Jean Francois Lyotar, Principe de chromodynamique
Giuseppe Chiari, Da 16 a 16mila cicli al secondo in 24 ore
Bruno Corà, Maria Novella Del Signore: Continuum Sensibile
Laura Vecere, And living is so very close to dying
David Clegg, Memories of a Body incomplete
David Clegg, The Science of Animal Earth
David Thorp, Grace in a Disordered World
And living is so very close to dying.
Laura Vecere, Florence, June 17, 2006
The provisional character of the situations and the images, caught in transit
while they are weaving a plot and already ready to move on to the next one,
describes an action carried out in the direction of the logic of the fragment, that
is to say of that entity which, "rather than as an isolated germ, behaves like a
wandering particle that is defined in relation to other particles."
The construction of a fragmentary universe requires, from those who practice it,
a daring balancing act between accepting every possible digression, on the one
hand, and keeping to the thread of a constant and coherent narrative, on the
other. This mental/existential condition traces one of the characterizing profiles
of modernity, from Sterne's Tristram Shandy to Schwitters's Merzbau. Art of
digression the former, and art of organic stratification, of modeling from within,
the latter.
From this trunk branches a line of descent that has shaped the artistic practice
of Maria Novella Del Signore right from her earliest works, that is from the time
when she made an entropic "conceptual" model the center of her activity. An
assumption that confers the paradoxical tone of a fragmentary "organism" on
the entire range of her output, and that accounts for the fact that each
construction of a space or a thing is never the result of what is conceived within
a program planned in advance, but always the outcome of a peripatetic and
shifting experience. Here one breathes a sense of atop/a. In fact there is no
longer the goal of the grand opus to be achieved, because the work is already
set out in the principle of transformation itself. It is therefore in the very nature of
its passing and transforming that everything always and inevitably intersects
with courses of degeneration and death. Yet the work does not draw back from
what appears to be an obstacle, a barrier, an interruption.
Viewed as a whole, the nebulous and fragmentary corpus of her work seems to
rotate slowly around an obscure area, that is to say around the very origin of the
underlying enigma, continually touched on, alluded to, hinted at and never
directly stated. Everything seems to move around a pulsating zone that radiates
its effects a long way from its own center which, although unexpressed, anchors
the plurality of the manifestations to itself. A nucleus that defines a "sacred"
space where, in the darkness of a mystery theater whose deepest root cannot
be revealed, a press blends them together and fuses them into an amalgam, life
into death, and death into life.
There is a hint of a remote matrilineal origin that runs from the chthonic cults of
antiquity through a subterranean vein that no form of patriarchy, beginning with
that of Mount Olympus, has ever been able to block permanently, all the way
down to our own time. Its underground ramifications nourish the universe of a
female awareness (and here it is worth referring briefly to the variations on a
similar underlying tone that surface in various ways in the work of women artists
who, while very remote from one another in both time and approach, are linked
by this thread, Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, Marina Abramovic, Kiki Smith, Mona Hatoum and Ghada Amer, to mention just a few names): ancient and
timeless stories that predate knowledge and religions and that belong by right to
the realm of the one Lady with many names: Isis, Hathor, Bastet, Artemis of
Ephesus, split into Demeter/Persephone. The Body, for this is what it is, of the seed itself, the seed that according to the Gospels must die in order to bear
fruit, becomes all one with the primordial body: mother earth, the mistress of the
cults of death and regeneration that link the human and plant worlds, and that
are reassembled, as Paredro of the goddess, whose death (by
dismemberment) and resurrection are celebrated.1
In the construction of Some Bodies Memories there are no relics or vestiges of
past actions that are now objects of veneration, but neither are there narrations
of a private biography. The itineraries and themes outlined above are brought
together again to give rise to a distribution of the works in which they are
scattered over a sequence of rooms, each of which is turned into the theater of
a bodily memory. A memory that resurfaces anomalous and "peripheral," a long
way from its central, cerebral seat. In other words the mnemonic route spreads
out like a rhizome, reemerging in the parts/fragments and in different
circumstances, to remind us that each individual part is impregnated with the presence of a vaster corporeality that assumes in itself both the organic and the
inorganic, both the human and the vegetable. As in the tradition of mythological
metamorphoses, all bodies and with them their souls can descend as well as
climb the ladder that links the multiple states of being.
And so we come to a long table on which “bodies” are lined up,
their surfaces undulating with paraffins and with a greenish light radiating from
their interiors, resembling exhibits of alien anatomies; gigantic photos of the
wriggling bodies of dead lizards, pictures taken on the side of the road; photos
framed with bumished iron depicting a sequence of the youthful
hands of a maiden saint, posed in attitudes of sacred representation. But we
also find showcases with fallen nests, frames/canopies that enclose fragments
of glassy surfaces, rippling with meanders and acting as skin/shield to a toxic
content of alumina, over which plays a livid yellow light. On a layer of tar is laid
a chest, almost a nuptial bed. containing waves of white material in movement:
disintegrating remains or moments of dawning. Signs of reawakening energy
that has not yet defined its field of action? The moving substance seems to
have designs of its own, almost beyond the intentions of its creator, animated in
a movement of self-organization. This is an important trait of Maria Novella's
work that allows her, in total complicity with the material, to provoke an effect of reactivity in it, setting it in movement with a touch as if she was just passing it by
and stirring in its inner core an endogenous force that projects it, internally
invigorated, toward an unknown goal.
At the base of this practice lies "confidence." A confidence whose source is
faraway, in that consciousness of not-knowing, which does not cover things with
the crystalline case provided by the interpretation of the rational mind, but which
installs itself inside them to observe the intimate oscillation that dwells with
them and “which makes them the place of infinite transits, of infinite possibilities.”.2
—
1. U. Pestalozza, / miti della donna-giardino. Da Iside alia Sulamita. Milan: Edizioni Medusa,
2001, p. 177. ↑
2. F. Rella, "Lo sguardo ulteriore della bellezza," in G. Battaile, La Parte Maledetta. Turin: Bollati
Boringhieri,2003 ↑