I don’t remember when the word Limbo became part of my vocabulary. Maybe in the nun’s school, maybe in the mass, maybe at home. As a child I never questioned it, as I often didn’t question the other images and beliefs I grew up with.

I imagined the Limbo as a kind of kindergarten where some children stayed while they waited for a place in Heaven. A blurry and undefined space like many others of the Christian folklore that provoked in me a mix of trust and fear. 

As an adult I moved away from religion but the Christian imagery, its symbols, stories and characters continued to fascinate me. And later also this place, the Limbo, resurfaced in my mind.

In a moment in life where the net that supported me was gone and I felt groundless, without being able to go back and not knowing where to go next, I opened my drawing sketchbook – my external hard drive for a weak memory – and used the drawings to document, to examine and to laugh of the situation. There I was, going into Limbo, where there were no more little children, just lost adults.

Along the years the word Limbo started appearing more and more in my sketchbooks, proportionally to situations in the world where a state of indefinition and uncertainty was increasingly present: people that didn’t know how to get out of a precarious life, the pandemic, the refugees, the climate crisis, the successive wars. Even if we interpret the Limbo as a place of transition for something better, it’s always a place where one prefers not to pass through. 

After an embryonic phase of restlessness and loose notes and drawings, succeeded a more obsessive search, looking for descriptions, representations and of listening to the opinions of people about this place that would help me giving it a meaning.

What is Limbo? Where is it? Who lives there? How can one get out? Is it there that stay the objects that are lost and not found again? Is it a place where we are alone, or a place crowded with people? Is it more like Heaven or more like Hell?

To these questions others will join, as a starting point for the research, the motto for talks, interviews, digressions and even deliriums about the Limbo and its ramifications – the concerns about life and death, about forgetting, the non-places, the waiting – waiting for what?

Along the years the word Limbo started appearing more and more in my sketchbooks, proportionally to situations in the world where a state of indefinition and uncertainty was increasingly present: people that didn’t know how to get out of a precarious life, the pandemic, the refugees, the climate crisis, the successive wars. Even if we interpret the Limbo as a place of transition for something better, it’s always a place where one prefers not to pass through. 

After an embryonic phase of restlessness and loose notes and drawings, succeeded a more obsessive search, looking for descriptions, representations and of listening to the opinions of people about this place that would help me giving it a meaning.

What is Limbo? Where is it? Who lives there? How can one get out? Is it there that stay the objects that are lost and not found again? Is it a place where we are alone, or a place crowded with people? Is it more like Heaven or more like Hell?

To these questions others will join, as a starting point for the research, the motto for talks, interviews, digressions and even deliriums about the Limbo and its ramifications – the concerns about life and death, about forgetting, the non-places, the waiting – waiting for what?

Formally, the narrative will take place in the sketchbook, where the lost and found thoughts will be placed. This object will be the leitmotif, used concretely and figuratively: the narrative will elapse from its use and handling and in it will be in itself also a Limbo of ideas.

The sketchbook gives place to the free association of ideas, it’s an environment for experimentation and erasure, capable of containing all sorts of digressions. It is also a living archive of memory and contains the thread of thought of the narrative that will allow us not to get lost in the Limbo of ideas. We can always go back, make a pause, get the focus back. Where are we standing?