Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself
Miles Davis
Welcome. I’m Carlo Navato, 50% Londoner, 50% Neapolitan.
I’m fuelled by insatiable curiosity and forever on the look-out for the next connection and the next possibility. Growing up in a household with an English mother and an Italian father set the scene early for an environment predicated on opposites. My childhood, mostly feral and spent outdoors, was built on adventure, exploration and seeing things a bit differently. Life on an edge-land council estate in the 1970’s, showed me time and again that it was possible to create great things from nothing. We were frugal, experimental, and creative.
From a young age it seemed instinctual to me that the tension between opposites was at the heart of creativity. So boisterous tree climber and studious reader, maker of bows and arrows to shoot with and maker of cakes to please with. Lover of art, lover of science.
I’m a collector of things including new experiences, new juxtapositions and new intuitions. I studied building and real estate in my 20’s, wine and design in my 30’s, photography in my 40’s and performance coaching and Zen in my 50’s.
I’m impatient, adaptable, and resilient and find that resourcefulness is our greatest resource. I value craftsmanship and I’ve learned that cheap is expensive.
I believe in the essence of not knowing, and the wisdom of holding uncertainty lightly. I’m never happier than hanging out with open-minded mavericks in wild places.
Most of all I like to make spaces: physically through my development company, creatively through photography, writing and experiments in connection, and professionally through consulting, coaching, and advising in leadership transformation and change.
I’ve recently given up worrying so much about being found out.
Find out who you are and do it on purpose
Dolly Parton
Brian Eno has this lovely idea that children learn through play and adults play through art. Art is just our way of continuing to play through acting on our imagination. This freedom to act on our imagination is increasingly being driven out of our structured world. But it sits at the heart of creativity, and it loosens boundaries and invites possibility.
And everywhere we look there are overwhelming choices, and relentless pressures to accumulate. Back in a simpler time, Aristotle said “For the more limited, if adequate, is preferable.” I’ve come to believe that. Excellence is achieved not when everything that can be added has been, but when everything superfluous has been taken away.
So, this site is an experiment in playfulness and in seeing whether less can be more. It is a collaboration with the designer Jo Briggs and the plan is for 1196 weekly offerings. There will only ever be the two most current pieces live at any one time. There’ll be words, images, sounds, conversations. The archive will be preserved annually and re-presented in analogue form as a series of physical things, and books.
I hope you find something to enjoy. Thank you for coming along.
55 / 1196
An unfinished theory
Carlo Navato
23 . June . 2025
Read Look Listen
A swashbuckling page 47 reads…
“There are millions of possibilities, and then all the combinations of them. These differences say something to us, and we earring-viewers register them without even being aware of it. Some of the differences we might like – the colour might remind us of a beach vacation, or that new jagged shape suits our current political direction – and we will choose that one. It is a world that we like. Or it's a world that we don't like, or feel indifferent towards. But we can 'read' these little artworks by noticing all the small choices involved. This usually isn't something we do consciously. It's a feeling that we're acting upon.
It's like finding a fragment of a different world.
a more romantic
or more eccentric
or sexier
or earthier
or crazier
or saner
or swashbucklier
world
Sometimes you can take the whole of the world in, and sometimes you need a small piece to take in. I think that is really what a work of art is: it is a small piece that you can ingest, that gives you an idea of the richness of the whole. Sister Mary Corita Kent, artist.”
What Art Does: An Unfinished Theory, Brian Eno, Bette Adriaanse, Faber & Faber 2025
—
53 / 1196
Osea Island
Carlo Navato
9 . June . 2025
Read Look Listen
I don’t know
What we all agreed on
When the sun rose on magical Osea Island
And we held each other in smoky embrace
Powered up
Only with love
Strangers become friends
And flowers blossom in salty air
On Osea Island
When the cock crows to a new day unfolding
Unfinished symphonies
Awakened hearts
Pay attention to the needs of the world
Every gesture here is a gesture laden with grace
Artful gestures of truthful expression
Not flawless execution
Simply beauty
And truth
And goodness
Precious moments in vanishing time
I don’t know
What we all agreed on
When the sun set on magical Osea Island
As the tide fell
And we powered down
To reflect
On knowing that love will save the world
—
52 / 1196
Year 1
Carlo Navato
2 . June . 2025
Read Look Listen
A year ago this week I started a little collaborative experiment with the designer Jo Briggs. I’ve long believed that small creative gestures can be fuel for a smile, re-consideration of an established thought, the opening up of a new possibility. So we agreed to put one offering into the world every week for the rest of my days… 1,196 weeks if I make it to the age my father was when he left us.
This is week 52. The end of year 1.
The world is cluttered and congested with output, so we decided there’ll only ever be two on offer at any one time. But please drop me an email if you’d like access to the back catalogue. Albert Einstein said “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” I think I would have enjoyed hanging out with Albert.
—
50 / 1196
Gee, it’s like a dream, Mr Tracy
Jo Briggs
18 . May . 2025
Read Look Listen
I was lucky enough to stumble across a small painting recently which stood out amongst the others for sale on the table, not because of it’s vibrancy of colours, in fact the exact opposite, it was mellow and muted, of two young girls climbing a tree, in parts the pale green ink washes of the leaves almost matching the colour of the paper. The seller told me it was by quite a well known female artist, but not necessarily so for her paintings, more for her work in the famous Thunderbirds TV series. I knew nothing much about the show other than a few famous catchphrases and some vague recollections of what I found pretty scary looking characters on my tv screen as a kid. But the painting I took a real shine to, and we happily shook hands on it before it was carefully taped to a piece of cardboard to keep it from creasing on my walk home. Tucked under my arm I smiled all the way back.
It didn’t take long to discover that the artist, Christine Glanville, had carved out quite the career for herself in the world of (what I now know is termed in the biz as) Supermarionation, designing and operating many of the leading characters for Thunderbirds and working with Gerry Anderson on many of his other shows too. The list of accomplishments in fact is pretty astounding, I can imagine especially for a woman working in that field at the time.
But the thing that stayed with me above that list of accolades was finding out she was born in Halifax, a town just a few miles from where I myself was born, and though many decades separated us, Yorkshire has that special ability to hold strong to time in our hearts; it’s yellow stone houses tarnished black by the soot of the old mills, standing as a testament to the industry and making that once poured out of it. A hard days graft the likes of which I’ve only ever heard in passed down tales but which echo every street you walk still.
It’s reported that even though Glanville moved to Essex as a child, she “remained Yorkshire by temperament and intonation” with one article writing that “extreme emotions never agitated her... The object of her passion was freedom.” And now suddenly my wonderful little painting made complete sense to me, how a woman who got to the top of her artistic game in television shows and feature films, remained a Yorkshire lass by heart, a girl clambering up a tree to catch a glimpse over the rooftops and bellowing chimneys of her beloved hometown.
Christine Glanville, puppeteer, born October 28, 1924; died March 1, 1999.
—
48 / 1196
The return journey
Carlo Navato
4 . May . 2025
Read Look Listen
I want to say something about nostalgia.
