Return to Sender:

This project was born through two ideas: validation and marginalization. As a student, I always based my worth upon grades and academic involvement. But as an adult, navigating the job market, I have no benchmark of what I am worth, and am faced with rejection more often than I’d like. Being accepted has become more and more like an impossibility as I try to put myself out there. While living with these thoughts in my day to day, I came across numerous letters addressed to me from colleges, foundations, credit card companies, and other services that were asking for my involvement or contribution due to whatever credentials I possessed. It angered me: if I am so qualified, then why can I not attain what I desire?

I began to sort through this mail, bothered by my current state of perpetual in-betweeness, when I was again hit with another idea. As an Italian student, studying in Italy was both an experience where I felt acceptance, as well as a feeling of never truly belonging. Language and culture are extremely nuanced, and there are things I would never understand no matter how hard I tried to integrate myself. Still, I would wander cities taking photos of narrow streets, strange angles of buildings, and shadowed areas along the way to the city center, or piazza, which was the hub of recreation and socializing. And as beautiful as the open space was, with some architectural feat of a monument in the center, I began to feel as if the streets that took me there were more interesting, and made me feel more like I belonged there.

An article by Richard Fusch titled “The Piazza in Italian Urban Morphology” describes the urban planning of the modern piazza to be an alteration of Roman orthogonal planning. During the Roman Empire, the piazzas, or forums, were flanked by two intersecting streets, north-south being cardus and east-west being decumanus. The grid layout city was a representation of organization, of planning and civilized urban life. As time wore on, merchants and nobles began extending their properties and forming guilds to separate the city into factions, effectively molding the grid into nooks and crannies, opening up to the piazza.

I considered this idea; the piazza’s essentiality to Italian modern life, and then wondered about those surrounding margins; those spaces where anticipation lay, where tourists pushed past in order to reach the vista point. Those were the spaces I tucked myself into, and are the same spaces I am in now. I anticipate that gratification and validation, even if I’m not there. I want to see the end result but I am currently stuck in a liminal state where I do not belong in the center just yet. Being bound to these margins and corners, never being able to reach the piazza.

However, the center cannot exist without its sides; north-south, east-west. The margins of the piazza, of the validation and welcome I crave, of the acceptance letter that is lost in the void, are just as essential to the city. It is where the people walk, it is where they live.

Video:

Process:

Agamya Rao

Agamya
Rao