https://marinasagona.com marinasagona Mon, 30 Nov 2020 21:35:55 +0000 https://marinasagona.com en https://marinasagona.com/Home Thu, 06 Apr 2017 19:39:31 +0000 marinasagona https://marinasagona.com/Home Marina Sagona (b. 1967) is an Italian and American conceptual artist. Born in Rome she lives and works in New York City and Rome. Her Work&nbsp;is shown and written about in&nbsp;Essays and articles.Please direct inquiries to this&nbsp;email. https://marinasagona.com/Work Mon, 30 Nov 2020 14:51:23 +0000 marinasagona https://marinasagona.com/Work https://marinasagona.com/Biography Tue, 11 Jul 2017 15:24:26 +0000 marinasagona https://marinasagona.com/Biography Marina Sagona is an Italian and American multimedia artist. Her practice is concerned with exploring shared identity and dynamics of communication and control.Her projects are cycles based on several different works, each conveyed through a different medium, including video, sculpture and drawing. In Rome she was assistent to postmodern artist Mario Schifano and studied Art History at the University La Sapienza. In New York she started her career drawing for&nbsp;The New Yorker and the New York Times.&nbsp; She is represented by Chiquita Room Gallery. <img width="2719" height="3623" width_o="2719" height_o="3623" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3c6e80e54c14e20adf189768f48f6e5d8657540f140f9e529a4ead06b65f2ff3/Opening-copy.jpg" data-mid="219788692" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3c6e80e54c14e20adf189768f48f6e5d8657540f140f9e529a4ead06b65f2ff3/Opening-copy.jpg" />Photo by Marco Anelli - Select festivals and screenings: 2026 Diritto di Sangue/Rovescio di Sangue Right of Blood/Wrong of Blood FLIGHT Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Genova, Genova Italy (upcoming) Diritto di Sangue/Rovescio di Sangue Right of Blood/Wrong of BloodIperfestival, MAAM Museo dell’Altro e dell’Altrove, Rome Italy Diritto di Sangue/Rovescio di Sangue Right of Blood/Wrong of Blood Museo Riso d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Palermo Italy Couscous, Stabat Mater MEGA Art Fair/Chiquita Room gallery, Milan Italy 2025 Your Dream is My Dream Internationales Festival Zeichen der Nacht,&nbsp;Berlin Germany Stabat Mater Faculty of Visual Arts Universidad de Guanajuato, Guanajuato Mexico To Be a Happy PersonFLIGHT Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Genova, Genova Italy&nbsp; Your Dream is My Dream International Festival Signs of the Night, Bangkok Thailand&nbsp; Your Dream is My Dream Pebbles Underground Film and Video Art, Toronto Canada&nbsp; Stabat Mater Experiments in CinemaAlbuquerque US&nbsp; Your Dream is My Dream Festival Internazionale Segni della Notte Urbino Italy Your Dream is My Dream Cadavre Exquis CinemaPalermo Italy Your Dream is My Dream Sirene Wave Movie Sesto San Giovanni Italy&nbsp; Your Dream is My Dream Ribalta Experimental Film Festival, Vignola Italy&nbsp; Your Dream is My Dream Perchance to DreamSpazio Supernova, Rome Italy&nbsp; 2024 Your Dream is My Dream FLIGHT Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Genova, Genova Italy Stabat MaterFLIGHT Mostra Internazionale del Cinema di Genova, Genova Italy&nbsp; Your Dream is My Dream Award winner Cleveland Arthouse Film Awards, Cleveland US&nbsp; Your Dream is My Dream LA Underground Film Forum, Los Angeles US Your Dream is My Dream Trånas at the Fringe Experimental films and Videopoems, Trånas Sweden&nbsp;COUSCOUS &nbsp; Iperfestival Mattatoio/Palaexpo, Rome Italy&nbsp; Your Dream is My Dream Award winner Geneva International International Film Festival, Geneva Switzerland Your Dream is My Dream&nbsp; Cadence Video Poetry Film Festival, Seattle US&nbsp; COUSCOUS Ribalta Experimental Film Festival, Vignola Italy&nbsp; 2023 Stabat Mater Budapest International Film Festival, Budapest Hungary Stabat Mater LOOP Festival,&nbsp;Barcelona Spain&nbsp; COUSCOUS Sirene Wave, Sesto San Giovanni (Mi) Italy Stabat Mater Lecce Film Fest, Lecce Italy&nbsp; Stabat Mater Bogotá Experimental Film Festival / CineAutopsia,&nbsp;Bogotà Colombia&nbsp; Stabat Mater Asolo Art Film Festival, Asolo Italy Stabat Mater Harlem Film Festival, New York US &nbsp; Stabat Mater New York Arthouse Film Festival, New York US &nbsp; Stabat Mater Fisura International Festival of Experimental Film and Video, Mexico City Mexico&nbsp; Stabat Mater Award winner Sipontum Arthouse International Film Festival, Manfredonia Italy&nbsp; Stabat Mater Award winner Ribalta Experimental Film Festival, Vignola Italy Stabat Mater Award Winner Sunworld International Film Festival, Sirkazhi, India&nbsp; Stabat Mater New York International Women Festival,&nbsp;New York US Stabat Mater Blow-Up International Arthouse Filmfest, Chicago, US Stabat Mater MoPOP Matinee Takeover, Museum of Popular Culture, Seattle US 2022 Stabat Mater Philadelphia Arthouse Film Festival, Philadelphia, US Stabat Mater International Cosmopolitan Film Festival of Tokyo, Tokyo Japan Stabat Mater Dublin World Film Festival, Dublin Ireland Stabat Mater Rio de Janeiro World Film Festival,&nbsp;Rio de Janeiro Brazil Stabat Mater Video Art and Experimental Film Festival, New York US Stabat Mater London Rocks Film Festival, London UK COUSCOUS London Rocks Film Festival, London UK Stabat Mater Art Film Awards, Skopje Macedonia Stabat Mater Experimental Film Guanajuato, Guanajuato Mexico Stabat Mater&nbsp; Desenzano Film Festival, Desenzano sul Garda Italy Stabat Mater BIDEODROMO Experimental Film and Video Festival, Bilbao Spain Stabat Mater LA Indipendent Women Film Awards, Los Angeles US Stabat Mater Award Winner Cadence Video Poetry Film Festival, Seattle US COUSCOUS Award winner On Art Film Festival, Warsaw Poland 2021 COUSCOUS Prague International Indie Film Festival, Prague Czech Republic COUSCOUS Non-Syntax Experimental Image festival, Taipei Taiwan COUSCOUS LOOP Festival, Barcelona Spain 2020Self-Portrait&nbsp; LOOP FestivaL, Barcelona Spain 2019Self-Portrait&nbsp; Palazzo della Cultura, Galatina Italy Self-Portrait&nbsp; MACRO Museum,&nbsp;Rome Italy → Select solo exhibitions 2025Diritto di Sangue/Rovescio di Sangue Right of Blood/Wrong of BloodCurated by Teresa Fiore for Agrigento Capitale della Cultura Farm Cultural Park/Ex-carcere di San Vito, Agrigento Italy&nbsp; Memory is a TriptycthCurated by Mariacristina Lattarulo Rhinoceros, Rome Italy&nbsp; 2023Stabat MaterCurated by Sophia Ma Chiquita Room Gallery, Barcelona Spain2021COUSCOUSEssay by Kosme de Barañano Food performance by Oreste Sagona Chiquita Room Gallery/Loop Festival, Barcelona Spain Ubi Consistam Essay by Kosme de Barañano Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Madrid Spain Ubi Consistam Essay by Kosme de Barañano Chiquita Room Gallery, Barcelona Spain 2018La Prigioniera/The Prisoner Essay by Claire Messud Fondaco Gallery, Rome Italy 2017 EdenCurated by Ierimonti gallery Ierimonti Gallery, New York US 2016&nbsp;Eden Curated by Ierimonti gallery La Nuova Pesa Gallery, Rome Italy The Comedy of WomenEssay by Colum McCann Ierimonti Gallery, New York US 2012 Less and MoreCurated by Paola Quintavalle Generation Gallery, New York US 2010 &nbsp;Amour FouCurated by Olga Gambari Tricromia Gallery, Rome Italy2009 CoincidenceCurated by Olga Gambari 41artecontemporanea, Turin Italy2008 At HomeCurated by Lea Mattarella Marte Gallery, Rome Italy2007 Punti FermiCurated by Lea Mattarella Le Nuvole Gallery, Palermo Italy → Select group exhibitions 2025 SaturnaliaCurated by Olga Gambari and Susanna Ravelli Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan Italy&nbsp; Memorie in divenire Curated by Elena Baldini Galleria La Nuova Pesa, Rome Italy&nbsp; 2023 FotoNoviembre Bienal Internacional de Fotografía de TenerifeCurated by Diana Padrón Alonso TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes - Centro de Fotografia Isla de Tenerife, Tenerife, Spain&nbsp; Follow the ThreadCurated by Barbara Pavan and Maurita Cardone Different venues in SoHo and the Meatpacking District, New York US&nbsp; The Art of AccessBenefit exhibition curated by Sibilla Maiarelli New Collectors Gallery, Vision Projects,&nbsp;New York US&nbsp; 2022 Daria Irincheeva Marina Sagona Noa Charuvi UNSETTLEDCurated by Sibilla Maiarelli New Collectors Gallery, New York US 2021 DreamersCurated by Maurita Cardone and Laura Mega Urban spaces