Nostalgia continually gets a bad rap and I’m not happy about it. Nostalgia isn’t about living in the past. It’s not, as it’s too often dismissively accused of being, mere sentimentality, but rather a powerful reclamation of the spiritual journey we’ve been on. Whether that journey is through a life well lived or a life of too much suffering. Slings and arrows, outrageous fortune, all that poetic stuff the bard wrote about in the Dane’s soliloquies.
Here’s the thing – when we embrace nostalgia, it orients us in this chaotic world, reminding us who we truly are. The Greeks understood this when they designed the word to embody that tender but painful ache for home – “nostos” – the return journey, “algos” – the sweet pain of remembrance.
In gentle moments, nostalgia arrives like evening light through knackered old wooden windows, that sacred longing to come home, not so much to a place perhaps, but rather to our real selves. Our real selves in all their complex multitudes.
Nostalgia is the soul’s compass, bathing our memories in amber warmth, preserving what matters most. Childhood lullabies, eating sprats on my mum’s lap, Mary, Mungo and Midge, green cotton parkas with fake fur collars. Showaddywaddy, spangles, pacers and sherbet fountains. Mrs Drabble, stories at Hayes Primary under the old oak tree in summer, buying records from Woolies with a fiver pocket money.
Nostalgia reminds us we are never truly lost. When we close our eyes and find ourselves beside childhood streams, or eating warm boiled potatoes and green salad in Granny’s kitchen, we discover not just what was, but what remains eternal within us.
A little part of me will always be in Christchurch, endless summers on the river with Suzy and Sara, Friars Cliff beach at 8am with mum and Aldo, tea with the retired folk in their beach huts with floral swimming hats. It’s why I unashamedly bought this little memory a few weeks ago. Look at that gorgeous saturated colour. All naff and 1970’s but rich in meaning.
—
46 / 1196
Happy Easter
Carlo Navato (aged 9)
19 . April . 2025
Read Look Listen
“Creativity is a wild mind and a disciplined eye.”
Dorothy Parker (1893-1967)
—
45 / 1196
Stir Well
Jo Briggs
11 . April . 2025
Read Look Listen
Chance encounters. And his paint is the business. So much so that we’re about to embark on a project together mixing new colours for an old haunt that we’re bringing back to life. Maybe if you stir well enough these things aren’t really down to chance after all.
—
44 / 1196
Bring Me The Rhinoceros II
Carlo Navato
07 . April . 2025
Read Look Listen
We gathered in the Zoom Zendo and shared stories. Innermost hopes and fears were gently offered and accepted. People are wonderful. Vulnerabilities were openly revealed and discussed. Wisdom from across the ages was fizzing and sparking like a Swan Vesta.
Please come again, next time let’s do it in the flesh.
—
44 / 1196
Bring Me The Rhinoceros II
Carlo Navato
07 . April . 2025
Read Look Listen
We gathered in the Zoom Zendo and shared stories. Innermost hopes and fears were gently offered and accepted. People are wonderful. Vulnerabilities were openly revealed and discussed. Wisdom from across the ages was fizzing and sparking like a Swan Vesta.
Please come again, next time let’s do it in the flesh.
—
42 / 1196
The unfolding
Carlo Navato
21 . March . 2025
Read Look Listen
Wandering the streets of an unfamiliar place with no goal, no expectation, is a treat. The unfolding drama of the street offers the photographer beautiful opportunities to capture slices of time and space. Fleeing moments. No-one inhabits the public realm with more conviction, more life, than Cubans.
—
41 / 1196
Beauty
Carlo Navato
14 . March . 2025
Read Look Listen
Here’s the Friday treat from Oscar Wilde that you didn’t know you needed:
“Beauty is the only thing that time cannot harm. Philosophies fall away like sand and creeds follow one another like the withered leaves of Autumn; but what is beautiful is a joy for all seasons and a possession for all eternity.”
—
40 / 1196
Where it all began?
Carlo Navato
07 . March . 2025
Read Look Listen
For Roman Eggenberger. Thank you for creating a wonderful House of Fun.
—
38 / 1196
NeverEnding Story
Jo Briggs
23 . February . 2025
Read Look Listen
“What I have learned from storytelling is that the pieces move… and that motion is everything, like the difference between stasis and change. What’s the use of returning? To find glimpses of art and heart, the small sediments that arrange and settle, then again rise to rearrange. Not to rehash, but to reshape.”
Lidia Yuknavitch, Reading The Waves, Riverhead Books, NY, 2025
For Nims, who found her way back to the boat.
And for Laura, who drew it.
—
36 / 1196
A conversation with Hugh MacLeod
Carlo Navato
11 . February . 2025
Read Look Listen
Hugh MacLeod is a pioneer. He was one of the first two bloggers that I followed on the internet, back in about 2001, the other being Seth Godin. His blog, featuring his doodles on the back of business cards and creative advice for young entrepreneurs, was a huge inspiration to me as I started out on the lonely journey of starting my first company.
A cartoonist, linguist and marketer, he has been championing the belief that art has the power to transform business, for over 30 years. His ebook How to be Creative on ‘ChangeThis’ was my first ever pdf download and contained pithy and sage observations and advice for entrepreneurs. It has been downloaded more than 4.5 million times, and was subsequently published by Penguin as the hardback Ignore Everybody. It is truly great.
It was a pleasure to finally meet the man whose art adorns my office wall, and enjoy his razor sharp social observations and stories from the road, back during the lockdown years.
—
35 / 1196
It’s time to get curious
Carlo Navato
31 . January . 2025
Read Look Listen
I don’t like cynicism. I think cynicism is wasted cognitive and emotional energy. I prefer to see the world as a spectacular place, full of great people, full of beauty, even if much of it is hidden to the casual observer in these funky times. But the last few years in business have put this preference of mine under intense pressure.
The thing is I’ve had a deep-rooted belief in the power and value of curiosity since early childhood, even when it was getting me into frequent ‘trouble.’ And I’ve been wondering recently if curiosity is actually the opposite of cynicism. The curious mind is the one which seeks to understand complexity and nuance, while the cynical mind often reduces things to their worst possible interpretation. If curiosity drives us to engage more deeply with people and ideas, then cynicism creates emotional and intellectual distance.
However, there’s a wrinkle in this idea. Cynicism and curiosity can stem from a similar impulse to look beneath surface appearances. The key difference is what they expect to find there. The curious person hopes to discover interesting or meaningful possibilities, while the cynic expects to uncover dysfunction or deception. This makes me wonder whether perhaps cynicism might sometimes be a damaged form of curiosity - a curiosity that has been hurt too many times and now protects itself by preferring indifference or assuming the worst. In this scenario they're not pure opposites, but rather different evolutionary paths emanating from a common root of wanting to unearth and understand what lies beneath.
So, it was with this in mind I have been wrestling with what to make of recent confirmation of something I’ve long had a hunch about - that the world of management consultancy has been very naughty over recent decades. It turns out that the blue-chip advisory world has been extracting billions of pounds from corporations based on pseudo-science, and a bit of manipulation. And their questionable strategy of promoting our aversion to uncertainty, triggering our innate drive for sense-making and promising control over the future, has not delivered the promised goods. [1]. Some might say they’ve used a cynical strategy of promoting impenetrably complex solutions to somewhat simple problems and promoting compellingly simple solutions to notoriously complex problems. And that sort of nonsense is always wrong.
