When I knew I would be bringing my book, PRESENTE CONTINUO, to New York—a city with which I have a special history—it was imperative to me to find a way to explain why this book should matter to someone living in a completely different world than me. The book itself is a recounting of my entire, convoluted life, with its own repetitions and themes, its circumstantial cast of characters, its intrinsic visual language. With this timeline, I want to give you a key to understanding the book, as well as a map of all of the possible connections between my own story and yours.

Graffiti—or more precisely, vandalism—is at the center of my story, but only inasmuch as that is what I became known for. The tag DUMBO meant something special to my hometown of Milan. I was, as writers aim to be, everywhere, but there was also something about the way I wrote that made people feel connected to this tag. I like to think that tags are yours only in the very moment that you are writing them, and that they become communal as soon as you walk away. The next person that comes along can read it, take a picture of it, spit on it, cross it out. And that vitality, that constant act of revision, is a proof of our engagement with each other—which is the only thing that makes a city worth living. Graffiti, though, and even vandalism, is only one part of my life. From that one obsession was born a million off-shoots—the examination of identity, the search for other repetitions to keep my mind simultaneously still and active, the exaltation of form as language and representation, the development of the individual through the vessel of family. Love, collective action, egotism, hard work, celebration.

So please, become absorbed. Trace my life from the working class outskirts of Milan, a little kid sketching at his kitchen table, discovering a whole new world through music and style, traveling through Europe to paint trains, starting my own (counter) cultural identity as a store owner, coming to New York and unexpectedly finding love, starting a family, struggling and growing, moving to the countryside and exploring what I could become passionate about there, returning to the city with every artistic project, putting down roots and creating new visual identities in an unknown, rural territory, encapsulating this all in one publication. Find yourself somewhere in this story. Let yourself be surprised that it touches you. 

Be present, continuously.

Now is constant.