Armed with petals
Daniele Capra
The project La terra dei fiori by Sasha Vinci and Maria Grazia Galesi creates a counter-mythology about the places in Campania that have been at the centre of the news in recent years for dramatic criminal and environmental issues. These are places where the management of the territory has been entirely taken over by organized crime. The state has utterly abdicated control, and the citizens have agreed to turn a blind eye, to not seeing or knowing, willing prisoners of an indifference no one seems to have been impervious to. Being citizens means taking sides, and not hiding one’s head in the sand: as Gramsci warned a century ago in a scathing moral admonition: “I hate the indifferent. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. […] I also hate the indifferent because of that: because their whimpering of eternally innocent ones annoys me. I make each one liable: how they have tackled the task that life has given and gives them every day, what have they done, and especially, what they have not done”[1].
The terra dei fuochi (Land of Fire) is riddled with toxic waste, it is poisoned, sickening, defeated by the tragic events that have befallen it. It is a labyrinth as twisted as a Greek tragedy, in which the gods punish men for their arrogance, the conceit of the hubris of those who did not respect the necessary order.
Vinci/Galesi suggest a way out to this impasse, a visual and moral one, through a territorial counter-narrative, starting from the flowers that are cultivated in Campania. They set the luxuriant blooming of nature against degradation, identifying it as an element of wonder, as the expression of the citizens’ will to find redemption. Campania, la terra dei fuochi, Land of Fire, can be a terra dei fiori, a Land of Flowers, a place for gerberas, chrysanthemums to grow.
The will to change the state of things must be ours, ours the momentum to overcome the current situation. Art which intends to change the world, should suggest a feasible road to salvation. Perhaps honesty, beauty and dignity can flourish even from the greatest neglect. But only if we feel that the solution available is feasible.
In western visual culture the flower is inextricably linked to beauty, purity, to fleeting elements and a transitory nature. Since the iconography of the annunciation has become formalised, every archangel is depicted bringing a lily to the Madonna. Like the wings, the lily is a not only an identifying attribute of Gabriel, but also a sign of good luck and a symbol referring to the purity of the virgin Mary. Particularly since the 15th century, the gardens depicted near sacred or mythological scenes also appear to be full of flowers, with even greater botanic wealth, making clear references to beauty, the cycle of the seasons and rebirth.
Cut flowers are also one of the distinctive elements of still-lives, a genre that started from the end of the 16th century and became one of the most frequent subjects of Flemish painting in the golden ages. They are at once the allegory of beauty and of the fleetingness of the world, but also a testing ground for the painter’s imagination and virtuoso abilities. This is decoration and at the same time admonishment, a secular and a realistic one, the result of a society that was becoming more and more secular and did not want to commission only religious and mythological scenes from its artists, but also works that could talk about and describe the contemporary world.
In the twentieth century, with the avant-gardes that tore apart every iconographic topos and every form of socio-cultural rigidity, the flower, after having been a very clichéd painterly subject in bourgeois interiors, utterly loses its characteristics to become the metaphor of something else, in particular of women, eros, or, with a greater psychological complexity, of the deceit hidden by the seductiveness of appearance. In the second part of the 1960s there was a true revolution with the student movements and Hippie counterculture. Allen Ginsberg theorized in an article that “Masses of flowers — a visual spectacle — especially concentrated in the front lines, can be used to set up barricades” [2]. This is how flower power was born, the idea of responding with a flower to the force and violence of authority, mocking the police and the army with the smallest gesture of protest: a flower offered to the lines of soldiers, inserting it into the barrel of their guns. From that moment on, the flower became something different, the tool for peaceful struggle, the emblem of a season of non-violence through which to protest against both the war in Vietnam and the kind of politics that considers arms as the only tool for resolving the conflicts between states.
La terra dei fiori project displays and discusses the expressive possibilities of the flower, a symbol of regeneration and spirituality, but most of all it makes it into a political tool, that art can use in a symbolic war. There are no manifestly ideological issues in it, but rather conceptual and botanical reason: it shares the land with the polluted areas, but it produces beauty, and delicately suggests the possibility of changing the status quo.
Vinci/Galesi offer transitory visions, as fleeting as the beauty of a flower, a wonder destined for swift dissolution. In these work the floral element transforms, animates and conceals. It is a natural presence holding many meanings rooted in the most ancient mythologies. They are also the metaphor of the fragility of the contemporary world, an image of joy and mourning. Of eros animating earthly love, and peace releasing the celestial one.
La Terra dei Fiori is a series made of large format photographs, a magenta-coloured neon as a dry reminder of the title of the project, bricks made with soil from the Land of Fire, as well as drawings and documentation. These works all tell of the route taken by Vinci/Galesi using the flower to investigate the individual identities as well as the forgotten places marked by abandonment, neglect, and civil degradation.
The land of flowers suggests, in a symbolic way, the mimetic and metaphorical potential of the flower, which the artists take to the furthest possible degree. The simple beauty of the gerberas and chrysanthemums embodies the reaction to the disintegration of a territory controlled by organized crime, and to the pollution caused by waste. It is the metaphor of the possible overturning of this forceful imprisonment, it is the dream of rebellion to a situation to which rationally no viable solution can be found.