As an aside, I believe as Einstein so elegantly put it, “things should be as simple as possible but not simpler.” In working to solve complex problems we want the most elegant, refined, and therefore apparently simple looking solutions we can get, but those outcomes always involve a terrific amount of behind-the-scenes resolution work. Einstein’s magic was in identifying that too simple is no good. It was the same point Aristotle made when he said “For the more limited, if adequate, is always preferable” the if adequate being the point. It’s Occam’s Razor - “of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred.” And I’ve always loved that little French Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s exhortation - “You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away.”
Anyway, backing up, where am I going with this. Simply, I believe that there is a much better way for businesses to enhance everything that they do and aspire to do, than the way they are choosing to, or are being encouraged to now, by you know who. And yes, I do mean everything and I’m willing to put my delicate bits on the block to test out and prove my hypothesis.
The hypothesis is this - curiosity is a high-performance strategy. What do I mean by this? Well first let’s look at what curiosity is.
Curiosity is a gateway. Curiosity is both spark and tinder. Curiosity is what ignites the fire of creativity and innovation. It's the restless drive to explore the unknown, to question the status quo, and to imagine possibilities beyond the horizon. Curiosity is what propels us to think differently and draw interesting connections where none are obviously present.
Curiosity breeds humility and guards against hubris. Curiosity breeds empathy. Curiosity is having the courage to say ‘I don’t know’ at the right time. Curiosity is servant leadership, and asking ‘what do you think?’
Curiosity is the bridge between the known and the unknown.
Curiosity is an active force, not simply a quality or a passive trait.
Curiosity reduces the risk of blind spots. Massively. Curiosity is the code for adaptability, resilience and ultimately, anti-fragility.
Curiosity is seeing the world as it could be, not as it is today. Curiosity is the torch that illuminates the dark corners of our ignorance, allowing us to see with greater clarity.
Curiosity is letting imaginations run wild. Curiosity is harnessing the fearlessness and innocence of childhood. Curiosity is the fertile soil from which the creative act germinates.
Curiosity dares to question established norms and explore uncharted territories. Curiosity challenges the status quo. Curiosity asks why and why not?
Curiosity is a lever.
“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” Archimedes
Curiosity, when disciplined, sharpens intuition. Curiosity, when structured, is not mere distraction.
Curiosity, when suffused with purpose, is gold.
Curiosity is the most important quality for leaders in the 21st Century.
Curiosity is a high-performance strategy.
CEOs set the tone for their boards and their organisations, and my ask is that they champion curiosity as the new strategic differentiator as soon as possible. They don’t need more data, they don’t need more dodgy quasi academic insight pieces, more scrums, more innovation labs and accelerators, more change management models, or re-structures or digital transformation programmes. They don’t need more Ai. That can all come later, if at all. What they need right now, is more great questions.
The litany of challenges facing businesses, particularly in the UK and Europe, is beyond the scope of this essay. But we all know what they are. And nothing will improve unless the way we go about improving things, is fundamentally transformed.
With CEOs under immense pressure to navigate uncertainty, protect downside and deliver growth, and inspire their teams, I’m saying that what they need is a new perspective unlocked by curiosity. A framework designed around curiosity as the gateway drug for creativity, stimulated by radical inspired thinking, is the way to unleash real innovation. This is not just about technological innovation, it’s about human innovation - unleashing all the brilliance of all the people. This is not just about making the CEO look more right-on, or the boardroom seem more dynamic to shareholders, this is about a real transformation of experience for the single most important asset in every company - its people.
Curiosity as high-performance strategy isn’t just about solving problems, it’s about the huge value-add of uncovering opportunities that we didn’t even know existed yet.
Helping businesses not just solve problems but reimagine them through a lens of curiosity and creativity is not something our friends at McKinsey, BCG, Bain and Deloitte are famous for. They are better at moats and networks and decades of ‘research’ and data. Instead of asking their favourite questions - “how do we cut costs?” maybe it’s time to ask “what’s the untapped value we’re overlooking?”
Instead of asking “what does the industry trend show us that we need to be focused on?” maybe it’s time to ask “what assumptions about our business and our industry have we not critically examined in the last 12 months?”
It’s time for questions like “what’s the problem we’re not seeing here?” And “what would we do if we weren’t afraid to fail?” It’s time for questions like “what conventional wisdom in our industry do we believe to be fundamentally wrong?” These are the kinds of questions which force teams to step back and challenge assumptions, and that’s the space where curiosity thrives.
Curiosity always starts with asking more questions. And it flourishes when it is supported by a refusal to settle for surface-level answers. This is about digging deeper, constantly challenging the stock responses, and staying open to new perspectives. Here’s the thing - the world’s biggest companies are drowning in data and spreadsheets. They’ve got all the analysis they could ever need, but what they’re missing too often is the spark — the human connection, the story that ties it all together. All of this starts with curiosity. This isn’t about fluffy ideas - it’s about strategic levers that drive real, tangible results.
The real magic happens when curiosity isn’t just something people talk about — it’s something they do, day in and day out. Curiosity is a muscle, and it grows from being trained. Curiosity is whey protein, transforming how teams think, operate and achieve greater things.
It’s time to get curious. It’s time to think, not about return on investment, but return on curiosity.
[1] Paul Sweeney 2024- Magnetic Nonsense: A Short History of Bullshit at Work and How to Make it Go Away.
—
34 / 1196
Raw concrete
Carlo Navato
24 . January . 2025
Read Look Listen
In celebration of the UK release of The Brutalist today, the new film by Brady Corbet, starring Adrien Brody, nominated for 10 Oscars, here’s a piece I wrote on Brutalism for Ernest Journal some years ago.
—
33 / 1196
The Ember Sessions
Carlo Navato
17 . January . 2025
Read Look Listen
There is one spot left for the third Ember Sessions and the chance to enjoy this very view, this coming May.
The Ember Sessions is about uncertainty and discovery and each gathering is unique.
Through an eclectic brew of action, discussion, creative production, and questioning, we’ll uncover new possibilities. This is a gathering for the soul not the ego.
In Zen we talk about mushin. Mushin is most often translated as a state of “no-mind” or “empty mind” — not meaning a blank or absent state, but rather a mind that is fully present, uncluttered, and ready to receive experience without judgment or resistance. ‘Shin’ also translates as heart-spirit.
I believe everything is possible in spaces where we bring mushin, and all you are asked to do is bring that. I’ve found that a lot of the impact is in the not-knowing.
The accommodation is spartan, a woodland located stone hut with basic facilities. Think of it like a masonry tent. It’s what makes it work as well as it does. All food, drink and necessities will be provided but we will be hands on. You’ll get a suggested kit list on confirmation of booking.
The timeline is as follows:
Meet Western Lakes 1400hrs, Friday 23rd May 2024 – Monday 26th May, depart hut 1000hrs (Bank Holiday Weekend).
The promise is that the value to be gained will resonate in unexpected, immeasurable ways. The investment is £1,450. This includes a 90 minute follow up discovery call, 6-12 weeks later dependent upon what works best for you.
Please drop me a line on carlo@carlonavato.com if you’d like to participate.
