A Room with a View: Matilde Sambo on her isolation experience

"A room with a view" is a new editorial initiative born with the aim of helping us see the positive potential of a little time spent in self-isolation. The third contribution of this series comes from Italian artist Matilde Sambo.

Words by Matilde Sambo

Dear My Art Guides Readers,

A labyrinth of thoughts continue to accumulate along this unbeaten path we have all found ourselves on.
The road ahead seems infinite.
These tangled up thoughts evermore difficult to straighten out.

I decided to stay in Milan because I feel it is my city. Venice is where I was born and where my family is, but here I built my world and became who I really am.

There is a unique energy to the streets of this city, they provide endless opportunities for growth and the potential to mould ones future.

To many, during these uncertain and precarious times, running away may seem the easiest and most sensible thing to do, but I believe this is the exact time to hold still.

This surreal situation, which renders the world a science fiction B-series film (absent of a set or special effects), has led me to carefully ponder upon every one of my ideas, projects and visions.

I am reviewing my priorities and rethinking everything I was taking for granted, clearing through the superfluous.
I realise now that I have been consumed by the superficial, it is now time to go deeper and beyond.
There are many questions that all of us, as a world and as individual human beings are asking ourselves, this is one huge physical and psychological challenge.

Losing touch is simple, suddenly able to be still at home, to read and put your feet up in peace on the balcony – a privilege. Yet it is absurd that it has taken a global pandemic to arrive at a point where as a species we are finally asking common questions.

I have the impression that wars, conflicts and all the terrible things that man has committed to fellow men and to the Earth itself have failed to stir up a common consciousness in the way this invisible enemy has so far done so.
On the one hand it is sad that this is what it has taken to make us face up to ourselves and our behaviour both as individuals and communities, on the other hand I think it was necessary and therefore I will accept this struggle, on the condition that it has the potential to make us better animals.

Matilde Sambo, Courtesy of the artist

Here follows three separate lists for reading, music and viewing, in each: 2 titles from my past, 2 titles from the present and 1 recent discovery.

Books:

“White Noise” 1985 by Don DeLillo
“Mythologies” 1957 by Roland Barthes
“Be My Knife” 1998 di David Grossman
“Guns, Germs, and Steel” 1997 di Jared Diamond
“The Puzzle of Left-handedness” 2010 di Rik Smits

Music:

“Primitivi del futuro” 2011 by Tre Allegri Ragazzi Morti
(in particular: “Rifare”, “So che presto finirà”, “La ballata delle ossa”)
“Brown Rice” 1975 by Don Cherry
“My life In The Bush of Ghosts” 1981 by Brian Eno & David Byrne
“A Face We All Know” 2005 by Cassiber
“We Are Sent Here By History” 2020 by Shabaka and the Ancestors

Films/ TV Series:

“Live Flesh” 1997 directed by Pedro Almodovar
“Princess Mononoke” 1997 animated film directed by Hayao Miyazaki
“Creep” 2014 directed by Patrick Brice.
“Che fare quando il mondo è in fiamme?” (What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?) 2018 directed by Roberto Minervini
“Flea Bag” TV Series directed by Phoebe Waller-Bridge