Mattia Balsamini

Time, space, labour and the proximity of home

Commissioned by OMNE.


I spent most of my childhood afternoons after school
at my father’s office. Marco, this is his name, owned
(and still does) a business designing and installing heating and cooling systems. At the time I wasn’t passionate about his job, I wasn’t even exactly sure what he did for a living.
But I knew well that, before him, my grandfather owned the firm and that now Marco was carrying it on. The offices were located off of a town road near the Sacile railroad station, and behind the entrance gate you could see this three storey house built in the seventies. On the bottom floor were the offices, while on the first and second floor was my grandparents’ residence. I moved and played between these two worlds almost seamlessly, being accustomed to think they were one. Eating an afternoon snack, talking with my grandma, then walking downstairs to play with tools at the workshop, among busy working people. Labour, very close to home, at the point they intersect. The fast shift of post-war period that took place in my hometown (like in most of north eastern Italy), projected the area from rural poverty to richness in a few decades – richness that wasn’t created thanks to oil, gas or gold, but through the only available resources: time, space and labour. Labour is an action, but it is also a place – a space in which we move and exist. Just like home is. What I started questioning during the residence in Castelfranco, was how the contact of the domestic and work settings, typical of this area, affected each other.

I believe I became interested in re-discovering what I first saw in my childhood.