“It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such.”
Henry David Thoreau (Journal entry August 1856)
—
32 / 1196
…
Carlo Navato
10. January . 2025
Read Look Listen
You are welcome here, suffering, joy, mystery.
I put my trust in attentive awareness.
—
31 / 1196
…
Carlo Navato
04 . January . 2025
Read Look Listen
When the curlew cries
Piercing the zendo silence
Everything connects
—
30 / 1196
A conversation with David Hieatt
Carlo Navato
28 . December . 2024
Read Look Listen
Recorded on the eve of the 10th Do Lectures back in 2018, here’s my conversation with the engaging David Hieatt, co-founder of the Do Lectures, Hiut Denim and Howies, all created with his wife and partner Clare Hieatt.
—
29 / 1196
Buon Natale!
Carlo Navato
19 . December . 2024
Read Look Listen
A very Merry Christmas to everyone from Carlo, Jo and William the waterbuck.
With special thanks to that other dashing young buck, my good friend Mr Ian Greenhalgh (pronounced Green-halsh for the un-initiated) who has been a wonderful and generous supporter this year. Treat yourself to some splendidly eclectic writing this festive holiday over at 07734 where Ian consistently delivers goodness.
—
28 / 1196
Gress Raiders Monument
Carlo Navato
13 . December . 2024
Read Look Listen
Gress, Isle Of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, HS2 0LQ.
The Gress memorial on the Isle of Lewis was designed by Will McLean and built by Jim Crawford, a local stonemason. It stands as a monument to the crofters who returned to Lewis having fought in and faced, the horrors of the First World War, only to find on their return neither the crofting land nor the homes that had been promised them by the government.
Instead, they found farms whose ownership was supported by the island’s new proprietor, Lord Leverhulme (the founder of the soap company Lever Brothers now Unilever). Tensions within the community were understandably running high and highlighted the inequity of Scottish land usage.
They were raids and battles in protest, some of the largest which took place in Gress in 1919. The raiders determination led to eventual success in 1922 when the Board of Agriculture took over the farms and divided them into over 100 new crofts, establishing crofting communities which survive to this day.
—
27 / 1196
A moment of rest
Carlo Navato
06 . December . 2024
Read Look Listen
This is my father Alberto Navato. Born 12-09-1928, died 04-12-2006.
The annotation on the back says “Bari 21-02-1950 - A moment of rest in the window of my dormitory - Alberto”
It was taken while he was undertaking National Service in the immediate aftermath of WWII, presumably by a friend.
I had no idea he played the banjo. I am uncovering my family history through my father’s and his father’s remaining photographs.
—
26 / 1196
A conversation with the wonderful, soulful Keith Yamashita
Carlo Navato
04 . December . 2024
Read Look Listen
“When you think of your life through a lens of curation, it really changes……all these false labels and all these false distinctions and all of the….I am this, and this means only this…..and I'm this combination of things, yes it’s such a helpful metaphor. Because I think are you analytic or are you creative? Well, you can be both. Are you poetic? Are you mathematical? You can be both. Are you an amazing thinker or are you a doer? Well, you can be both. Are you a dad and a great entrepreneur? Well, you can be both. And it's not that you should be all things, it's that you should be the combination of things that is of your most beautiful creation and curation.”
—
25 / 1196
Facts of life
Carlo Navato
26 . November . 2024
Read Look Listen
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.
Henry David Thoreau
—
24 / 1196
Be here now
Carlo Navato
19 . November . 2024
Read Look Listen
Time is life. Life is a series of evanescent moments, experiences and memories. The secret to contentedness lies in accepting the impermanence of everything. Stepping into the wilderness of zazen is to relinquish the need for everything to be personal and enduring. Meditation is an invitation to recognise our limits and discover endless possibilities. Take time to breathe, to be here now. Money lost can be earned again. Time lost is gone forever. Value the present moment. It’s all we’ve got.
—
Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over
Thought I'd something more to say
© Roger Waters 1973, Time
—
To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.
© Pema Chodron 1997, When Things fall Apart
—
Time is not slipping through our fingers, time is here forever, it is we who are slipping through the fingers of time.
© David Whyte 2024, Time (from Consolations II)
—
23 / 1196
Lessons from an old school Italian restaurant No. 5
Carlo Navato
11 . November . 2024
Read Look Listen
I believe that alongside curiosity one of the foundational qualities for successful leadership is adaptability.
To hone an adaptable mindset leads to an increase in one’s tolerance to ambiguity. It also provides a necessary cushion against the inevitable volatility in the complex world of commerce.
Looking after a restaurant might not seem the most obvious way to sharpen leadership adaptability skills, but it certainly did in my Dad’s case. The thing is a restaurant is a perfect microcosm of society.
And there’s no better example of a place to test you on Rudyard Kipling’s “if” than a restaurant -
“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch….”
To run a top quality restaurant well requires continual adaptation to circumstances which are changing at dizzying speed. One minute the Portuguese kitchen porter, who’s English is not great, is having a meltdown and no-one can work out why. You need to sort it.
The King of Jordan’s people are on the phone - a table for 4 please at 1300hrs - halal meat dishes only - you’re already full. You need to sort it.
Federico, the head sommelier, helped himself to the three quarters full left over bottle of Sassicaia after service last night without asking. That’s stealing. You need to sort it.
The grout in the wondrous Enzo Apicella designed bathrooms is grubby. Mario has just called to say he’s coming in tomorrow. That needs sorting. Your job.
The Pugliese baker hasn’t had his bill paid and is threatening to quit. He’s an abrasive and proud old character and he needs to be talked down before tonight’s service. Your job.
I remember coming home from Uni one weekend and excitedly telling my Dad we were studying management theory. Handy, Drucker, Peters. I told him I knew what it took to get teams working effectively. I was very confident.
My Dad left school at 14 to start work in a hotel that had been requisitioned by the German Army in Naples. Tough gig. His management training was somewhat more hands on. He listened calmly.
I’ll never forget the knowing look he gave me, the wry smile as he took my excited over-confidence on board. Patiently he let me blow myself out and then slowly he said to me words to the effect of “Yes I’m sure the books are good. Read the books. But never forget that learning to adapt to crazy problems daily means you need your eyes on the people not on the books. And you need eyes in the back of your head”
It was my first lesson in practical leadership. From a grizzled, adaptable old Neapolitan with eyes in the back of his head. I’ve never forgotten it and have to remind myself frequently that a love of books and reading is never going to be an adequate substitute for in the trenches adaptability. Thanks Dad.
—
21 / 1196
Power Up
Jo Briggs
25 . October . 2024
Read Look Listen
My vivaciously Italian father told me how one night he closed down his restaurant and then spent the next two years eating all of the stock from the freezers and drinking all of the booze from behind the bar. I really hope that’s true. A good friend told me how she just can’t bring herself to believe in an afterlife, but that when the time comes she wants more than anything to be proven wrong. I really hope that’s true too.
For me it’s always been the lure of people’s stories that have drawn me in for a closer look. Books, films, friends and family, work colleagues, strangers overheard in the street. Who’s telling them, and why, what’s the ask, and what can we hear in those tales that might just give us a shot at something, anything. Because I think it’s much more about creating an outline of a map than setting directions to follow.
