“You throw something into the sea, and the sea (after an unspecified time) returns it to you worked, finished, smoothed.”

Bruno Munari, designer

Every time I walk on the sea and walk the profile of beaches and cliffs here where I now live – in the La Maddalena Archipelago in Sardinia – I come across a lot of plastic. Carried by the wind and the sea. Waste that I have been collecting for years, because it hurts to see the outrage of nature. But for some time, collecting, I realized that not everything is vulgar refusal, even if it is certainly polluting and out of place. Among the Posidonia oceanica that dries out in the sun, mixed with the sand and wedged between the rocks, there are disparate things, parts of objects that are difficult to trace back to a whole, and fragments of innumerable colours that always speak of us. These end up in a separate bag.

They talk about our way of living and consuming; of what we have produced and discarded in recent decades. And, let me think: some of these parts, even infinitesimal, are even beautiful. The sea and the sun have degraded and transformed them. Faded, diaphanous colours, sometimes transparent, sometimes intense. In relief on caps and bottles, the product brands we all know and have used many times. On the shores I find evidence, the sea does not lie. With these I build compositions that aspire to be narratives. With these, I create paintings. Each painting is unrepeatable and also each frame. In fact, I restore old frames because everything can be reused. I don’t go to the art store to buy tubes of paint anymore. I find them all by the sea.

Valeria Serra