around NYC, New York US 2020 #chezmaddalena Curated by Romina De Novellis 179 Rue Saint-Maur, Paris France 2019 Red and RedsCurated by Maurizio Pellegrin The Hub Center for the Arts, New York US L’infinito Presente: 29 Poeti e 29 Artisti per il Bicentenario de l’Infinito di Leopardi Curated by Simona Marchini and Arnaldo Colasanti Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome Italy &nbsp;2018 L’infinito Presente: 29 Poeti e 29 Artisti per il Bicentenario de l’Infinito di Leopardi Curated by Simona Marchini WeGil, Rome Italy 2017 Trame d’Autore—47 Years 1 Month 3 Days: Pizzi Cannella, Nagasawa, Pietrosanti, Sagona, Salvatori, Kounellis Curated by Simona Marchini Auditorium Parco della Musica, Rome Italy 2015 Premio Fabbri Quinta EdizioneCurated by Lea Mattarella Palazzo Pepoli Campogrande, Bologna Italy&nbsp; 2011 La RechercheCurated by Michele von Buren RvB Arts, Rome Italy 2009 Lungara 18Curated by Fabio Campagna Stanze Segrete, Rome ItalyLe parole per dirlo: Gregorio Botta, Denis Pondruel, Sylvie Romieu, Marina SagonaCurated by Lea Mattarella Marte Gallery, Rome Italy 2007 Bratislava BiennialCurated by Barbara Brathová Slovak National Theatre, Bratislava Slovakia 2000 Videotrip 01Curated by Caudio Di Biagio Teatro Vascello, Rome Italy I Live HereCurated by Owen Phillips California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco US : → Select publications and public talks 2025 The Flavor of Italian DrawingTalk at the&nbsp;Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, conducted by Kosme de Barañano Professor of Art History Bilbao Spain&nbsp; 2022 Le Conversazioni/La Repubblica &nbsp; La commedia delle donneThe Comedy of Women 2021 The Comedy of Women Texts by Colum McCann, Martino Marazzi, Judith Thurman, Sophie Gee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Carol Muske-Dukes, Nicole Krauss, Alice Sebold, Leslie Jamison, Claire Messud, Anna Funder&nbsp;published by Longo Editore in collaboration with Ravenna Festival Ubi ConsistamText by Kosme de Barañano&nbsp;published by Chiquita Ediciones 2013 My Inner WitchText by Giovanna Calvino&nbsp;published by Mondadori 2011 Amour FouTexts by Mario Desiati, Olga Gambari&nbsp;published by Italic Arte2008At HomeTexts by Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Lila Azam Zanganeh, Giovanna Calvino, Antonio Monda, Lea Mattarella published by Orecchio Acerbo → Awards/Residencies/Nominations 2024Your Dream is My Dream - Best Experimental Film &nbsp;Cleveland Arthouse Film Awards, Cleveland US Your Dream is My Dream - Best Experimental Film &nbsp;Geneva International Film Festival, Geneva Switzerland 2023 Stabat Mater - Film of the Season Sipontum Arthouse International Film Festival, Manfredonia Italy Stabat Mater - Best Experimental Film Sipontum Arthouse International Film, Festival&nbsp; Manfredonia Italy Stabat Mater - Best Concept/Script Award Ribalta Experimental Film Festival, Vignola Italy&nbsp; Stabat Mater - Best Experimental Film&nbsp; Sunworld International Film Festival, Sirkazhi India 2022 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award Nomination, New York US Stabat Mater - Best Experimental Video Poetry by an Artist &nbsp;Cadence Video Poetry Film Festival, Seattle US Couscous - Best Experimental Film &nbsp;On Art Film Festival, Warsaw Poland 2021 Chiquita Room Gallery Artist Residency, Barcelona Spain 2019 Domus Artist Residency, Galatina Italy https://marinasagona.com/Essays Tue, 11 Jul 2017 15:24:26 +0000 marinasagona https://marinasagona.com/Essays Mariacristina Lattarulo &nbsp; CouscousCouscous, 2024 Sophia Ma &nbsp; Stabat MaterStabat Mater, 2023 Ordetv Blogspot &nbsp; Stabat MaterStabat Mater, 2023 Barcelona Cultura &nbsp; Un recorrido artistico entre la maternidad y la separaciónStabat Mater, 2023Cinema Italiano &nbsp; Ribalta Experimental Film FestivalStabat Mater, 2023 La Voce di New York&nbsp; Marina Sagona: la mostra Tripoli su nostalgia e amore paternoTripoli, 2023 London Rocks Film Festival&nbsp; Rocks Festival blog/Sarah SmithStabat Mater and COUSCOUS, 2022 Chiquita Room/Loop Festival Food performance with Oreste SagonaCOUSCOUS, 2021 Radio 3 &nbsp; La lingua batte/Paolo Di PaoloThe Comedy of Women, 2021 Rai Cultura&nbsp; La commedia delle donneThe Comedy of Women, 2021 La Repubblica &nbsp; Le donne di Dante/Antonio MondaThe Comedy of Women, 2021 Linkiesta &nbsp; Tutte le donne sono una sola/ Dario RonzoniThe Comedy of Women, 2021 Colum McCann Our WomenThe Comedy of Women, 2021 Alice Sebold The Naked WhoreThe Comedy of Women, 2021 Center for Italian Modern Art Schifano and Friends: Marina Sagonain conversation with Marica Antonucci, 2021 El Temps de les Arts Declaració de dependència Ubi Consistam, 2021 Radio 3 Siglo 21 Marina Sagona (min 35:45)Ubi Consistam, 2021 NEO 2 La identidad diluida de Marina SagonaUbi Consistam, 2021 Radio Mataró Marina SagonaUbi Consistam, 2021 BETEVÉ Ubi Consistam (min 8:58)Ubi Consistam, 2021 TV3 - TN Marina Sagona parla sobre la identitata la galeria Chiquita Room de BarcelonaUbi Consistam, 2021 Le Cool Barcelona Ubi Consistam, by Marina SagonaUbi Consistam, 2021 Arte por Excelencias Ubi Consistam, una exposición sobre la reconstrucción de la identidad nacionalUbi Consistam, 2021 Arte Informado Ubi ConsistamUbi Consistam, 2021 Time Out ES Ubi ConsistamUbi Consistam, 2021 PAC Plataforma de Arte Contemporaneo Ubi Consistam Individual de Marina Sagona en Chiquita RoomUbi Consistam, 2021 GOOD 2 B Ubi ConsistamUbi Consistam, 2021 SIES TV Ubi ConsistamUbi Consistam, 2021 Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Barcelona Ubi Consistamin conversation with Kosme de Barañano, Judith Thurman, Ingrid Rossellini and Giovanna Calvino, 2020 Kosme de Barañano MS, Mémoire Souvenir (English)Ubi Consistam, Couscous, 2020 Kosme de Barañano MS, Mémoire Souvenir (Italian)Ubi Consistam, Couscous 2020 Istituto Italiano di Cultura, New York Until Further Noticein conversation with Silvia Giambrone and Maurita Cardone, 2020 Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Barcelona Self-Portraitin conversation with Kosme de Barañano, Judith Thurman, Anna Funder and Giovanna Calvino, 2020 Artribune Foyer Gallery/Maurita CardoneEden, Couscous, Ubi Consistam, 2020 Macro Museum Self-Portraitin conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri, 2019 Leggendaria Un repertorio di desideri e fantasmi/Titti DaneseSelf-Portrait, 2019 Il Messaggero Sagona, un autoritratto costruito da sei donneSelf-Portrait, 2019 Ruth Ben-Ghiat The PrisonerThe Prisoner, 2018 Vanity Fair Marina Sagona: “In ogni amore c’e’ dipendenza”/Simona SiriThe Prisoner, 2018 La Repubblica Bellezza e DisagioThe Prisoner, 2018 Rai InternationalThe Prisoner, 2018 Antonio Monda, Claire Messud La Prigioniera/The Prisoner, L’amore malato/Toxic LoveThe Prisoner, 2018 IL Sole 24 ore Trame d’Autore47 Years 1 Month 3 Days, 2017 Claire Messud 47 Years 1 Month 3 Days47 Years 1 Month 3 Days, 2017 IL Sole 24 ore Sofia SilvaEden, 2017 Rainews24 Central Park West/Antonio MondaEden, 2017 La Stampa Elena del DragoEden, 2016 IL Sole 24 ore Cento donne e una divina commedia a New York/Giulio D’AntonaThe Comedy of Women, 2016 Olga Gambari Your Eyes Two Shots in the DarkAmour Fou, 2012 Lea Mattarella At HomeAt Home, 2008 Gianni Riotta School ColorsPunti Fermi, 2007 https://marinasagona.com/Our-women Wed, 12 Jul 2017 17:49:15 +0000 marinasagona https://marinasagona.com/Our-women Our WomenColum McCann –&nbsp;The Comedy of Women It is utterly humbling to think that in art our motives are similar to those who made the cave paintings: we attempt bring to life the texture of who and what we are. In this way we remember for ourselves, and we hope to remember for others. The best art – writing, cinema, painting, dance – creates and suggests and inspires further art. Nothing ever finishes. We turn and turn in the widening gyre. Blake as Dante. Longfellow as Dante. Rodin as Dante. Listz as Dante. Mandlestam as Dante. Woolf, Elliot, Joyce, Pinsky, Borges, Beckett, Sontag, Heaney: all as Dante. Every atom belonging to one as good as belongs to another. &nbsp; &nbsp; “A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the seperation between himself and the artist,” says Tolstoy. “Not that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.” What is so profound and beautiful about Marina Sagona’s “The Comedy of Women” is that she chooses to continue this tradition and further widen the gyre. She re-opens the possibility of what art can continue to do: not as something derivative, but as something entirely raw and new.