In her book ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ Robin Wall Kimmerer believes that stories offer us the chance for a “corrective” lens, words which once would have yanked with the graphic designer in me who was all about setting rules and fiercely sticking to them. Thankfully, enough time has now passed in that field to allow myself some pretty hefty breathing space, and with the hindsight of experience, I can happily fess up to knowing that the juice is never in the absolutes. Rick Rubin writes poetically that the rules creatives learn are “...different, they are assumptions… there to be tested.” That rules “...direct us only to average behaviours… so if we’re going to innovate, we mustn’t fit in!”
And I sit typing this in a room full of stuff I have collected and collated over the years echoing just that. That we are here to innovate and to learn from one another, to make things better and to keep on passing that baton along the track and towards the “good” that Iris Murdoch asks of us to bring.
On my wall I treasure a long-faded print of the revolutionary architect Lina Bo Bardi, who never believed in ownership of a space, as much as possible creating projects for all to enjoy, and who when one day faced with police raids said to her colleague “I’m an architect! I can’t go through walls! All I can do with walls is break them down.” To the right of Bo Bardi – and just up from a screen still of Meryl Streep doing her thing in ‘The River Wild’ – is another equally sun-bleached print of The Immaculate Heart Art College showing students and teachers in full flow on their screen beds. Sister Corita Kent taught there between 1938 and 1968 and to my mind and many others is just the bees knees when it comes to creativity, teaching and passing those invaluable life lessons along. Incidentally, she did write some rules (see image below) but see Rule 10 for clarity on the matter. One of my favourite art pieces of hers are the words ‘POWER UP’, set in all uppercase, multi-coloured screen-printed letterforms and split over four individual frames hanging on a wall. It grabbed me the first time I flicked through her book and reminded me of a talk I heard Paula Scher give when I was fresh out of university some 20+ years ago and aching to make my mark in the graphics world. Scher referred to Pentagram as a collective “Super Group”. And boy did I want to be a part of something that sounded like that.
And I’m forever thankful that I first stepped into that world in 2001, back when we turned down designing websites because we didn’t think they’d catch on, and when the three of us as designers could spend an entire month potato printing shapes for an album cover and dragging paper through the fax machine to force distress some type. It was so much fun. But I am also so very thankful I had a boss who taught me that I needed to balance that joy (and the account books) with an understanding of process and how to truly hone my craft; and that work was always going to be done in the shadows, typesetting page after page of annual reports and sticking like glue to inch thick folders of monotonous brand guidelines. More rules than you could shake a stick at, but as Rubin points out to us, we’ve now got something to test. And for the most part, reports came and went without much ado.
But I got better. I understood the difference that weights, tracking and leading could make to a typeface and learnt how to create hierarchy on a page, how to create pace and then slow things down, how to guide people on paper in the ways I wanted them to see the content I’d just laid out on my computer screen. That stuff was never going to win awards, but it was never about that either. They were invaluable lessons learnt, which in turn gave me the guts to ask the real questions and then figure out if I liked the answers I was being given, or if it was time to start breaking down some walls.
A question I’ve been asking for the past four years is how might we want to live and work together, and looking at ways in which places and spaces can enable that. Design for me has become something much broader than I could ever have imagined when I was starting out and those identities and books I once created now happily feel no different to buildings and place-making in their abilities to tell stories. So a few of us gathered with an idea, but the world took a funny spin in that time and our grand plan also needed institutions to play fair, which is rarely the case unfortunately. For now, those particular walls remain. And we regroup, look at our map outline, power up and go again, listening out for tales as yet unheard, eager to lead and be led.
PS. For those whose stories I have been trusted with, thank you. I promise to be careful with them.
—
Picture credits:
1. My home workspace
2. In the 1960s, Corita Kent asked her students to reimagine what a learning environment could be. Their contributions comprised the now widely recognisable Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules (commonly referred to as the “Ten Rules”)
—
18 / 1196
Autumn
Carlo Navato
04 . October . 2024
Read Look Listen
Autumn is here, the season of wide skies, kaleidoscopic colours and clarification. Autumn is transformation, the season of memory and sorrow, where previous lives die away and stores are replenished for the coming winter. The abundance of Spring is in the far distance. Now is the time for chopping logs, readying the fires and coming to terms with all of the uncertainty that characterises life. Time for getting comfortable with discomfort.
—
17 / 1196
Rockpool
Carlo Navato
20 . September . 2024
Read Look Listen
There’s nothing here son
Nothing to see here
Nothing to catch.
It matters not the quality of
your first stop, tack shop
£4 funky little fishing net.
Look your timing’s off son
The tide is out
If you want to catch you’ll have to bide your precious time
Until the moon does its thing.
Come back in about 6 hours
It’ll be absolutely teeming.
Then that shitty little net
Might yet set you up with
a bucket of crabs and fish and winkles.
But that’s not the catch son.
Nah.
If you’re lucky you’ll catch yourself becoming sea.
15 / 1196
Mastery
Carlo Navato
06 . September . 2024
Read Look Listen
Mastery is a funny thing.
I remember when Malcolm Gladwell popularised the idea of the 10,000 hours in his book Outliers (actually it was a bit of a shameless steal from the work done by Anders Ericsson and later written up in his book Peak which I think was very naughty). He implored us all to spend every waking hour perfecting doing one thing well. I was always a bit suspicious of the idea that ruthless dedication to one thing was the secret to deep success or mastery in all things.
In his terrific book Range, David Epstein does a brilliant job of debunking a lot of the myths around achieving peak levels of achievement. The one thing focus is great for chess, or playing musical instruments or things that have a repetitive, predictable nature. But not for everything.
Bruce Lee had a lovely idea that I think connects to this - he said learn the rules, follow the rules, dissolve the rules. And Bruce knew a bit about mastery. I think what we need to do more of is have a deep look at what we are trying to achieve, understand the ‘normal’ approaches and what has led to success elsewhere (however that’s defined and that’s a post for another day), and then ascertain the extent to which any ‘rules’ apply.
Once we learn them well we can start to dissolve them, and find our own unique way. I think that’s more likely to create magic. A bit like Tony Levin’s magic when he plays bass on Peter Gabriel’s Big Time with mini drumsticks strapped to his fingers (check it on YouTube or your social sinbin of choice by a quick visit to Rick Beato’s site).
The idea I’m thinking more and more about is that a T shaped approach to life, and to the specific areas of expertise we are striving for, is not only much more interesting but maybe more effective. The bar of the T representing a broad sweep of subject matter interest, inspiration, knowledge, etc, and the post of the T being the particular specific expertise subject matter in question. Research by the Bernsteins found that scientists who win a Nobel Prize are about nine times more likely to have training in crafts such as wood- and metalworking or fine arts, than the typical scientist.
This approach, fuelled by curiosity, for me the gateway drug to creativity, means more accepted wisdoms (that might well be wrong) get questioned, vanilla outputs are less likely, and life reveals more colours, possibilities and opportunities for growth.
Having said all of that, I wonder whether the goal of mastery is a flawed idea anyway. The zen principle of beginner’s mind - maintaining a mind open to endless possibility - a principle that I hold to be crucial, suggests that mastery is never possible anyway. There is always something new to learn, especially if we are to avoid hubris. Experts can be arrogant, and arrogance is dangerous.
