what do you see

A vernissage. My works on the walls. Someone stops in front of one, looks for a long moment, and asks: what is this? — meaning: what am I looking at?

The question is reasonable. The works are often difficult to place: they look like paintings but are not paintings, or they are photographs of something that tends to play with perception. The viewer’s category system fails, and they ask for a label.

I rarely give one. Instead I turn the question around. In Italian: tu cosa ci vedi? — cos’è per te? — secondo te cos’è? In English, simply: what do you see? The wording varies; the gesture is the same. I do not want to tell them that this is a door on the Zattere in Venice photographed in close-up. I want to know what they see.