slavic at the Serbian-Orthodox temple (devoted to Saint Spyridon, whose corpse, it’s said, smelled like fresh basil once they popped him out his grave, a tangible testimony to his sanctity); admiring the local synagogue or the grand façade of the catholic Church of Sant’Antonio Taumaturgo, protector of the pilgrims.
But this is enough about those who breathe. It is the dead who drew me here.
As a happily melancholic city Trieste has mused artists and literates. There is a sense of eternal stillness and yet a lot of whispering currents. Maybe the streets keep their ghosts – a friend wrote upon visiting. I think they’re right.
1964 theatre poster for Zeno's Conscience | Beeswax candles in the Serbian-Orthodox Temple of Saint Spyridon
If you keep open, as you wander along the main roads, the viali, the old port, the steep streets climbing the hips of this bizarre, unconventional sea town, you may still hear their word. I believe they have a great sense of humour.
There is, of course, James Joyce, Trieste’s most famous self-exile, whose longest period in the same flat here was three years. Family drama. Varying fortunes. Relatable. A stint as a bank clerk in Rome. Writers, we all have hope! But you might also stumble into Italo Svevo: reading ‘Zeno’s Conscience’ could, one day, help you quit smoking.
Or be seduced by Leonor Fini, born in Argentina and raised in town, disguised as a boy to escape being kidnapped by an abusive father. She went on to become a great Surrealist, sharing her Paris apartment with a plethora of beloved felines and lovers. Giorgio Strehler might stop you in your tracks. The great theatre-maker who established Il Piccolo Teatro of Milan with Paolo Grassi, breathing thespian life off the rubble of WWII, revered the light of Trieste as one of his main inspirations. You could sit down and have a coffee with Ernest Hemingway. Amiably chat with Leo Castelli, whose destiny took its course away from a career in insurance, making him the founding father, or accountable for, the art system of today. Meet my neighbour, poet Umberto Saba, of Jewish mother and absent Christian father, who opened his bookstore in 1919 having close to no formal education. Pose for Wanda Wulz, the first Italian female photographer to have her work acquired by MoMa with a dreamy superimposition of a cat and a young, self-possessed girl titled Cat Woman …extraordinary lives looping and intertwining with one another.
Where do you come from?
James Joyce overlooking the canal | Sinuous corners of Trieste
For a long time, I couldn’t understand my restlessness.
And so, I used to care. I used to be triggered by this question. It felt like an accusation.
I used to grudge those who root themselves within the conviction of their identity, their accent, their seemingly happy family structures, those who seem to know exactly who they are because their parents knew who they were.
Now, I celebrate the fact that I am an international alien. All my favourite people feel like that. Sometimes I think everyone feels like that, it’s just that it takes courage to admit it. Dogmas can be reassuring. But they also discourage people to be curious, hence hindering their freedom. Fluidity is a gift, as it allows one to stay flexible, in fluxus. Like water.
Water doesn’t compromise and yet it can change into a multitude of states, and within each identity it stays true to itself. Soil instead needs water to become mud, to become mouldable and malleable. When mud dries, it cracks and breaks into a million sad, lifeless splinters going back to dust.
Fluidity allows writers to be fishing boats.
“Trieste is a Latin-Slavic window onto the Balkanic world” confidently states Ettore, my taxi driver. We are on our way to the airport. “Don’t take me wrong, I’m not a nationalist, but the more time passes, the more I feel a sense of nostalgia towards the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That was the Trieste of Joyce: a melting pot, drenched in culture.”
Scala dei Giganti (Giant's Stairway) | The triumphant Arc of Riccardo built back in 32-33 BC
Where do you come from?
Animating the curled, rebellious ribbon of land garnishing the North-Eastern edge of the boot that is Italy, there lies a city called Trieste. Across its eventful history, it has been a point of arrival, transit and departure. Motherly repair, stern Karsic rocks and runway from where ideas take off. A port and a mythological metropolis. I go to hide there.
Where do you come fro-
ENOUGH!
I shush my thoughts and turn to the untitled poem. I want to read how it ends.
'Where we have come from, need not be where we go
It only matters that what we are, we know'
Jini Fiennes - ‘Suffolk Song Cycle & Other Poems’, Virnix Press (1995)
Trieste's newspaper Il Piccolo established in 1881 | A city climbing onto the Karst hills
Trieste is not my Ithaka, it’s not the end destination, even if I were to move here forever.
Trieste is my process, the mentor I never had. It is the gift of the journey within.
This city is somewhere for those who don’t come from anywhere.
