Deleted drawing of my son
Instructions
For this work you need at least one child, many papers, pencils and/or objects that can be used for a drawing and a box.
Every day I will ask my son if he would like to draw me a picture.
Every day I will erase a drawing of my son’s very carefully by erasing every mark with the eraser, it will remain an erased sheet of paper with the original title only and I will keep it.
Every day for the rest of my life I will draw a picture for him and I will keep it.
When I will no longer be able to draw or I will no longer be there, he will be able to open the box of my drawings on the condition that I erase one every day, in a meticulous way, to retrace what I was.
This work is a process, you who start it won’t be able to see the end.
This process will have as its final result only blank sheets of paper.
This process activates deep knowledge between the two participants.
In this case the two participants are father and son.
The children can interrupt the process whenever they want, the parents can’t.
From the first drawing this process of knowledge can last two days if you are unlucky, to more than 100 years if you are lucky.
Deletion as a mechanism of knowledge
The only person I would never erase a drawing from is my son, it’s an exercise of power and I’ve always had problems with the exercise of power…then, I realized that erasing is basically a gesture of attention, if you want to erase well you have to analyze, retrace, then look, almost read. Erasing is a caring, it’s an act of knowledge. The result of this process is not to go back to the blank sheet of paper, what you get from it is never really white, it is marked, a bit worn, worn out; it is an indication of a scene, of an instantaneous energy, of a precise moment, of a past and familiar time, of an energy that has been released and through the eraser has turned into barely perceptible and mute, in practice a memory.
The life of men is like that of trees, when it ends it is only halfway through.
During this period I retraced the signs of my son’s drawing by chasing with the rubber a koala on the tree, a moon too far away, the number four. I understood that sometimes he is left-handed, that he loves fat pencils, that at the age of three he already knows everything and in time he will specialize in something. He’s understood that I’m strange, but he indulges me and has fun. For him for now I have left drawings of a snail out of focus, a telescope for fireflies and a long-legged dog.
Bio
Francesco Pedrini has chosen the sky as his field of interest. His research is related to astronomy, meteorology and iconographic research in historical archives. His last personal exhibitions have been at the Galleria Milano, at the Susanne Albrecht Gallery in Berlin. Other solo shows at the Galleria Martano in Turin, at the Facultad de Derecho de la Universidad in Buenos Aires, at the Tirana Institute for Contemporary Art and in group exhibitions in numerous galleries and institutions, including the Dal Monte Foundation in Bologna, the Biennale disegno in Rimini, the Fondzione Buziol in Venice and the Tophane Culture Center in Istanbul.