Maybe Harry Truman had it right: “An expert is someone who doesn’t want to learn anything new, because then he wouldn’t be an expert.”
—
14 / 1196
Connection and Belonging
Carlo Navato
23 . August . 2024
Read Look Listen
Music has always played a huge part in my life. I can’t play a note on anything but that’s never diminished my belief that a love of music is the single biggest factor in most of my deepest friendships.
Recently, having discovered the incredible work of Robin Dunbar (an extraordinarily gifted evolutionary psychologist at the University of Oxford), I found confirmation that music is indeed one of 3 most significant dimensions around which people connect and bond, in his Seven Pillars of Friendship model.
Which brings me onto a beautiful entanglement and connection to this very thing. When I first met the amazing James Sills at the Do Lectures back in 2018 we forged an immediate bond over music. His work in that domain is extraordinary.
Fast forward to this very Summer when James and I re-engage in Cardigan, and then serendipitously bump into each other in North Cornwall just a few weeks later. We get talking. On a secluded beach while the kids skim stones and spot a seal rolling in the distance. And James references Dunbar’s work and off we go again celebrating these webs of connection that arise blissfully out of an always curious mindset.
So, with all that in mind I hope you enjoy our previously unreleased live conversation recording from that first meeting back in 2018.
—
12 / 1196
Where the snow never melts
Carlo Navato
02 . August . 2024
Read Look Listen
This image is from the rough edit of my book project ‘The Forbidden Playground’. I sent it to Jo for this week’s piece, as to me it is reflective of the connection between physical and spiritual or psychological wandering and I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. I suggested a title.
The strength of artistic collaboration comes from being challenged to offer something that opens up space for more interesting possibilities. The words proposed really hadn’t done that and Jo pushed for more. It’s good to be encouraged to make the best gesture we can, to make a mark with our boldest stroke. That’s the job of creativity.
To that end Jo suggested that the image conjured up vibes from something she’d read by Aldo van Eyck. He believed that children are our most important inhabitants of place. Here it is:
“… if we create a playground well, we create a world in which man rediscovers what is essential… ” Like those rare times after a heavy snowfall when the children take over and the entire place becomes a playground. But places need “something more permanent than snow.” (Aldo van Eyck, by Robert McCarter, Yale University Press, 2015)
Let’s create playgrounds together where the snow never melts.
—
11 / 1196
Faces of Do 2024
Carlo Navato
26 . July . 2024
Read Look Listen
If I’ve learned anything over the last 5 years, it is that the absolute power of human connection, honest, deep, visceral human connection, is more important than anything.
Three weeks after the Do Lectures in July 2019, I lost my brother very suddenly to the awful disease sepsis. And so began a period of deep grief and reflection. It was a fraught time and I wrote about it recently. For me there is life before Aldo died, and life afterwards. For one reason or another the first time I was able to step back onto the farm in Cardigan, the magical venue for the event that I’ve been blessed to be a part of since 2008, was three weeks ago.
The reflections on those awe-inspiring four days will come later, but for now all I know is that to gather and create embers together, the embers of our lives which we fan gently into flame with one another, friend and stranger alike, is our real life’s work.
Here’s to the Faces of Do 2024, if you only knew how much it meant to share this encounter with you all, and to become once again, entangled in this glorious web.
—
10 / 1196
Shitting money
Carlo Navato
19 . July . 2024
Read Look Listen
Creating the plan for a new impact investment platform is bringing up some interesting finds from my collection of pending filing. Impact investment, and the move to an impact driven economy, must embed an approach that both acknowledges that financial return on money is one essential foundational element, but can’t be the only one. As we stand the financial status quo has to change rapidly, and historically it hasn’t. Here’s what the American Beat artist, William S. Burroughs had to say about money back in 1966:
“When a certain stage of responsibility and awareness has been reached by a young banker, he is taken to a room lined with family portraits in the middle of which is an ornate gilded toilet. Here he comes every day to defecate surrounded by the family portraits until he realizes that money is shit. And what does the money machine eat to shit it out? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty and above all it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits out quantity. There was a time when the machine ate in moderation from a plentiful larder and what it ate was replaced. Now the machine is eating faster.”
The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (1966) William Burroughs with Daniel Odier
You can always count on a great artist to cut to the chase and reveal what lies unseen but in plain sight. Almost 60 years after he said this, I’m not sure much has changed. And that’s one of the key reasons why the time is now for the dam walls to break on impact investment. In a world that desperately needs to see connection and collaboration and compassion become the drivers for everything, this is the way forward.
So, what is ‘impact investment?’ The widely accepted Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) definition is: “Investments made with the intention to generate positive, measurable social and environmental impact alongside a financial return.” It’s time to formulate game changing approaches that allow the money machine to shit out not just more money, but more life, beauty, creativity and connection. It’s time to get to work.
—
09 / 1196
Shall we dance?
Carlo Navato
12 . July . 2024
Read Look Listen
A cocktail. Mixology. JoJo the wizard. Nostalgic old man. Alberto RIP. The Joker. Carte Napoletane. Scopa. Nostalgia. Dull business cards. Pukka GF Smith stock. Electric blood. Telling truth to power. 1989 Tim Burton and big Jack. Coppe, bastoni, denari, spade. Juggle.
“Shall we dance?”
—
07 / 1196
Hopeless
Carlo Navato
28 . June . 2024
Read Look Listen
You have overcome yourself: but why do you show yourself to me only as the one overcome? I want to see the victor: throw roses into the abyss and say, ‘Here is my thanks to the monster who didn’t succeed in swallowing me alive’.
Friedrich Nietzsche
—
05 / 1196
Through the fish-eyed lens of tear-stained eyes
Carlo Navato
10 . June . 2024
Read Look Listen
Time seems to have taken on a weirdly different complexion. Less a linear thing, the past behind me, the present now, and the future still out there somewhere, and more of a kind of upward helical spiral with events sitting on top of one another and moments and experiences reprising and returning.
I’ve been thinking about death a lot lately. The certainty of impermanence and change has been all around. Relationships that were dead and buried have re-ignited, ideas that had withered are suddenly succulent once more. A failed 10-year project built on so much blood, sweat and tears, many questions, few good answers. A close friend continues to suffer the aftermath of losing his phenomenal, gorgeous wife a year ago, and none of us can relieve the pain. In the last month a best friend has received a bladder cancer diagnosis. Then I got a call just three weeks ago from a very old school friend saying one of our class of ’87 has just suffered a massive brain tumour. And then bam, just 48 hours later a text landed. “He’s passed. I’ll let you know the funeral plans asap.”
Death is everywhere. My Zen teacher also wrote a heartfelt celebration of the passing of one of his close friends this week.
“Helping our Corey cross over was a community event” he said, a beautifully tender way to consider the transition from this life to whatever comes next. “People are weeping, helpful, bright, the whole seems composed, and life is going on, but death always exerts pressure against the complacency of life: Am I free while I’m dying, while those I love are dying, or while it’s raining?”
Wonderfully Zen.