&nbsp; Sagona is an image-rascal, unbound by convention but still prepared to acknowledge the deep, helixed history of art and story-telling. She braids colour, form, myth, literature and intellect together. Part of her modus operandi is the acknowledgment that we go forwards by glancing backwards first, even if only to see where we have been. She, in essence, brings a new light to an ancient form, and revitalise our relationship not only with the images, but with the poem itself. One of the primary forces of Sagona’s art is to recreate the present within the historic. She takes the women of the Divine Comedy as her launching point to be faithful to our own time, and yet also be faithful to the past. They are characters of the now while simultaneously, and elegantly, carrying their past with them. In this way the drawings have a forward movement, dramatised by the swirl of the brush. There is a spectacular tension between the drawings’ extant sexuality and the backwards tug of time. Dante’s women – or rather Sagona’s women – or rather ourwomen&nbsp;– are lucid. They are honest. They are empty of nostalgia. They exist now, and yet we are made aware that, of course, they existed then. They become eternal. Sagona does what great artists have always done – she isolates the core of significance, empties the frame of everything but the necessary, and then passes it along to us.&nbsp; Yes, the women are ours now. Sagona says that she began these drawings wanting to confront herself, as a non- believer, with one of the most religious and beautiful of books, a text so profoundly rooted in her culture “that even my illiterate and beloved Nonna Pina used to quote Dante talking about every day events.” She chose to focus on the women because she thought they could be her red thread in the maze of The Divine Comedy's many layers. And so began the adventure. Sagona knew she wanted to find land, but she wasn’t sure what shape the actual landscape would take. After two years of work, she realized that the drawings were steering her in an unexpected direction. The current took her. She arrived at shore. Instead of just guiding her through The Comedy, it struck her that the drawings were whispering a far more personal story: as if they were one person, one woman. In that one woman were all women, including, of course, herself. Her own inferno. Her own purgatory. Her own paradise. The drawings, then, are a reconciliation to herself. And if, then, she was putting her finger on her own pulse, she knew that she should open that pulse to others. She was interested in knowing how other women – Claire Messud, Anna Funder, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Sebold, Judith Thurman – would see the drawings. She wanted them to inhabit the drawings and to create from there. In this way she further widens the gyre of both time and form. (I myself couldn’t help thinking that so many of the drawings were of Molly Bloom and that she and Beatrice were somehow brought together in the undulating lines). Sagona has arrived at a rawness that speaks directly to the body, both male and female. She carves and sculpts and even rhymes. She draws at a deliberate distance from sentimentality, though not of course sentiment. She makes the right decisions about how to communicate and what to leave out. The solitude of the figures somehow undoes their loneliness. Rodin once said to William Rothenstein: “People say I think too much about women. Yet after all what is there more important to think about?” &nbsp; What, indeed? Sagona re-gifts us those women whom we knew from the past. In this way she achieves what Tolstoy was looking for: she allows the living to extend the imaginations of the dead. They are forever our. ︎ back https://marinasagona.com/Kosme-de-Baranano-English Mon, 30 Nov 2020 18:25:19 +0000 marinasagona https://marinasagona.com/Kosme-de-Baranano-English MS, Mémoire Souvenir Kosme de Barañano - 2020 The current exhibition by Marina Sagona shows her work Ubi Consistam, a visual ensemble that consists of 30 small sculptures divided into two series (Organs and The Five Senses), 16 printed drawings titled Passport, and a video titled Self-Portrait. Ubi Consistam works as an essay, that literary genre, written in prose, in which an author develops his or her ideas about a specific topic with a personal character and style: a short piece of writing on a particular subject, often expres- sing personal views, according to the dictionary; always with a critical spirit. This essay, Ubi Consistam, is a composition that turns a coherent set of ideas (the here and now of papers, objects and a film) into a story about one’s sense of identity (both personal and national). It is not a linear essay, but a reflection on three levels and in three diverse techniques. It does not lead the reader or the visitor of the exhibition along a structured path following a linear logic, but rather to a perspective that goes from the document (the passport that ascribes us to a nation and to a territory) to a series of reliefs, some of which can be clearly identified with parts of our body and others with our senses and their respective organs—an ear, a nose, etc., and finally to a film that includes six interviews. The three components of Ubi Consistam are not sections or chapters of an essay. They are more like argumentative movements, what we would call adagios in music, around the same topic. The group of prints titled Passport consists of 16 images based on the double pages of a US passport, which have been enlarged (to 61 x 45.5 cms.) and modified. Each of the 16 pages of the passport is illustrated with an American landscape, some sentences by American Presidents and quotes taken from the Declaration of Independence. It is the artist’s own passport, which she received in 2017, having lived in Brooklyn and Manhattan for 22 years. The US passport is a new (bureaucratic) identity that is added to an Italian identity, the artist’s experience of her family home, located in Rome but still impregnated with the air of Tripoli. Over the illustrations on those pages, the artist prints her initials M.S. in green and red. The position of those two letters, M and S, on the different pages is not random. Sagona places or uses them to highlight certain specific words that, out of context, form a new independent narrative. The term passport—whether in English, Italian or Spanish—comes from the French word passeport, made up of the verb passer and the noun port. During his reign, King Louis XIV of France granted certain travel documents to some of his subjects. The document was called a passeport, which literally means “passing through a port”, because most journeys outside of France were made either in sailing boats or through the gate (also port) of a city. Historically, a passport is then a document that identifies us in order to leave or enter “our” territory. Sagona makes us reflect on this document, now with her initials superimposed on sentences and landscapes. We sometimes forget where things come from. What is a passport? Until the 1st World War, passport were not generally required to travel within Europe, and crossing a border was a relatively simple procedure. Today’s passport somehow appeared in conjunction with the railway in the 19th century, when trains started moving thousands of people around at a new speed, thus overwhelming the European system of passports and visas. For this reason, France abolished passports in 1861. By 1914, this kind of document hardly existed. But the war brought about a renewed concern for international security, so passports were required once again. The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, which was passed in 1914, clearly defined the notion of citizenship and issued a passport in the form we know today. It was valid for two years and, in addition to a photograph and a signature, it included a physical description, including details such as the “shape of the face”, the “build” and “other features”. Many Britons complained about the “nasty dehumanisation” of a