ANTONIO PARADISO

Santeramo, 1936

I always dreamed with my eyes closed, with my thoughts, infinite spaces to look at, to meditate, to elaborate, but after seeing the launch of the carrier pigeons, from the moment when they take flight to go and look for the companion, I understood that it was not a normal flight, but a mysterious flight, whose movements give off all the joy that the pigeon stored at that time, a challenge to being, a liberation; flying was what we men have been trying to practice for three thousand years from Icarus to the astronaut who goes to the moon. The flight of carrier pigeons gives off a strange charm that affects everyone.

BIO

There are three theories of navigation of the traveller columbus depending on the distance:

1* Fondo, 1000 Km. – This first navigation is still today, in the year 2015, a mystery. How does the pigeon orient itself? From the launch to the cage are 1000 Km, but a thousand doves, a thousand cages in different points from the start up to hundreds of Km. distance from one cage to another. Everyone flies in the skies alone towards his goal; goal the dovecote or partner, material or spiritual space. German scientists say that the pigeon has, between the brain and the beak, a microscopic compass. The Italian biologists affirm that the pigeons are loaded of magnetite, from which the orientation derives; both the one and the other theory does not recognize the opposite, therefore uncertain theories and therefore null.

2* Distance, 500 Km. – They navigate with the sense of smell, recognizing in every area that cross the mountain, the hill or the sea; in fact if you eliminate the smell with a mask on the nostrils or with a surgical operation, excluding the olfactory nerve, arrive late or a few days later.

3* Zone, 50 Km. – They sail on sight. Now we are in the arrival space and everyone falls into their pigeon.

The Colombi, of all the regions of the north that go from the Veneto, Lombardy, Piedmont, Liguria, are collected in Lissone, Milan, brought with trucks to Battipaglia and from there launched. Through studies, research and surveys, photos, drawings, projects, I had a contract with the fashion house Naj Oleari, to which the design was sold, for the production of fabrics for clothing and furniture. The success that the flight design had was exceptional and the company produced sixty percent of all twenty designs in production and convinced her to stay seven years in print so as to pay me, every six months, a royalty check. The Paris fashion house Marie Claire, copied the design, also the colors coordinated by me, and published them in 1982 in the magazine N somebody 322 JUIN. On pages 236 and 237.(with all the sales addresses of the French shops)
Angelo Naj Oleari furiously went to Paris, turned to the management of the fashion house, claiming that the designs were his, exclusively, because they were bought by me for his exclusive production. The director replied that they could copy them, “sue us,” they said. The international cause was initiated and won by Naj Oleari with a damage of one hundred and fifty million lire, plus the total blocking of the production of the flight design.
Soon after I began to work out the flight in stone; even the stones released the ecstasy and joy, albeit stones attached to the wall. In the cities I transformed them into benches, exposed in Corso Vittorio Emanuele in Milan: The City has bought two placed next to the Duomo. A friend of mine from Milan called me and said: “Do you know where I’m sitting now? I answer “I don’t know”, she answered me, “above your sculpture in Piazza Duomo in Milan”.

Usually, when the race takes place, the breeders use techniques to increase the desire for the return of the pigeon; they have invented for this the widower, that is separate the pigeon and the dove, which must leave for the race, in two different cages for two days, so that separation contributes to increasing the desire for physical contact. The pigeon of monogamous nature, does not mate with other pigeons, not before twenty days of separation.
It’s my theory, even if it’s wrong, that the mystery of Columbus navigation is love, so God.