Of course, many followers of the Zen way reject the concept of there being a ‘next’ in the sense of a rebirth. If we are attuned to live only in this present moment and accept the notion of there being no self, separate from everything else, then Dogen Zenji’s description of what happens is fine:
“Firewood, after becoming ash, does not again become firewood. Similarly, human beings, after death, do not live again.”
But who knows? I’ve made a strong commitment to holding uncertainty lightly as I navigate the second half of my own life. And I’m signed up to the imperative of seeing doubt as virtue. Carl Jung knew what was what, and as he said:
“People who merely believe and don’t think, forget that they continually expose themselves to their own worst enemy: doubt. Wherever belief reigns, doubt lurks in the background. But thinking people welcome doubt: it serves them as a valuable stepping stone to better knowledge.”
—
In loving memory: Andrew Cole, 12th September 1968 — 12th March 2024
We said goodbye to Andy on Tuesday and it was too soon. He was only 55. He shared my late father’s birthday - the 12th September - he was just 3 days younger than me. It was a poignant send off - somewhere around 22 of his old school mates amongst family and friends. Nine of our old first XV rugby team. Some of us hadn’t seen each other for 37 years - not since we stood in front of the A level results board back in that endless Summer of ’87.
Andy was a hell of a winger - natural athlete - strong, fast, and possessed of a ferocious hand off. He broke all sorts of try scoring records. He was also a consummate thinker. Wickedly smart and natural in any argument - he’d seamlessly swap sides in a debate just to keep everyone’s blood pressure at unnecessarily elevated levels. But he also had a delicate spirit and a deep-rooted vulnerability. He wasn’t confident that he was lovable or loved, and he had a complex relationship with his family. It seemed he struggled with the world a bit more than most. Like many boys who’d had their seven years at our Catholic school, mass every Wednesday, all that jazz, he shook off his faith not long after leaving. But he rediscovered it again late in life and was very close to his God when he died. I’m glad about that.
In the pub after the funeral ceremony there was so much laughter, so many re-connections made, so many reminders of how precious it is to be surrounded by people who care. Half the boys are of Irish descent so there was some serious story telling going down. Andy never married and he didn’t have kids, so this really was an old school reunion. It wasn’t long before my brother Aldo came up.
Aldo was six years older than me and in his last year at school as we were in our first year. All the boys knew him. He was distinctive. When Chris Pereira asked after him, I was back in my helical spiral where time hadn’t passed so much as circled away and come back again.
“He died Chris. Summer of 2019. 57.” Chris is consummate in his response. But we’re back at school again, just two beefy but fragile boys, eye to eye, not quite knowing where to go next. I just about manage “Yeah, I know, thanks mate.” And here it all is again. The trauma, the grief. I remember Nick Cave writing about the tidal nature of grief. It is tidal. It washes all over us when it first comes, catching us totally unprepared, flipping us over like a huge breaker, desperate to drown us. In time of course, it recedes, and we’re left with precarious feelings of acceptance, forward movement, and quietness, only for the tide to wash back in again carrying sorrow and anguish and helplessness. And then out it goes again, and we rise above the suffering, temporarily. Eventually the ebb and flow of the pain accumulates into a tideline where all the old memories and emotions cohere and settle.
If we love, we grieve, that’s the deal. And grief scours us clean. Its gift is to starkly illuminate for us all the nonsense we become entangled with. All the bullshit. It spotlights every one of the dreadfully insignificant things that so much of our lives are spent being hung up on. Then they just fall away. But it’s no easy task staying in that illuminated mindset. They will return. One of Aldo’s great passions in life was music, particularly the music of Pink Floyd. There’s a verse from the Final Cut, one of his favourite tracks from one of his favourite albums which perfectly summed up where I was in the immediate aftermath of losing him:
“Through the fish-eyed lens of tear stained eyes
I can barely define the shape of this moment in time
And far from flying high in clear blue skies
I'm spiralling down to the hole in the ground where I hide”
Aldo was my hero. I didn’t want to have to hide. Not from him, not from the memory of him, not from the world. I loved him from the absolute marrow of my bones. I was lucky - I got the big brother whose immense and beautiful character challenged me to improve my own. The brother whose love and affection and humour so enriched our lives, and whose loyalty, strength and support revealed to me what it is to be a real man. And he showed us all what it is to be truly alive. Vibrantly alive. He transcended so many challenges, physical, mental, emotional, and just flat out decided fuck it, he would be right at the centre of where the action was anyway. He raised everyone he touched just a little bit higher. God I miss him - mischievous, prickly, courageous, resilient old bastard joker that he was.
—
Grief is so complicated. It brings with it an unbridled basket of emotions. And some of these emotions challenge everything we think we know about ourselves. Grief is like an unforgiving spotlight - it shines the brightest of all lights back on us, like some kind of torturous mirror. But we mustn’t waste it. Because it has within it the seeds of new growth, the makings of a better thing. In the aftermath of the devastation that comes with losing somebody precious, we reset. The other stuff, the tinder dry under-storey, gets burned off right away. And we are left with this strange newness. While it’s unfamiliar and unbearably uncomfortable at first, in time it can become the stimulus for incredible creativity. The very thing we fear will destroy us, becomes the very thing that gives us a newfound creative energy. Like the regenerating forest floor which has survived the fire, the rebound energy is all invested into recovery. New shoots. All the colours a little more saturated, all the tastes a little saltier but at the same time a little sweeter.
If This Is A Man, the Italian chemist and partisan, Primo Levi’s grindingly hard but inspiring memoir of surviving life in Auschwitz, contains the following passage:
“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealisable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realisation of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite ……… The certainty of death opposes it: for it places a limit on every joy, but also on every grief.”
His words are comforting. Wisdom is revealed slowly over time. We must be persistent in the face of pain and uncertainty. I work with old buildings. They are a bit like old people - if they are treated with respect and care they tend to willingly give up their secrets. Longevity after all, is evidence of success. Like the best of them we must wear our patina and our craftsman’s marks like they unselfconsciously wear theirs. I’ve always liked Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame observation:
“Time added to the cathedral more than it took away. Time spread over her face that dark grey patina which gives to very old monuments their season of beauty.”
Time again. Spiralling away both up and down my helical staircase. All those friends standing on numerous treads, on those helical stairs, in that pub, wearing their visible signs of lives well lived, and not so well lived. Each one lovely, each one a stark reminder of the power of compassion and love. Maybe the ultimate measure of friendship is whether it needs constant attention to stay alive. I wonder whether the very best friendships are like the hardiest seeds - they stay dormant for decades and then when conditions are right, they regenerate. I think so. In the blossoming we see that the real nourishment of friendship is not in either party becoming something more, something improved, but simply in the fact of both friends having borne witness together. In the sharing of these unique experiences we get, as the poet David Whyte, delightfully describes it:
“the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.”
—
In loving memory: Aldo Francesco Navato, 8th July 1962 - 6th August 2019
So, here’s to you Andy, and here’s to you dearest Aldo. Thank you for enlightening my journey, a journey that would have been more fun had it lasted longer. But short as it was, it was filled with sweet fruit and much joy.