person being described by a civil servant. In 1920, thanks to an agreement by the League of Nations to standardise passports, the famous “old blue” passport was issued. This was an iconic image of the British traveller until it was replaced with the maroon European version in 1988. However, the origin of the passport or safe-conduct can be found in the Bible, in the Book of the Prophet Nehemiah (2:7-9), which dates back to circa 450 B.C. Here it is said that Nehemiah, a public servant under King Artaxerxes I of Persia, asked for permission to travel to Judea; the prophet, who worked as a royal bartender, wanted to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Artaxerxes granted him permission and gave him a letter “for the governors beyond the river”, requesting a safe passage for him while he travelled around his lands. In the 20th century, the safe-conduct went from being a travel document to becoming a key tool of identification as a security measure both for crossing borders and for the Government to recruit men. A travel document that certifies the identity and nationality of its bearer, a document that protects, becomes a document of control, of submission. These questions about one’s nationality, and the submission to a passport, reminds me of certain reflections in Jours caucasienes (1945) by the writer Banine (1905-1992), a pseudonym used by Umm El-Banu Asadullayeva, who was born in Baku, Azerbaijan. Jours caucasienes is a mémoire of a young woman who grew up in that territory of perpetual contact between East and West, between Islam and Christianity, between Arab and Russian, who, after experiencing the luxury of Berlin and Budapest, ends up in Paris. A woman who is always pursued by the need for a passport in order to be free, to be herself. It also reminds me of that note on the blog Apuntes e Instantáneas [Notes and Snapshots] by another nomad who settled in Barcelona, David Mauas, author of the film Goya, the Secret of Shadows (2011, Spain, 77 mins.). In a note from November 2010, he writes: “Colombian consulate. Visa process. One woman tells another: «giving up your homeland is like giving up your mother, my land is my land.» The woman notices my attention. A reproving, condescending look.” In Sagona, the mother country is the home, her manual is to be happy behind closed doors. Paradise is each person’s home, and the home-refuge has to be an emotional fort; but she does not give up her mother country. All her registers, from Passport to Self-Portrait, are stamped with the colours of the Italian flag. The second core element in Ubi Consistam is a double set of sculptures, two series titled Organs and The Five Senses (2018), made in plaster and covered in enamel, in the three colours of green, white and red. The first series, called Organs, consists of five pieces (each one measures 5 x 8 x 1 inches) that represent the trace or print of five organs in the human body: the brain, the trachea, the liver, an intestinal tract and the heart. The second series, called The Five Senses, are negative prints of a finger, a tongue, two eyes, an ear and a nose. These reliefs represent touch, taste, vision, hearing and the sense of smell through the negative space of the corresponding organ. The 30 small sculptures are shaped from the desire to give form to a vacuum, to an identity derived from a lack of definition. They all have a physicality, a feel. They are templates of human features, of their organs and viscera, but they are also empty spaces, the memory of what they once were, the negative space of what they really are. Each series repeats itself three times in green, white and red (the colours of the Italian flag). As I have already mentioned, these colours are also present in the initials MS in Passport and in the tones of the video Self-Portrait.The formula of the flag, playing with its three colours, is like the caro amico or the apostrophe “fra ‘Guittone” in Trattato d’Amore [Treaty of Love] by Guittone d’Arezzo (c. 1230-1294). I am referring to the manuscript Escorialense di rime italiane antiche (Latin codex in parchment me.III.23 in the Saint Lorenzo Royal Library at El Escorial, Madrid). The poet reinterprets, in a moralist way, a long literary tradition, which lasts from Ovid’s Remedia Amoris to the troubadours, until the poets of the cosiddetta tradizione ‘veneziana’ delle rime dello Stil novo. Guittone transcribes poems and analyses them, while he reinvents or “reinitiates” them by explaining their images, by modifying them, as Sagona does with the prints in Passport. Besides poetry, Guittone reflects on the importance of the poetic and meta-poetic interrelation between the written word and the image, because the dynamic relations within a singular text and those of the text in space (the material space of the handwritten book and the metaphoric space related to its production, distribution and reception) are also shown as a lyrical and iconographic representations, as complementary parts of the author’s macro-tex- tual planning. In Sagona’s series of sculptures, Organs and The Five Senses, we also see this medieval hermeneutical practice for the various degrees or levels of meaning: from the figurative (literal, pictographic), to the figurato (metaphorical), to the figurale (moral). In the field of the interpretation of writing, this is equivalent to «secundum historiam, secundum allegoriam, secundum tropologiam». Let us remember that sculpture is an ars mechanica in the system of medieval arts, of a docere per Visibilia (teaching through the visible), which belongs to the sphere of the literal, in the figurative-pictorial sense. In Sagona’s work, a human being’s senses are described as a relief, as a “figure” or shape. In other words, as an image. The third storyline or core element of Ubi Consistam is the video Self-Portrait (25:55 mins.). It contains six interviews with six different women about six different topics. One is the artist herself, who talks about co-dependence and abandonment. Another is her daughter, who was born in New York and talks about the different ways of growing up in one country versus the other. The remaining four interviewees are Judith Thurman (writer), Ingrid Rossellini (professor), Giovanna Calvino (author) and Anna Funder (writer). Three of the female protagonists speak English and three speak Italian. These women’s discourse shapes a portrait of the artist in that she selects certain words said by the others and inscribes them on the screen. The montage of the interviews and the underlining of the others’ words in the video editing form and confirm Sagona’s visual thinking. There is an element of nostalgia in all the interviews. The word “nostalgia” comes from the Greek vocables nostos (returning home) and algia (pain). The term was recovered in the 17th century, when some Swiss doctors diagnosed a strange new contagious disease in mercenary soldiers. The treatment for this mysterious “nostalgia” included the use of leeches, hypnotic emulsions, opiates, and a trip to the high mountains of the Alps. During the 19th century, the term was used to refer to a greater evil, a melancholy felt by many human beings, a destiny, a kind of passing illness. Nostalgia turned historical and became the sickness of the century. In The Future of Nostalgia (2002), Svetlana Boym identifies two types of nostalgia, each of which emphasises one of the two roots of the word. The first type is inescapably linked to the home. It longs for a return to the mythical place located on the island of Utopia, where a “greater homeland” will be rebuilt. This nostalgia is collective and has a reconstructive function; it is a “restoring” nostalgia, which is so characteristic of nationalisms that formulate and fabricate custom-made historical myths. The second type of nostalgia emphasises the act of yearning in particular; it is a feeling of loss and displacement, but also a romance with one’s own fantasy. It does not seek to rebuild the lost mythical place and it takes pleasure in distance. It does not search for a reference, because nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. This is an ironic nostalgia, fragmentary and unique. This nostalgia considers exile in a double exposition or a superposition of two images: home and abroad, past and