.2019

I have an interest in the difference between what we perceived and what it’s taught, between critical thinking and ideologies. Working on the discrepancies between memory (subjectivity) and official History, I am attracted by voices that speak of a more complex and human, History and reality. My research leads me to focus on peculiar “communities” -as an outsider- for their cultural and political characteristics, and to interrogate public space, using my practice and aesthetics, as a way to find something out or work through something.

My pieces aren’t political but they activate politically the spectator, asking the audience to take a position toward a subject, to reconsider an event or to start a dialogue with memory and with others. Often, they are an attempt to take care of a problem that belongs to a specific group of people. The attempt is seen as performative effort but also as a learning process, open to errors, to audience feedback, to improvement, and it’s sometimes DIY. My practice is mainly involved in sound pieces and collective performance, using field recording, interviews, documentary and participatory practices. I have been working on the threshold between performer, spectator and witness, investigating, the agency of the citizens on art and the real, and questioning what it means to bear witnessing and to be a performer.

As an artist I have been analyzing “dynamics” in order to create relationships and experiences. My practice is concerned with the creation of the physical space and conditions, to initiate and facilitate them. The space can assume different forms such as a newspaper, an office, a club, a sound installation in public space or a pair of salt walls, but they all are Spaces of encounter and dialogue. To get something more intimate I work in the language of the community I collaborate with, learning often a new language within this path. Symbolic places and materials, usually become key parts of my history and site based projects, as triggers for actions and memory.

COMPLEXITY

It comes to us simpler and faster, to think via stereotypes and ideologies instead of taking time to understand the complexity, the reasons behind the action of others, and to dialogue. Our time became working time, leaving us privy of theoccasionto grasp reality in all its aspects, instead we are having mediatized simplified version of it.

Schools became too often spaces where to educate multitasking productive subjects able to work under-stress. Engineering is an approximation of Nature, in order to be able to foresee and rationalize reality. Often it happens that in the study and teaching of History of Art, everything tends to be simplified and presented as a linear evolution of concepts and techniques. But reality happens in a messy way full of overlaps. Furthermore, I began to question the application of an alleged scientific methodology to the evaluation of artistic production for funding policies, which wants to regularize Art by transforming it into a linear work in steps to evaluate, quantify and control.

I am a former engineer who has grown intolerant against the need to have everything under control and does not believe that the measure is the only truth. Perhaps now we need dreams and irrationality to solve the problems that our too rational and over-productive thought has created.

THE ROLE OF THE AUDIENCE

I have always considered a performer not a trained person but who takes the chance to walk on the stage, in that very moment of taking action, for me s/he becomes a performer. I create situations that give space to the subjectivity of others and spaces where different elements create a field of forces, giving the audience the role to balance them or to choose its own position within a story. Spaces where “truth” can be perceived as a process and a story unfolds itself in the making, it’s a documentary turn on performing a dialogue.In this doing the practices of choreography, installation and audience engagement dialogue. To further the research on audience co-participation in spoken pieces and the role of the witness, I studied as autodidact, under the advices of Alfredo Lescano and Luca Greco, Semantic of Social Conflicts, Linguistic Anthropology and Conversation Analysis.

THE TRACE

For the philosopher Piere Nora, Memory is by nature multiple and never specific, constantly evolving, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting. History instead is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of something that no longer exists, history is the representation of the past.

During my High School period in Italy, studying History of Art does not seem to me much different than detecting in the biography of an artist the traces of what made her/him one.We study and question the trace of others, to understand how to leave ours, how to exist.

My pieces at the beginning started from a discourse on the trace, about how we leave one and how we find traces in memory and oral history, about what remains and what is left of untold or interrupted stories, the value of such testimonies in questioning ourself and institutionalized stories, in defining a future memory. The investigation of historical event became for me a context to bring together different people (volunteers) for a discussion of the past in the present, of the past and the present. Like a theater director that create a stage for a story, the rules to play it and invites a mixture of witness ad citizens to play. Then, I wait curios to see what will happen, hunger to be surprised about what can come out and what a temporary collectivity can achieve or not.

But I have always been interested also in the symbolic, social and political value we invest in remains and testimonies. Bones can become relics if we invest them with sacred values and we classify them following the Canon Law, or they can be remains if we see them as an archaeologist.

THE ATTEMPT

In my practice I have tried to take care of problems and others in different ways, starting with community projects on different scales and itinerant performances. Very often the problems that I wanted to solve led us to works with almost mythological objectives that we could not always complete due to our limitations of contacts, resources and techniques. But in some cases there was also a discrepancy between the purpose and what in reality I had the courage to do. If I look back, my works have frequently been an attempt to solve a problem and not a solution.

The attempt is a cognitive process, it is an openness to the public, to becoming, to grow, and for this it always maintains the possibility of error and the space to improve.