Tempo e Relazione (Time and Relation)*

The time of the coronavirus forced us into a new relationship with the spaces of daily life. For me, they weren't those of a home, but rather of a plane or a train.

A sudden suspension of my inhabitancy gave birth to new relationships between space and time in a spasmodic search for the luogo dell’anima (soul’s space). Enclosed in our homes, the “walls of discovery” became unprecedented spaces where we saw objects that reminded us of ancient journeys into the world and moments lived in the past. We rediscovered music records that we had not listened to in a long time, and we consumed books that, perhaps, we had read thirty years ago, or that we had never even browsed through.

This new way of living—at home—put us in a new relationship with ourselves, reviewing (re-evaluating?) the notion of time, as the virus forced us to think more quickly and to live more slowly.

A reflection on the present and on the future can only be faced by those who have been able to live this fleeting and suspended time intensely.

The prime space was that of the beginning of March of last year, when we, musicians, would go out on the balconies at 6 p.m. to play for the Italians. We had a need to identify a new distance that was not only that from home to home, from window to window, but, specifically, a renewed relationship among people intent on sharing as many emotional spaces.

An unimagined creative suspension has expanded time as well as ideas. In the attempt to communicate an equal planetary suspension that becomes human, it has reminded us of the smallness of the world and of the human beings who inhabit it.

*Tempo e relazione is the title of a musical composition created by the Italian pianist and composer Giorgio Gaslini in 1957.