Aliki Polydor | "Take it or Leave it" installation 2006

Take it or leave it : the implications are many - above all, take what I offer you or leave it. The five senses exist but are lacerated. We are placed in a situation where we need to reflect on the following: feelings cost sacrifices and renunciations.
Today we have intense and rapid desires. Let’s think about it: is this the best way? And what is the best way to enjoy life? I don’t know. We want satisfaction at once but at times this isn’t possible. In the meanwhile we leave no space for renunciation.

And the immediacy of impulses also takes charge. I think that there is also an alteration in our way of getting attention, of being cuddled; perhaps we should become a little more patient as cuddles come at a price and not at once (as is suggested/provoked by the dialogue you will hear with the headphones).Listen to it : it is the exchange of words between a woman and a man; she says :
“Viens que je t’embrasse, embrasse-moi, fais moi des calins” and then other exhortations in Italian, French, English. And when they make demands they lose their intensity, become banal, though it is true it is said that “what you ask for, you will never get”. Nothing should be taken for granted! We cannot give orders, as though pressing a switch, and at once have a mark of genuine, measured affection, even in the most extreme exaggerated cases! WE simply CANNOT. We must learn once again how to nurture, how to give time in order to harvest the feelings that strew the path.
This is a hard reality, but I believe that in this way, we can gather some lasting satisfaction pleasure; we cannot say it is easy to be taken or left alone: it is not this simple, we must struggle, and this too is not easy. Garbellini’s film is projected in parallel with the recorded dialogue heard on the headphones that reveals the man and the woman have just met and barely know each other... “viens que je t’embrasse”, “hug me”, Dammi una carrezza” etc..But then, not always is immediacy gratifying...
Aliki Polydor 2006 All Rights Reserved
translated by Michael Haggerty