Federica di Carlo

Without Colors

Before forming its atmosphere and its oceans, the Earth must have resembled a grey ball revolving in space. As the Moon does now; where the ultraviolet rays radiated by the Sun arrive directly, all colors are destroyed, which is why the cliffs of the lunar surface, instead of being colored like Earth’s, are of a dead, uniform grey. If the Earth displays a varicolored countenance, it is thanks to the atmosphere, which filters that murderous light.

A bit monotonous – Qfwfq confirmed – but restful, all the same. I could go for miles and miles at top speed, the way you can move where there isn’t any air about, and all I could see was grey upon grey. No sharp contrasts: the only really white white, if there was any, lay in the center of the Sun and you couldn’t even begin to approach it with your eyes; and as far as really black black is concerned, there wasn’t even the darkness of night, because all the stars were constantly visible.
[...]

You rarely met anyone in those days: there were so few of us! To survive with that ultraviolet you couldn’t be too demanding. Above all the lack of atmosphere asserted itself in many ways; you take meteors for example: they fell like hail from all the points of space, because then we didn’t have the stratosphere where nowadays they strike, as if on a roof, and disintegrate.

Then there was the silence: no use shouting! Without any air to vibrate, we were all deaf and dumb. The temperature? There was nothing around to retain the Sun’s heat: when night fell it was so cold you could freeze stiff.
[…]

I put my hands to my deafened ears, and at the same moment I also felt the need to cover my nose and mouth, so as not to breathe the heady blend of oxygen and nitrogen that surrounded me, but strongest of all was the impulse to cover my eyes, which seemed ready to explode.

The liquid mass spread out at my feet had suddenly turned a new color, which blinded me, and I exploded in an articulate cry which, a little later, took on a specific meaning: “Ayl! The sea is blue!”

The great change so long awaited had finally taken place. On the Earth now there was air, and water. And over that newborn blue sea, the Sun – also colored – was setting, an absolutely different and even more violent color. So I was driven to go on with my senseless cries, like: “How red the Sun is, Ayl! Ayl! How red!”

Night fell. Even the darkness was different. I ran looking for Ayl, emitting cries without rhyme or reason, to express what I saw: “The stars are yellow, Ayl! Ayl!”

Federica Di Carlo

Federica di Carlo
(Rome, 1984. She lives and works between Rome and Milan.)

Blue Marble is the name by which the first image of the Earth taken from space is known. Among the clouds that surround it we can recognize the Gulf of Aden, the east coast of Africa, and the ice of Antarctica. Addicted to satellite images, it is difficult today to imagine the emotion felt by the two astronauts of the Apollo17 mission who first saw our planet from the outside, recognizing on its surface the profile of continents and seas not in the cartographic representation, but as a living thing.

In a similar way, the work of Federica di Carlo seems to restore wonder to the abstract data and devices that science makes available to us today to observe the Universe. Release a rainbow in a room; combine the blue of the atmosphere and that of the sea; making us look at a new landscape through a lenticular vision that subverts it, capturing a ray of light that is a fleeting and dematerialized limit, sounding the space with a breath are some of the actions that translated into works allow us to have a deeper understanding of the world where we live.

Sopra questo livello ci sarà solo spazio libero (Above this line the space is free) is a work created specifically for the exhibition and takes its title from the definition with which Theodor von Kármán described the physical limit that conventionally marks the boundary between the earth’s atmosphere and outer space.

Above this line, identified at a height of 100 km above sea level, the space is free, it no longer belongs to the individual states.

The work consists of several elements: a solar panel used to power satellites or space stations, on which a drawing ideally represents the cosmos above the Kármán line; a text that shows within the exhibition space the boundary line beyond which the space is freed from the weight of the world and a Polaroid by astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti: a close up of her face closed in the helmet, while performing a compensation breathing exercise, a technique that serves to prepare oneself to manage an “atmosphere” different from ours.

“For me it is important to emphasize the breathing exercise, because combined with the other two elements it works on the concept of overcoming any physical, intellectual or gender limit by breathing deeply”, the artist says. Beyond the line of Kármán the still mythical space of cosmos opens up. From that distance from which the astronaut looks at us, the Earth is a small and shiny marble, far away.

Cecilia Canziani