Pacco da Casa
Pacco da Casa (“Parcel from Home”) is the culmination of an MA project focussed on the concepts of home and identity set within a speculative environment. It was born out of the fact that as an Italian student living abroad, I am used to getting parcels from home full with home-made food and, specifically relevant to this project, jars of sauces. Starting from that observation, I asked myself what would these boxes contain in the future. Thinking about this prospect, I realised that the importance that I, and probably most fellow Italian nest-leavers, attribute to such parcels is probably not necessarily identified with the content itself, but rather with the associations to our hometown, family and friends that the content represents. Therefore, I came to the conclusion that in the future, instead of (or probably along with) jars of sauces, these “pacchi da casa” could contain memories of the place and people that are to some extent abandoned in favour of a new environment.
Each jar contains a specific memory of my life in Bologna, before moving to London. Instead of collecting jars of sauces, Pacco da Casa presents the future prospects of collecting memories in your cupboard, creating this scalable deposit that preserves them in a near-physical form.
I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that the more we try to hold on to something, especially something such fleeting as a memory, the more it will slip away from us and fade away. That is why when you actually try to grab and literally hold on to to one of the jars, the shadow of the memory it contains disappears.