—
Originally published: The Forbidden Playground, 09 April 2024
04 / 1196
New York, New York
Carlo Navato
31 . May . 2024
Read Look Listen
New York, New York, 1999. In downtown Manhattan everywhere you look there they are. Unmissable. Massive, brooding towers, the twins. Born 1973, murdered September 11th, 2001; felled by madmen in pursuit of some horrific, twisted, afterlife liberty or glory. In honour of the 2,977 innocent victims.
—
03 / 1196
Rise up, in the heaven of artistic creation
Carlo Navato
23 . May . 2024
Read Look Listen
Every man needs aesthetic ghosts in order to live. I have pursued them, sought them, hunted them down. I have experienced many forms of anxiety, many forms of hell. I have known fear and terrible solitude, the false friendship of tranquilizers and drugs, the prison of depression and mental homes. I emerged from all that one day, dazzled but sober. Marcel Proust taught me that ‘the magnificent and pitiable family of neurotic people is the salt of the earth.’ I did not choose this fatal lineage, yet it is what allowed me to rise up in the heaven of artistic creation, frequent what Rimbaud called ‘the makers of fire,’ find myself, and understand that the most important encounter in life is the encounter with one’s self.
An extract from Yves Saint Laurent’s retirement Speech, 7th January 2002
—
02 / 1196
A is for Architecture
A conversation with Murray Kerr
Carlo Navato
15 . May . 2024
Read Look Listen
This conversation with the stellar architect Murray Kerr, was recorded back in April 2020 during the first UK Covid lockdown. Murray’s design practice, Denizen Works is creating one category defining piece of work after another. We started with the question “what is architecture” and proceeded to meander all over the place in a lively discussion about space, constraints, bumps in the process, humility in design and the need to keep pushing forward.
—
01 / 1196
The Forbidden Playground
Carlo Navato
8 . May . 2024
Read Look Listen
What can we know of the world? What quantity of space can our eyes hope to take inbetween our birth and our death? How many square centimetres of the Planet Earth will our souls have touched.
George Perec (1974)+
—
The Forbidden Playground started life as a photographic project. When I began to document a former Battle of Britain Fighter Command Air Force base, back in 2014. It formed the backbone of the final submission for my Masters in Photography. The Forbidden Playground was a personal attempt to understand my visceral connection with a space which had formed such an evocative backdrop to my feral childhood. However, what was initially designed as a critical visual investigation into an edge-land environment on the border of suburbia and the outer London greenbelt, morphed into something more.
This ‘terrain vague’ replete with military bunkers, spitfire blast pens and gun emplacements – a brutal built environment designed for war – became a metaphor for something deeper, richer. Here, planted into a natural landscape of grass expanses, greater knapweed, wild carrot and cow parsley, structures which I had infiltrated as a child decades earlier, invited something more than just a photographic study. What began as an examination of physical structures, evolved into an excavation of family history, childhood play, nostalgia, and personal identity. It became about contemplation and entanglement and paradox and the question: who am I really?
—
Photography is unique in this — it transcends time and space in a way that few other creative practices can. This way of being out in the world with eyes wide and an open mind is cathartic. On a good day it is seeing, not merely looking, and the vibrations of life are recorded. On a very good day what is found is truly magical — where physical, emotional, mental and spiritual space coheres, creativity explodes into life, and real art gets made. For me photography is the tangible manifestation of a restless, obsessive curiosity. Photography is about personal disclosure, the chosen revelation bounded tightly by a frame. Making images is definitively reductive — the contemplation on what to leave out being just as important as deciding what to include. And then, the decisive moment, action, a slice of time frozen for all time, a shard of history created. Of course, no two photographers will ever make the same image, however much they share a subject. This is the joy of the medium. It beautifully reflects that each of us attend to the world in an utterly unique way. In a considered photograph, or series of photographs, the maker weaves a narrative that reveals something deeply personal of themselves.
—
So, the Forbidden Playground. Oxeye daisy, bush vetch, yellow rattle and nettle, enveloping and penetrating concrete, brickwork and steel, inviting exploration. And as the work continued a theme materialised. Multitudes, uncertainty, paradox, contradiction and combination. Duration and transition, permanence and impermanence, new growth and decay, optimism and pessimism, playfulness and melancholy. Time and again new contrasts and juxtapositions appeared — space and place, natural environment and built environment, longevity and ephemerality, discovery and loss. The stark beauty of both the monumental and the humble. The incongruity of the inviting lacunae, cracks and fissures and the repellant massive slabs and walls.
—
The project led me into an entirely new world of creativity unleashed – a welcome output for the insatiable curiosity that needed to ground, to take root in something meaningful. All the adjacent disciplines of history, archaeology, anthropology, architecture, geography, art, psychology, ecology, and philosophy, all threw something my way. An invitation to gluttony, an offer I couldn’t refuse. And with that a decision made – a decision to turn over the stones of discovery and embrace this web of diverse interconnections.
Through making photographs with intention, we invite reflection on our innermost vulnerability. It was in this multi-dimensional space that I found strong ties back to a complex personal history. The son of an Italian immigrant and grandson of an RAF officer, I grew up in an era when the aftershocks of World War II were still resonant. My parents, born and brought up on either side of a brutal and unforgiving world war, coming together and bridging the divide. But confusion is the nature of childhood and all those misunderstood contrasts were stark. Then, through curiosity, and a grounded creative practice, shards of light started to appear through the cracks that are present in everything. Things come into sharper focus. The Forbidden Playground – a place of childhood freedom and teenage abandon – of unbounded enthusiasm and a surrender of inhibitions, was also a place about loss, betrayal, aloneness, and fear. It was here that I was awakened to the ever-present tension between continuity and change.
—
This awakening changed everything for me. It now informs all that I do in my work. Continuity and change are not opposites — they are mutually reinforcing realities.
I make space. I do this in a multitude of ways, physically as a developer, and metaphorically as an adviser, a coach and a creator. I have spent thirty-five years relentlessly pursuing excellence in building physical space and now more and more of what I’m asked to do is about building space for possibility.
I’ve seen that the provocation to discover creative fulfilment is the most significant work of all. Space, after all, is just a container, the real juice is in what’s happening for those inside.
The way to creative fulfilment is in finding this middle space where relentless drive can reside more comfortably with uncertainty and doubt and exploration. I’ve noticed more and more that wherever there is a predilection to high achievement there is the need for moderation, for an offset with curiosity and creative discovery. There is always a deeper meaning to be attained than the one found on the frontline in business. I know, I’ve been there and it’s exhausting and its lonely. I can’t be this because I’m this we tell ourselves. The Forbidden Playground released me from that dualistic absurdity. Here was a space in which I could become so much more.
We all have a Forbidden Playground, a space for multitude and the resolution of what appear to be contradictions. In this place you become neither one thing nor the other, but both, or better still the manifestation of all your entangled parts. It’s the place where you bring radical honesty and forgiveness, and where intuition trumps logic. It’s where multiple routes to truth emerge and where reason becomes only of them. The data driven world of everyday is left behind and the abundance of holding uncertainty lightly, reveals to us what it is to be human. It’s the place where the gears of your heart change as art is made.
Find the space, enjoy the play.
—
FOOTNOTE+Perec, G. 1974. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. London: Penguin.