present, dream and daily life. As soon as we try to force it into a single image, Sagona sees it breaking the frame or burning the surface. Moreover, with an ability to penetrate into detail as Walter Benjamin did, Sagona is, in Ubi Consistam, a stroller, a flâneuse, who moves around the essay between Das Passagen-Werk [The Arcades Project] and Einbahnstraße [One-Way Street] (1928). The interviews are additionally coloured in three hues: the first two in green, the third and fourth in white, the fifth and sixth in red. That is, once again, the colours of the Italian flag, like the colours on the casts of body organs or in the initials MS that are printed on the drawings in Passport. At heart, the interviews also reveal a vision of the nature of identity. The most emphatic expression may be found in the words of the Australian writer Anna Funder: “I didn’t want to be a window frame with the wind blowing through it.” The theme of identity was already in Sagona’s work as a book illustrator or in previous exhibitions, such as her exhibition titled La donna al plurale [The Woman in Plural], presented at the Tricomia Illustrator’s International Art Gallery in Rome in 2011. The artist’s works were inspired by the poem Song of Songs by the Czech poet Vitlezlav Nezval (1900-1958) in the book La donna al plurale (Einaudi, Rome, 2002). And the theme of one’s roots had also come up in her picture books for children, such as Voglio essere un albero (Einaudi Ragazzi, Rome, 2007). Ubi Consistam means stable point (a fixed base or location) and it is part of the Latin translation from ancient Greek of a phrase Archimedes allegedly uttered after discovering the law of the lever: “da mihi ubi consistam, et terram coelum- que movebo”, which has been translated into that hackneyed phrase “Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth”. It sums up a human being’s need to have, or start from, a stable point, a solid foundation, from which to create his or her world and existence; an existence, a vital force, not only of a physical nature, but also of psychological needs. It is a reflection on one’s self, in terms of the body (our senses) and of paperwork (the identity a passport gives our existence). The physical self and the citizen self, the body and its number plate to travel the world. It is ultimately a reflection on the unique human history, of how the individual is represented, identified by a piece of paper. As a whole, Ubi Consistam is a project about how we build ourselves an identity and how our own identity is sometimes blurred. It is not about (physical or psychological) changes in oneself, but about how we are changed by the context we live in (whether it is due to social forms or to that a priori that is our passport or ID card, the paper that certifies and affirms our existence). A passport validates our organs, the body we inhabit, with which we perceive the world. Our perception is determined by our organs and by our senses. And our memory is printed in those interviews, which are so diverse and yet so similar. In a way, the real (the passport) indicates to us the orientation of the false (I am Libyan, Italian, American). For me, that identity manifests in other spheres: the land of birth, the homeland, takes place within the self, inside oneself, in the involuntary memory in food and in the voice, or rather the tone of voice; in how it is modulated and how we hear certain terms, such as pentola, chiodo di garofano, etc., in Sagona’s extraordinary 6.17 minute video Cousous (2020). Couscous is a short video that is structured like a diptych. On the right side of the screen, various clips of family footage are shown, while on the other side of the screen, we see short, linear information about the artist’s father and family over a background of &nbsp;the color of hummus. Born into an Italian family that had lived on the island of Malta for over 200 years and then moved to Libya during the Ottoman Empire, the father, Oreste, gets married in 1966 and moves to Rome. The rest of the family does so in 1969, after the Gaddafi coup. Malta is populated with people from Italy, an island that Ferdinand of Borbon, King of Naples and Sicily handed over to the British Empire in 1816, after the signing of the Paris Treaty in 1814 and the Vienna Congress in 1815. Since Italian was banned as the official language of Malta in 1936, many Italians then moved to Libya. They cross the Mediterranean, as wandering Jews had done before them, with resignation but also with vitality and good intentions. What nobody can take away from them are those times that are their very own, as much as those others of inherited years and centuries they carry in their blood and their memories, and in their homeland, so to speak, the one that has never been a physical place but a mental place. Couscous condenses a memory of happy survival. French philosopher Henri Bergson distinguished between two memories, or rather two ways of analysing what we call memory or recollection of the past: the memory that comes from, or is stored through, the mécanismes moteurs [motor mechanisms], is attained with the effort of will; the memory that comes from, or is stored through, souvenir independents [independent memories], is a spontaneous recollection, an image that becomes present. Years later, Gilles Deleuze would make a distinction, from a different perspective, between mémoire-souvenir (souvenir pur) and mémoire-contraction (souvenir-image). The first type of memory, which is voluntary, is stored in the brain (matter). The second type is stored in one’s consciousness (life, mind). With the help of perception, the brain reviews or scans the memories-recollections and selects those that are needed for the action of living or surviving. Automatic memory, which is preserved in the body, so to speak, with its automatic reactions to situations that arise in life, has been translated into English as “habit formed memory”, “habitual memory” or “pure recollection”. This second type is the enduring memory of each person, which consists of their individuality, in the entire mix of a person’s past and present. Bergson calls it independent, because the images that are stored in it are always intact as such, regardless of the situation an individual experiences. This is known as “pure memory”, a memory that comes as an image that one preserves of oneself, like a contraction that evokes a certain moment and shapes our present. This can be seen practically in the six interviews in Self-Portrait. The time of consciousness is not spatial, reversible time (it cannot go back and repeat the experiment like in science). Its basic feature is duration: the self lives in the present with the memory of the past and the anticipation of the future, which only exist in the consciousness that unifies them. In Passport, Sagona not only stamps her civil data, but also landscapes and quotes. Passport is also the impression and the trace of that tangle of experiences Sagona gradually sketched out later while waiting for her nationality. In his posthumous book Time Regained (1927), Marcel Proust said that we also retain the smell and taste of beings and objects of the past, whose memory sometimes lasts much longer, like the smell of madeleines: “Remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.” In Couscous, this edifice of memory is built by Sagona, not just with the memory of what was filmed, the beaches, the streets, the architecture of Tripoli, but also with the sound, the voice of her father explaining a culinary recipe. The saxophonist Gato Barbieri, in his album Caliente! (1976) claims: “The images of memory have a sound. With cinema, we realised that images have music. With music, something older and more intimate happens; when it really touches you, you can invent your own images and dream of things you didn’t know you were going to dream. Music is like a jungle (as is memory); it has limits, but we don’t know them. Music is the memory of dreams.” The visual diptych in Couscous is complemented with an Italian-speaking voice that explains the recipe for couscous. Food is the means of communication through which her father expresses himself: describing or breaking down a recipe he likes is his way of expressing his love and explaining his roots. In