When I first set out from my place in the UK, with the rucksack on my shoulders and Carlos pulling a bright orange trolley behind him, heading east across the English countryside, I did not fully know what would come of it all. I had the impulse to walk, and the need to return to my roots in Italy, but I also carried a deeper intention: to transform this experience into something shareable, something that could exist beyond memory. That something became From Home to Home, a body of artistic work that is not simply a translation of my walk, but an embodiment of it.
The journey was the raw material. The art was the form.
Walking, in its slow unfolding, opened up a new way of thinking. Each encounter, each footstep, each shifting landscape etched itself into my consciousness not just as a memory but as a sensorial, emotional imprint. These imprints became the foundation of the installations. What I created was not meant to depict the walk, but to invite others to enter into its atmosphere, its silences, its human depth.
In the first installation, From Home To Home visitors stepped onto a modified walking machine that responded to their movement, activating video footage of the walk. This interaction was crucial. It was not enough for people to observe. I wanted them to feel what it meant to walk with purpose, to see the land not just as scenery but as something lived through, inhabited step by step. The machine offered resistance, mirroring the labour of the road, while above, knitted tubes hung like arteries or lines on a map, carrying whispered voices, recordings of people I had met along the way. They were the lifeblood of the journey, the scaffolding that supported me across countries and doubts.
In the second iteration of the work, From home to Home: Take 2, the walking machine disappeared. I wanted to give people freedom, freedom to move at their own pace, to encounter the video projection not as a result of effort but as a quiet presence in the space. Shadows became part of the piece, intermingling with footage of me walking, a metaphor for how others had walked with me in spirit. The voices, no longer static, were now activated by the movements of the visitors, echoing the idea that memory and meaning are never fixed but always relational, always unfolding in connection with others.
Art, like walking, revealed itself as a relational act.
These installations were not simply about the distance covered, but about the textures of experience, about how a landscape is shaped by the stories carried through it, and how memory lives not just in the mind, but in the body, the breath, the movement of people across space. In designing these pieces, I kept returning to one core question: how can art hold the intimacy of lived experience without reducing it?
I think the answer lies in presence. In the act of witnessing. In creating spaces where people can pause, move, listen, and inhabit their own journey alongside mine.
Ultimately, From Home to Home is not just my story. It is a shared encounter. It lives in the crossings between art and audience, between memory and sensation, between the personal and the collective. And in this way, the installations become a continuation of the walk itself, an open invitation to others to reflect on their own paths, their own ideas of home, and the silent transformations that happen when we simply keep moving forward.
