Le specie del sonno

Introspective precision is the goal towards which Ginevra Bompiani’s writing strives. The fact that she does not focus on “the events of life” in their supposed concreteness but, rather, on centaurs and basilisks, Amazons and salamanders, already tells us that the path or method she has chosen is not to reduce the complexity and randomness of everyday life to abstraction, but to approach increasingly fluid, precise and probable definitions of inner experience, starting from the observation of an objective figure – as objective as those forever consigned to the repertoire of myths. Ginevra Bompiani’s eye fixes on mythological emblems as if they were Rorschach inkblots, except her gaze cannot be naïve and these figures’ power of fascination cannot be that of something seen for the first time. Thus, the operation of rewriting myths fluctuates between dreamlike fluidity and gnomic sententiousness, yet the figure’s fixed nature reappears in the meticulous details of the dream as soon as we try to transcribe them, and the elusiveness of meaning reappears with the sibylline decisiveness of oracles as soon as we attempt to capture it in a formula.