Franco La Cecla, Mente locale, 2021

What does a poet like Borges, who talks about his city, have in common with the immigrant who settles in a new reality, or with the Indonesian native who sees in his village the summary of the world, or with the inhabitant of a courtyard in historical Palermo? A competence, equal in richness and implications to language, which is acquired through living, through direct contact with the space that surrounds us. Moving through time and space in a path that goes from the fishermen of Terrasini to Perec’s Paris, La Cecla traces this uninterrupted interaction between us and our environment that is so familiar to us that it is not perceived. And if today this interaction has often been reduced to mere consumption – after having been largely expropriated by the “experts of space”: architects, politicians, administrators… – our ability to make the local mind remains latent and takes advantage of every crack in the bureaucratic system to come out. And it is precisely this continuous and imperceptible dialogue with our environment that allows us not only to use it but also to transform it.