The two artists stand completely wrapped in a colourful, flowery drape, hiding any somatic traits in symbolically laden contexts. They appear like a spirit disseminating colour and a future in the greyness and neglect of the present. The drape the artists are wrapped in is hand made by stitching thousands and thousands of flowers onto ethereal fabrics, in observance with a tradition of a religious celebration of Saint Joseph in Scicli, a village in Sicily. The scenario is the poetic one of a beach with the sea and the land competing for supremacy, but most of all it is the shore where scores of desperate people have travelled to from the other side of the Mediterranean, fleeing the war, a place where the bodies of many without any hope were washed up.
The beauty of the places captured in the photographs of some of the most recent projects, is a contrast that makes the limits of the human condition even more jarring.
[1] A. Gramsci, Indifferenti, in La città futura, February 1917.
[2] A. Ginsberg, Demonstration Or Spectacle As Example, As Communication Or How To Make a March/Spectacle, in Berkeley Barb, 19 November 1965.
La terra dei fiori. Notes for a rebirth
Gabi Scardi
The whole project La terra dei fiori by the two artists Sasha Vinci and Maria Grazia Galesi is a metaphor. A metaphor born of the perception of a need, grafted onto approaches, subjects and relationships established over the course of many years. The project is based on the convergence of a series of factors.
In accordance with the performance-based nature of the work of the two artists, the scenic aspect is fundamental. To begin with, the project takes on the form of a chorography articulated in different moments. It is a sort of ritual, and as with any ritual, La terra dei fiori eludes any univocal interpretation. It lives in part on its own internal truth and expresses a vital energy, a life which is almost magic. But that is not all.
The project unfolds in two places: the Sicilian city of Scicli and its territory, and the Land of Fire, in Campania. However it refers to a much wider history. Vinci/Galesi concentrate on places marked by their extremely dramatic nature. Among these there is the church of San Matteo in Scicli, the Mater Ecclesiae beautifully dominating from above. After a period of disrepair, the building was restored, only to be abandoned again in a sadly emblematic story of neglect.
Another part of the project is the Sampieri coast, near Scicli, and its magnificent beach. It is a joy for swimmers, but it has a bitter connotation if we think that it is also the place where many migrants land, and for some it is the tragic end to their journey. It is no coincidence that the two artists have chosen dusk as the time for their performance. This time of day gives the images an intimate, dream-like, enigmatic effect, contrasting with the reason it was chosen: it was the time when thirteen migrants were washed up here on the 30th September 2013.
Finally the grandiosity of the royal palace at Caserta, the venue for the exhibition, and, during the inauguration, for the performance. This building used to tower over the once fertile and splendid Campania felix. Now the devastated territory of the Land of fire stretches before it, an area whose condition is the very paradigm of a relationship between a land and its inhabitants based on arrogance, exploitation and illegality.
The fundamental elements of the project are drawn from a ritual that is still practiced in Scicli: the Infiorata di San Giuseppe. Sasha Vinci and Maria Grazia Galesi respond to that ritual not only because of its external dimension, but also as a model through which to give form and meaning to interpersonal relationships and collective sensibility. Rites, like art, are also a way to achieve knowledge, to seek meaning, and a creative field for the expression of both the individual and the collective. Not only. As well as reflecting and sanctioning social conditions, interpersonal relationships and mental patterns, the ritual action is based on the premise that the ritual can actively create them.
The action in La terra dei fiori uses primal symbols: first of al flowers, that return in different forms throughout the project. Using flowers, the artists create a series of polyhedrons, ancient symbols of balance and knowledge that have been part of western thinking since ancient times. The artists make two capes that cover them completely, hiding their individual identities. By hiding themselves from view, they attempt to create a new relationship with the context. With a third cape, they then cover the black Friesian stallion, Eros, the protagonist of the Infiorata in Scicli.
Flowers have always been the symbol of life and beauty. Vinci/Galesi have chosen to use chrysanthemums and gerberas, flowers that are intensely cultivated in both areas addressed in the project, and that in Italy are associated with mourning. There is a reference both to death and to the rituals that accompany it, and to the violence of the logic of blind profit that does not consider its lethal effects on the environment. The horse has a central role in the project: this magnificent companion in their adventure, this iconic, monumental figure, expression of pride, life force and sensibility, is the symbol of the need for a relationship of respect between human beings and the creatures around them.
The two artists entrust it with the crowning moment in their performance with the parade of the horse and bardatori walking along the straight avenue to the staircase of the palace.
Vinci/Galesi have also created a series of drawings with natural inks and pigments. Furthermore, they have also manipulated the soil, specifically that of Acerra, using an ancient technique to make it into bricks with the word “Felix” engraved on them.
In this way the artists contrast the destructive forces that seem to have ensnared behaviours and thoughts, and that have brought environmental devastation to the lands of Sicily, Campania, and, by extension, to many areas of the global village. They do it by opposing the basic module for any kind of construction: the brick. On it they engrave the memory, and hope, of a possible equilibrium, bringing forth the idea of a different past and a possible future.
The two artists respond to the lack of consideration and the moral collapse that these two areas of Italy represent by contrasting it with the collective and cultural memory of knowing craftsmanship and the recovery of the idea of relationships based on care and respect.
In being a two-artist project, La terra dei fiori already conveys a sense of sharing.
The work presents two great dichotomies: nature and culture, human and animal, life and death, visible and invisible, the relationship with one’s habitat or exploitation. La terra dei fiori is a way of tackling the present and engaging into relationships and equilibriums of power. Talking about values, or the opposite of values, degeneration and a possible rebirth, is a way of opposing arrogance with a vital force, with aspiration and desire.