every recipe, there is a linear aspect (the number or list of ingredients), but there is also a timeline aspect, the code to combine those ingredients (how to cut them, put them in the pan, and the timing). A cooking recipe is a language that has no other translation than its making. Here, eating (satisfying one’s hunger) becomes food, and food becomes nourishment, loving food, nutrition. This term comes from the Latin word nutrire, which is also the root of the word nurse, and from the pre-Indo-European term nutri, which allows us to swim, to flow. In the video Couscous, in the flow of Oreste’s voice, we watch the pan being filled, not with ingredients, but with experiences. That cooking pot, as a familiar territory, is a sensory place as well as an emotional epicentre. Every nation has limits or it limits, but the place does not. Neither does food. This subject of food is already present in another one of Sagona’s works, from a negative perspective, in the children’s book No – Anna e il cibo (Orecchio Acerbo Editore, Rome, 2006). The story of a “no” by a girl who does not want to eat becomes, day by day, step by step, little by little, a “yes, I do want to eat”. The book narrates the story or the path of a mother and daughter who transit toward a positive view of eating, which is growing and living together. It is a book toward the future, whereas Couscous is a mémoire-contraction, a souvenir-image, pure memory. The film follows the logic of the condiment, of cuisine, to reach the feeling and the memory of a native land, that space we grew up in. The voice of the father rolling out the ingredients and their order in preparing the dish, as well as the dish itself, are what provide the true look at who we are. They are not mere madeleines but, as in Proust, it is the preparation of a dish that brings back the involuntary memory. In that act of cooking, land and love are both summed up and reaccepted. Although Ubi Consistam is an essay, Sagona does not follow the genre’s typical academic rule: a comparative analysis. She simply presents us with some objects and directs our attention to what they represent, manifest, symbolise and, above all, determine. She shows us a geography registered at three levels (paper-reliefs-video), as if providing a map to be able to travel a path that leads us to a vantage point from which we do not reflect upon the landscape, but rather upon our own identity and the safe passage that places us in a given territory that we call nation. Sagona structures her thoughts on identity through her bureaucratic identity, through some reliefs that refer to her body and through taped interviews with women surviving in a foreign country. Ubi Consistam can be read as a civil history, as a non heroic saga, and as a simple visual story, without adventures, whose core idea and engine is the fight for personal freedom, desire and happiness. Despite the colours of the Italian flag in the initials MS on the American passport, despite the three hues of the film, there is neither a nationalist’s pride nor a sceptic’s sadness in Sagona’s visual storytelling. We are human beings and there is no belonging to the species, no homeland for the species. The same language, the same past, do those things unite us? Does our community, does our family, unite us? We are more united by our interest in living in peace, in being able to develop and feel comfort, in simply enjoying the scenery where each of us is at each moment. Sagona goes beyond that in Ubi Consistam: she points to who we are and what the political reality is, the reality that gives us a distinguishing feature, our passport, the absurdity of nationality and the nostalgia of our native land. Ubi Consistam, like a mémoire-souvenir, seeks a profound, hidden meaning behind the paperwork of the errors that float above what we call civilisation. ︎ back https://marinasagona.com/Kosme-de-Baranano-Italian Mon, 30 Nov 2020 21:35:55 +0000 marinasagona https://marinasagona.com/Kosme-de-Baranano-Italian MS, Mémoire Souvenir Kosme de Barañano - 2020 La presente mostra di Marina Sagona espone l’opera Ubi Consistam, un complesso visivo formato da due gruppi di trenta sculture (le serie Organs e The Five Senses), un gruppo di sedici disegni a pastello su stampa intitolati Passport, e il video intitolato Self-Portrait -Autoritratto. Ubi Consistam funziona come un saggio, quel genere letterario scritto in prosa in cui un autore sviluppa le sue idee su un determinato tema in modo e stile personali: a short piece of writing on a particular subject, often expressing personal views, secondo il dizionario; sempre con spirito critico. Il saggio Ubi Consistam funziona come una composizione che trasforma un insieme coerente d’idee (in questo caso di fogli, oggetti e un film) in una dissertazione sul senso dell’identità (sia propria, sia nazionale). Non è un saggio lineare, bensì una riflessione a tre livelli e con tre tecniche diverse. Non conduce il lettore o il pubblico della mostra attraverso un percorso strutturato secondo una logica lineare, ma lo porta a un approccio che passa per il documento (il passaporto, che ci attribuisce una nazione e un territorio) e da questo, per una serie di elementi, di calchi (chiaramente identificabili con parti del nostro corpo e altri elementi che fanno riferimento ai nostri sensi e ai loro rispettivi organi: un orecchio, un naso, ecc.) ed infine a un film con sei interviste. I tre elementi di Ubi Consistam non sono sezioni o capitoli di un saggio, bensì movimenti argomentativi, in musica diremmo adagi, che ruotano intorno allo stesso tema. L’insieme di stampe Passport è formato da sedici immagini realizzate a partire dalle pagine doppie del passaporto, di misure ingrandite (in questo caso di 61 x 45,5 cm.) e modificate. Ciascuna delle sedici pagine del passaporto è illustrata con un paesaggio statunitense, con frasi di presidenti degli Stati Uniti e con citazioni estratte dalla Dichiarazione d’Indipendenza. Si tratta del passaporto americano dell’artista, ottenuto nel 2017 dopo aver vissuto ventidue anni a Brooklyn e a New York. Il passaporto americano è una nuova identità (burocratica), che si aggiunge a quella italiana, alla vita vissuta a Roma, dove l’aria di Tripoli impregnava ancora la casa familiare. Nelle stampe di queste pagine l’artista disegna le sue iniziali MS in maiuscolo, in verde e rosso. La posizione delle due lettere M e S nei diversi fogli non è casuale; Sagona le dispone e le usa per evidenziare determinate parole specifiche che, estratte dal contesto, creano una narrativa nuova e indipendente. Il termine passport - sia in italiano sia in spagnolo e sia in inglese - proviene dal francese passeport, dal verbo passer e dal sostantivo port. Durante il suo regno Luigi XIV concesse dei documenti di viaggio ad alcuni sudditi, che li chiamarono “passeport”, che letteralmente significa “passare per un porto “, poiché la maggioranza dei viaggi fuori dalla Francia si realizzava in barca a vela o per la porta di una città. Il passaporto storicamente è, quindi, il documento che ci identifica per uscire o entrare nel “nostro” territorio. Sagona ci porta a riflettere su questo documento, grazie alle sue iniziali e a frasi e paesaggi. A volte dimentichiamo da dove provengono le cose. Cos’è il passaporto? Fino alla Prima Guerra Mondiale abitualmente non erano necessari passaporti per viaggiare all’interno dell’Europa, e attraversare una frontiera era un procedimento relativamente semplice. In un certo senso, l’attuale passaporto nasce nell’Ottocento con le ferrovie, quando i treni permettono a migliaia di persone di spostarsi a una velocità nuova per il territorio, in modo tale da creare un totale collasso del sistema europeo di passaporti e visti. Per questo motivo nel 1861 la Francia abolì i passaporti e questo tipo di documento era in pratica inesistente nel 1914. La guerra porta una rinnovata preoccupazione per la sicurezza nazionale e, quindi, i passaporti furono di nuovo richiesti. The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act (la Legge di nazionalità britannica), approvata nel 1914, definì chiaramente le nozioni di cittadinanza e creò un passaporto del formato che conosciamo. Era valido per due anni e, oltre ad una fotografia e a una firma, includeva dettagli come “forma del