I am an Italian writer who went to Los Angeles thirty years ago. I followed my “American in Paris” and stayed, spellbound by the big sky.

This photograph shows me when I was 6 or 7 years old, next to the house in which I was born, in Besano, a small village of Northern Italy in front of the Suisse mountains. The native place, my two younger cousins, my grandfather the painter. He shaped my life more than I could ever imagine. I lost him when I was seven years old. Even if I was lost many times, every time in the end the good direction appeared, my hand in his, feeling his love and the sense of life he had traced in me, and guided.

I am a scholar who became a journalist, a journalist who turned into an art-writer and curator, moved from the eighteenth-century philosophy to contemporary art, and from Italy to France to California, where research and teaching (UCLA, USC, OTIS College of Art and Design) joined with writing and and craftwork.

My blog, THE KITE, is my most recent experience as a writer: ten years building a family tree about art and life: the artists in my family surrounded by a great many artists of different countries. All artists I consider worth meeting for any kind of reader. THE KITE is not for specialists, is addressed to those who love the arts. It’s a lunch table for sharing the best possible food.  To know in detail about my previous work,  go to my web site: http://www.albertini.ws

I also became a writer who publishes and makes by hand her own books. Some of them are available for sale in this blog.

The after-covid time is reopening a new life that is not really like the old we had before. Our emotional apparatus has changed, still tentative, hesitating. THE KITE is almost ten years old. I have been taken by a deep desire to transfer the whole body of this on-line scroll into paper books, hand made by me: 18 volumes.

A few months ago I wrote some paragraphs telling the readers why I started this blog. What does it mean in my own life as a writer. I reproduce it here because THE KITE has been, and is, the focus of my work and a flame for my life.


“The first year of blogging: from April to July 2014, 36 posts. My purpose was based on determination and stubbornness, genetic in my family, pushing me to continue to work as a journalist in a situation of complete freedom. The art magazines where I had worked for years with discovery passion had progressively lost their openness to new, unknown names and ideas. The pleasure of discussion crushed by the market rules rolling like bulldozers, clearing the ground.

Three years wait for an article about Jim Show, only published when he had his first solo show in Paris. I missed my first and following steps into the art writing on the large pages of an Italian newspaper, L’Unità. They had meant freedom from the academic world’s rules, a daily contact with readers, and such a fast response to the chaotic world around that my voice was often trembling, while dictating the articles on the phone at the end of the day. An electric typewriter was the only technology. Journalism became a passion lifting me from the heaviness of working as a translator of philosophical books and as a researcher in humanities struggling with academic specialisms. I don’t think I’ve ever made real decisions. Life was guiding me to accept challenges. I didn’t know if I could be a journalist, I tried. It seemed strange I was easily accepted. That’s why I still do not know how to define myself, and I end up telling I’m a writer. A maker of hand-made books. As I am a cook.

Italy in the 80’s is vivid in my mind. Los Angeles now isn’t that different. American life gave me wonderful opportunities without changing my impatient temperament. American literature, poetry especially, changed my soul. Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish on line, (my husband’s discovery) showed me a new way to keep my journalism alive, the excitement of really letting go with the idea that ‘evaluation’ or ‘judgment’ are the right approach to writing about artists. Such a mechanical device. Which the brain is not.

It took years for me to distance gradually from old habits of philosophical training, to change my writing in a way that I could feel my heart pulsing within my little stories along with the artists’ heart beating in their works. A long time accepting collaboration as a present of kindness as well as a real value for the whole body the blog had become. Becoming skeptical of aesthetic theories, following an inner fire that lights on every time I am in front of interesting artworks. Needing to meet the artist, to crush objectivity like Fluxus artist used to do, using an axe to destroy the piano. Emptying as much as possible my closet filled with intellectual devices. Giuseppe Chiari recommended this to me just a few weeks before I left Pisa to France and then to Los Angeles. “If you don’t, he told me opening the sliding door of his perfectly empty closet, you will never move on.” I didn’t know it was forever. The revival of Fluxus Art in Italy during the last years of my life there, in the late 80s, had a strong influence on me. As usual, I was attracted by things I did not understand. Over the years, patiently, they started to make sense.

Jorge Luis Borges says reality is exact, memory is not. I’m not sure. Reality is an unstoppable change that we grab by fragments, instants, projecting our own state of mind and perception on it. Limits over limits. Understanding is always partial. It certainty springs from more than our brain, it melts between words. An instinct, maybe. It blooms from poetry:
“I play them on a blue guitar / And then things are not as they are. / The shape of the instrument  / Distorts the shape of what I meant, / Which takes shape by accident. / Yet what I mean I always say. / The accident is how I play./  I still intend things as they are.” Wallace Stevens
After almost ten years the blue guitar remains the core of THE KITE, what I try to play at every post.

Not alone, nor isolated. Old and new friends among Los Angeles artists, and others keeping the pleasure of thinking together despite the geographical distance, help me to make this blog (and the blog books) the place of pleasure I imagined at the beginning, a fragile carpet supporting the texture of stories that words cannot perfectly translate, and images cannot reproduce.

Yet, what makes artists’ lives and work an irredeemable outer word, although often invisible, is also what allows such a fragile land to hover over everybody’s lives without touching them, just showing some where else. Humans alterations in reality. Never cease feeling, don’t give up hoping. Blogging in common with my open tribe of people gave me, and continues to give me, the treasure of Joy.

Rosanna Albertini

Los Angeles, February 18, 2023

http://www.albertini.ws