Giorgio Andreotta Calò
25 Feb - 25 Mar 2016
GIORGIO ANDREOTTA CALÒ
IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE
25 February – 25 March 2016
The Sulcis area is on strike again. The economy is starving, unemployment is out of control. This piece of land is located in the southwest of Sardinia. It is not unknown to Giorgio Andreotta Calo, who came here several times in recent years, taking home various artefacts, bones, stories. Among the deserts of sand that open onto the Mediterranean and kilometres of rough roads, the remains of a languishing economy emerge, an economy which still lingered in the late '30s autarkic production model promoted by fascism. Coal is extracted from the belly of the earth, in the dark, where the humidity accentuates the smell of the mineral and the hours inexorably pass. From below, precisely from the bowels of Carbonia, Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s journey starts. A journey - yet another - that Giorgio Andreotta Calò undertakes with a group of miners and former miners headed on foot to Sant'Antioco, the island connected to the mainland by a short artificial isthmus. In Girum Imus Nocte is the 16mm film that records this action. It begins at sunset and ends at dawn, in the Santa Barbara night, the patron saint of fire fighters and bomb squads to whom even the miners are devoted. Her image appears swiftly, in the holes of light that appear by fits and starts on the film. The film is dark, lyrical. A vision that condensates sculptural colour changes, where the landscape flows in the background: even if you do not see it, it vibrates. The night of December 4th, 2014 was as black as coal. Of a geological silence. The miners come out from the darkness of the earth and rise to the surface. The torches that illuminate the path move in the race of the frames and mark the progress of the walk. A unison step measured by the tongues of fire of a burning boat, on the beach of the fish farm of Stagno di Cirdu. Enclosed in the flames, the ritual of the pilgrims wears out. The fire walks with them.
The horizontality of this journey, and its cyclical reading, mirrors the narrative of the exhibition. A physical path that runs close to the ground and that can also be accomplished in the opposite direction. A continuous process of matter and transfiguration, the one that Giorgio Andreotta Calo reproduces, being it a sculpture, an action or a film, it doesn’t change much. It ideally begins beneath the surface. The original core-samples made in the Sulcis are proposed offering a panorama of different rocks in the area: volcanic rocks, basalt, limestone, coal. A sculpture that itself becomes action and journey. Lying on metal semicircles, the extractions retrieved from the archives of the Carbo Sulcis evoke a descent into hell, where the potentially infinite time marks the geological eras of this habitat. The same time that in the artist’s series of hourglasses occurs vertically, shrinking in the middle for a continuum moment, here takes us deep into the lowest layer of the subsoil.
The territory and the earth are two indivisible components, and you cannot tell which one comes first. The nature of this exhibition is grounded in both of them. The space, whose surface is like a trompe l'oeil, is verticalized over time. Henri Lefebvre acknowledged in space a multiplicity comparable to a puff pastry dessert. In Girum Imus Nocte tries to absorb them all.
The Pinna Nobilis, which introduces us to this journey, is the cast of a hermaphroditic organism, the largest mussel that inhabits the Mediterranean waters. Witness of an underwater landscape that is a counterpoint to landscape above. Layers that are organized one in the function of the other, each of them characterized by its own compositional unit. Something that, as Guy Debord suggested about the film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni "is in itself interchangeable with indifference."
To which of these many eras does Dogod, the mysterious entity, belong? It cannot as well be excused from this plural reading of the process. The pile of animal bones (perhaps a dog?) haunts the gaze and remains inscrutable. Once again it brings with itself a time and a place, and it transfigures them. The sculptural action transforms the matter-nature to deliver it to its immanence.
- Martina Angelotti -
IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE
25 February – 25 March 2016
The Sulcis area is on strike again. The economy is starving, unemployment is out of control. This piece of land is located in the southwest of Sardinia. It is not unknown to Giorgio Andreotta Calo, who came here several times in recent years, taking home various artefacts, bones, stories. Among the deserts of sand that open onto the Mediterranean and kilometres of rough roads, the remains of a languishing economy emerge, an economy which still lingered in the late '30s autarkic production model promoted by fascism. Coal is extracted from the belly of the earth, in the dark, where the humidity accentuates the smell of the mineral and the hours inexorably pass. From below, precisely from the bowels of Carbonia, Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s journey starts. A journey - yet another - that Giorgio Andreotta Calò undertakes with a group of miners and former miners headed on foot to Sant'Antioco, the island connected to the mainland by a short artificial isthmus. In Girum Imus Nocte is the 16mm film that records this action. It begins at sunset and ends at dawn, in the Santa Barbara night, the patron saint of fire fighters and bomb squads to whom even the miners are devoted. Her image appears swiftly, in the holes of light that appear by fits and starts on the film. The film is dark, lyrical. A vision that condensates sculptural colour changes, where the landscape flows in the background: even if you do not see it, it vibrates. The night of December 4th, 2014 was as black as coal. Of a geological silence. The miners come out from the darkness of the earth and rise to the surface. The torches that illuminate the path move in the race of the frames and mark the progress of the walk. A unison step measured by the tongues of fire of a burning boat, on the beach of the fish farm of Stagno di Cirdu. Enclosed in the flames, the ritual of the pilgrims wears out. The fire walks with them.
The horizontality of this journey, and its cyclical reading, mirrors the narrative of the exhibition. A physical path that runs close to the ground and that can also be accomplished in the opposite direction. A continuous process of matter and transfiguration, the one that Giorgio Andreotta Calo reproduces, being it a sculpture, an action or a film, it doesn’t change much. It ideally begins beneath the surface. The original core-samples made in the Sulcis are proposed offering a panorama of different rocks in the area: volcanic rocks, basalt, limestone, coal. A sculpture that itself becomes action and journey. Lying on metal semicircles, the extractions retrieved from the archives of the Carbo Sulcis evoke a descent into hell, where the potentially infinite time marks the geological eras of this habitat. The same time that in the artist’s series of hourglasses occurs vertically, shrinking in the middle for a continuum moment, here takes us deep into the lowest layer of the subsoil.
The territory and the earth are two indivisible components, and you cannot tell which one comes first. The nature of this exhibition is grounded in both of them. The space, whose surface is like a trompe l'oeil, is verticalized over time. Henri Lefebvre acknowledged in space a multiplicity comparable to a puff pastry dessert. In Girum Imus Nocte tries to absorb them all.
The Pinna Nobilis, which introduces us to this journey, is the cast of a hermaphroditic organism, the largest mussel that inhabits the Mediterranean waters. Witness of an underwater landscape that is a counterpoint to landscape above. Layers that are organized one in the function of the other, each of them characterized by its own compositional unit. Something that, as Guy Debord suggested about the film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni "is in itself interchangeable with indifference."
To which of these many eras does Dogod, the mysterious entity, belong? It cannot as well be excused from this plural reading of the process. The pile of animal bones (perhaps a dog?) haunts the gaze and remains inscrutable. Once again it brings with itself a time and a place, and it transfigures them. The sculptural action transforms the matter-nature to deliver it to its immanence.
- Martina Angelotti -