viso”, “corporatura” e “altri tratti caratteristici”. Molti sudditi britannici si lamentarono della nasty dehumanisation, la “sgradevole disumanizzazione” che rappresentava la descrizione dell’impiegato pubblico di turno. Dopo un accordo della Società delle Nazioni per standardizzare i passaporti, nel 1920 fu emesso il famoso passaporto blu, iconica immagine dei viaggiatori britannici finché apparve l’attuale versione europea di colore bordeaux nel 1988. Tuttavia l’origine del passaporto o salvacondotto si trova nella Bibbia: nel libro del profeta Neemia (2: 7-9), databile approssimativamente al 450 a.C. Nel testo si racconta che Neemia, un funzionario al servizio del re Artaserse I di Persia, chiese il permesso per viaggiare in Giudea; il profeta, che era coppiere reale, voleva ricostruire le mura di Gerusalemme. Artaserse gli concesse il permesso e gli consegnò una lettera “per i governanti dell’altro lato del fiume” con cui richiedeva un passaggio sicuro mentre Neemia viaggiava per le loro terre. Nel XX secolo passa da documento di viaggio (da salva-condotto) a strumento per l’identificazione, chiave per la sicurezza nell’attraversare le frontiere, ma anche per reclutare gli uomini di governo. Un documento di viaggio che certifica l’identità e la nazionalità del titolare, un documento che protegge, si converte in un documento di controllo, di sottomissione. Le richieste per la nazionalità da cui uno proviene e la sottomissione al passaporto mi ricordano alcune riflessioni di Jours caucasienes (1945) della scrittrice Banine (1905-1992), pseudonimo di Umm El-Banu Asadullayeva, nata a Baku, in Azerbaigian. Jours caucasienes è una memoria di gioventù di una donna cresciuta in quel territorio in continua tensione fra Oriente e Occidente, fra islam e cristianismo, fra arabo e russo, che passa per il lusso di Berlino e Budapest e finisce a Parigi, una donna perseguitata sempre dalla necessità di un passaporto per poter essere libera, essere se stessa. Mi ricorda anche una nota nel blog “Apuntes e instantaneas” di un altro nomade, che risiede a Barcellona, David Mauas, autore del film Goya, el secreto de la sombra (2011, Spagna, 77 min.). In una nota del novembre del 2010, egli registra: “Consolato di Colombia. Pratiche per il visto. Una donna dice a un’altra: «rinunciare alla propria patria è come rinunciare alla propria madre». La donna si accorge che la osservo. Sguardo di rimprovero, condiscendente”. In Sagona la patria è la casa, il suo manuale è essere felice nelle mura domestiche. Il paradiso è la casa di ciascuno, una casa-rifugio dev’essere una fortezza emotiva; però non rinuncia alla madre patria. Tutti i suoi registri, da Passport a Self-Portrait, sono marchiati con i colori della bandiera italiana. Il secondo nucleo di Ubi Consistam è un doppio gruppo di sculture, due serie intitolate Organs e The Five Senses, realizzate nel 2018 in gesso e ricoperte da uno smalto e ripetute in tre colori, verde, bianco e rosso. La prima serie, denominata Organi, è formata da cinque elementi (ogni calco misura 12,7 x 20,3 x 2,5 cm) che rappresentano la traccia o l’impronta di cinque organi del corpo umano: il cervello, la trachea, il fegato, un tratto dell’intestino e il cuore. La seconda serie, denominata I cinque sensi, è formata da impronte in negativo di un dito, una lingua, due occhi, un orecchio e un naso. Questi rilievi rappresentano il tatto, il gusto, la vista, l’udito e l’olfatto attraverso lo spazio negativo dell’organo corrispondente. Le trenta piccole sculture prendono forma dal desiderio di materializzare un vuoto, un’identità che nasce da una mancanza di definizione. Tutte possiedono una fisicità, un tatto, sono calchi di forme umane, dei loro organi e delle loro viscere, e allo stesso tempo sono spazi vuoti, memoria di quello che furono, lo spazio negativo di ciò che sono realmente. Ogni serie si ripete tre volte in verde, in bianco e in rosso, i colori della bandiera italiana già presenti, come segnalato in precedenza, nelle iniziali MS in Passport e nel viraggio dei colori del video Self-Portrait. La formula della bandiera, il gioco dei tre colori, è come il caro amico o l’apostrofo “fra ‘Guittone” nel Trattato d’amore di Guittone d’Arezzo (c.1230 - 1294). Mi riferisco al manoscritto Escorialense di rime italiane antiche (codice latino, pergamena me.III.23 de la Real Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid). Il poeta reinterpreta in maniera moralista una lunga tradizione letteraria, che dal Remedia amoris di Ovidio perdura fino ai trovatori, e arriva ai poeti della cosiddetta tradizione ‘veneziana’ delle rime dello Stil Novo. Guittone trascrive poemi, li analizza, e allo stesso tempo li reinventa o “ricomincia” spiegando le sue immagini, affinandole, come fa Sagona nelle stampe di Passport. Guittone riflette, oltre che sulla poesia, sull’importanza dell’interrelazione poetica e metapoetica, fra scrittura e immagine, poiché le relazioni dinamiche all’interno del testo unico e quelle del testo nello spazio (lo spazio materiale del libro manoscritto e quello metaforico, relativo alla sua produzione, circolazione e ricezione) si mostrano anche come rappresentazione lirica e rappresentazione iconografica, come parti complementari della pianificazione macrotestuale dell’autore. Nella serie di sculture di Sagona Organi e I cinque sensi vediamo, inoltre, la pratica ermeneutica medievale dei diversi gradi di significato: dal figu- rativo (letterale, pittografico), attraverso il figurato (metaforico), fino al figurale (morale); il che equivale, nell’ambito dell’interpretazione delle Scritture, a «se- cundum historiam, secundum allegoriam, secundum tropologiam». Ricordiamo che la scultura è un’ars mechanica (nel sistema delle arti medievali), di un docere per visibilia (insegnare attraverso ciò che è visibile) che appartiene alla sfera del letterale, nel senso di figurativo-pittorico. In Sagona la descrizione dei sensi dell’essere umano compare come calco, come una “figura” o come una stampa, cioè come un’immagine. Il terzo argomento o nucleo di Ubi Consistam è il video Self-Portrait-Autori- tratto (25:55 minuti). Si tratta della registrazione di sei interviste con sei donne diverse, su temi diversi; una è la stessa artista, che parla di codipendenza e abbandono e un’altra sua figlia, nata a New York, che parla della diversa ma- niera di crescere da un paese all’altro. Le altre persone intervistate sono Judith Thurman (scrittrice), Ingrid Rossellini (professoressa), Giovanna Calvino (autrice) e Anna Funder (scrittrice). Tre delle protagoniste (sono tutte donne) parlano in inglese e tre in italiano. Attraverso il discorso di queste donne prende forma il ritratto dell’artista, poiché è lei a selezionare determinate frasi rispetto ad altre e sovrascriverle sullo schermo. Il montaggio delle interviste e la sottolineatura - nell’editing del video- delle parole delle altre donne, ci conforma e conferma il pensiero visivo di Sagona. C’è una punta di nostalgia in tutte le interviste. Il termine “nostalgia” viene dal greco nostos, “ritorno-casa” e algia, “dolore-mancanza”. La parola viene ripre- sa nel XVII secolo quando alcuni medici svizzeri diagnosticarono una strana e nuova malattia contagiosa nei soldati mercenari. Il trattamento della misteriosa “nostalgia” includeva l’uso di sanguisughe, emulsioni ipnotiche, oppiacei e un viaggio nelle alte cime delle Alpi. Nel XIX secolo, il termine si utilizzava per riferirsi a un male più grande, a una malinconia di molti esseri umani, un destino, una specie di malattia passeggera. La nostalgia divenne storica e si convertì nel male del secolo. Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia (2002) identifica due tipi di nostalgia, ciascuna delle quali sottolinea una delle due radici della parola. La prima è inevitabilmente vincolata alla casa, cerca un ritorno al luogo mitico che si trova nell’isola d’Utopia, dove si ricostruirà una “patria più grande”. Questa nostalgia è collettiva e ha una funzione ricostruttrice, è la nostalgia “restauratrice”, così caratteristica dei nazionalismi che formulano e fabbricano miti storici su misura. Il secondo tipo di nostalgia pone in particolar modo l’accento sull’atto del sentire la mancanza, un sentimento di perdita e distacco, ma anche una storia d’amore con la propria fantasia. Non vuole ricostruire un mitico luogo perduto e si crogiola nella distanza. Non cerca un referente poiché l’amore nostalgico può sopravvivere solamente in una relazione a distanza. Si tratta di una nostalgia ironica, frammentaria e unica. Questa nostalgia esamina l’esilio attraverso una doppia esposizione o sovrapposizione di due immagini: la casa e ciò che è foraneo, il passato e il presente, il sogno e la vita quotidiana. Nel momento in cui cerchiamo di rinchiuderlo in una sola immagine, Sagona vede che rompe la cornice o brucia la superficie. Nella stessa maniera, con una capacità di penetrare nel dettaglio propria di Walter Benjamin, in Ubi Consistam Sagona passeggia, è una flaneur, che si muove tra il saggio fra Passages (Das Passagen-Werk) e la Strada a senso unico (Einbahnstraße del 1928). Le interviste, inoltre, sono virate in tre colori: le prime due in verde, la terza e la quarta in bianco, e la quinta e la sesta in rosso, cioè nuovamente i colori della bandiera italiana, gli stessi degli spazi negativi delle sculture degli organi del corpo o delle iniziali MS impresse nei disegni di Passport. In fondo le interviste sono anche un distillato di una visione della natura dell’identità. Forse l’espressione più completa è la frase della scrittrice australiana Anna Funder: Non voglio essere una conchiglia (windowframe) attraversata dal vento. Il tema dell’identità era già presente nelle opere di Sagona come illustratrice di libri o nelle mostre precedenti, ad esempio, quella intitolata La donna al plurale, presentata alla Tricromia Illustrator’s International Art Gallery di Roma nel 2011. Le opere dell’artista erano inspirate al poema “Il cantico dei cantici” del poeta ceco Vítezlav Nezval (1900-1958), e al libro La donna al plurale (Einaudi Roma 2002). Il tema delle radici appare in precedenza nei suoi libri illustrati per bambini, ad esempio in Voglio essere un albero (Einaudi Ragazzi, Roma 2007). Ubi Consistam significa punto stabile (una base, un’ubicazione fissa) ed è parte della traduzione latina della frase che Archimede avrebbe pronunciato, in gre- co, dopo aver scoperto il principio della leva: “da mihi ubi consistam, et terra coelumque movebo”, tradotta nel luogo comune “dammi un punto d’appoggio e solleverò il mondo”. Riassume la necessità dell’essere umano di avere o partire da un punto stabile, un fondamento solido, dal quale creare il suo mondo e la sua esistenza; un’esistenza, uno slancio vitale, non solo di forza fisica, ma anche di necessità psicologiche. È una riflessione su se stessi, per quanto riguarda il corpo (i nostri sensi) e per quanto riguarda i documenti (l’identità che il passaporto da alla nostra esistenza): l’io fisico e l’io in quanto cittadino, il corpo e la sua targa d’immatricolazione per spostarsi nel mondo. In fondo è una riflessione sulla singola storia umana, su come l’individuo è ri-presentato, identificato da un pezzo di carta. Nel suo insieme Ubi Consistam è un progetto su come ci costruiamo un’identità e su come a volte la nostra identità non è più a fuoco. Non si tratta dei propri cambiamenti (fisici o psicologici), ma di come ci cambia il contesto incui viviamo (sia per le strutture sociali sia per quell’apriori che è il passaporto, il documento d’identità, il pezzo di carta che certifica e afferma la nostra esistenza). Il passaporto da validità ai nostri organi, al corpo che abitiamo e con cui percepiamo il mondo. La nostra percezione è determinata dai nostri organi e dai nostri sensi. È la nostra memoria impressa in queste interviste, così diverse e, tuttavia, così uguali. In qualche modo il vero (del passaporto) ci orienta verso il falso (sono Libico, Italiano, Americano). Per me questa identità si manifesta in altri ambiti: la terra natale, la patria; si manifesta all’interno del self, di se stessi, nella memoria involontaria, nel cibo e nella voce, o meglio nel tono di voce: in come si modulano e si sentono certi termini come pentola, chiodi di garofano, ecc., nello straordinario video intitolato Couscous del 2020 (6:17 minuti). Couscous è un breve video, strutturato come un dittico. Nel lato destro dell’immagine si succedono diversi frammenti di film familiari, un family footage; nell’altra metà, su uno sfondo color pasta e ceci, si susseguono delle informazioni concise e lineari sulla famiglia e sul padre dell’artista. Sagona proviene da una famiglia italiana residente sull’isola di Malta per più di duecento anni e trasferitasi in seguito in Libia durante l’Impero ottomano; il padre Oreste nel 1966 si sposa e si trasferisce a Roma; il resto della famiglia, lo segue nel 1969 dopo il colpo di stato di Gheddafi. Malta è un’isola abitata da molti italiani, un’isola che Ferdinando di Borbone, re di Napoli e di Sicilia, dopo la firma del Trattato di Parigi del 1814 e con il Congresso di Vienna del 1815, consegna all’Impero Britannico nel 1816, e nella quale viene proibito l’italiano come lingua officiale nel 1936; molte persone si trasferiscono, quindi, in Libia. Attraversano il Mediterraneo come avevano già fatto gli ebrei erranti, con rassegnazione, ma anche con vitalità, con genuina buona fede. Ciò che nessuno può togliere loro è questo tempo che è proprio e personale come lo sono gli anni e secoli ereditati intrecciati nel sangue e nella memoria e, per così dire, nella “patria”: questa non è mai stata un luogo fisico, ma un luogo mentale. Couscous condensa una memoria del sopra-vivere felici. Il filosofo francese Henri Bergson distingueva due memorie, o meglio due modi di analizzare quello che chiamiamo memoria o ricordo del passato: quella che proviene o si incamera attraverso i “mécanismes moteurs”, che si ottiene con lo sforzo di volontà, e quella che proviene o si incamera attraverso i “souvenirs indépendants”, una memoria spontanea, un’immagine che si fa presente. Alcuni anni dopo Gilles Deleuze distinguerà, da un’altra prospettiva, fra “mémoire- souvenir (souvenir pur)” e “mémoire-contraction (souvenir-image)”. La prima, la memoria della volontà, si accumula nel cervello (matter) e l’altra nella coscienza (life, mind). Il cervello, con l’aiuto della percezione, ripassa o scannerizza le memorie-ricordi e seleziona quelle necessarie all’azione di vivere o sopravvivere. La memoria automatica, che è, per così dire, conservata nel corpo, con le sue reazioni automatiche davanti alle situazioni che ci presental’esistenza; nella traduzione americana è l’habit formed memory, habitual memory, o pure recollection. La seconda, è la memoria di lunga durata di ciascuno, che consiste nella sua individualità, nell’amalgama della totalità del suo passato e presente. Bergson la chiama indipendente perché in essa le immagini si conservano sempre intatte come tali, indipendentemente dalla situazione in cui vive l’individuo; è pure memory. Memoria pura è quella che ci arriva come immagine-souvenir che si conserva dentro se stessi, come una contrazione che evoca un determinato momento e plasma il nostro presente. Tutto ciò si vede in pratica nelle sei interviste di Self-Portrait. Il tempo della coscienza non è un tempo spazializzato e reversibile (a cui si può tornare indietro per ripetere l’esperimento come nella scienza); la sua caratteristica di base è la durata: l’io vive il presente con il ricordo del passato e l’anticipo del futuro, che esistono solamente nella coscienza che li unifica. In Passport Sagona imprime non solo i suoi dati civili, ma anche paesaggi e frasi. Passport è anche un’impressione, un’impronta di questa trama di esperienze che Sagona aveva man mano delineato a posteriori mentre attendeva la nazionalità. Marcel Proust nell’ultimo libro Il tempo ritrovato (postumo, 1927) dirà che degli esseri e oggetti del passato ci resta anche l’odore e il sapore, che a volte -come l’odore delle madelaine- dura molto più a lungo: “a ricordare, ad attendere, a sperare, sopra la rovina di tutto il resto, portando sulla loro stilla quasi impalpa- bile, senza vacillare, l’immenso edificio del ricordo”. In Couscous Sagona costruisce questo edificio del ricordo non solo con la memoria dei filmati, le spiagge e le strade di Tripoli, l’architettura, ma anche con i suoni, con la voce del padre che spiega una ricetta di cucina. Il sassofonista Gato Barbieri nel suo disco Caliente! (del 1976) indica: “le immagini della me- moria hanno dei suoni. Grazie al cinema ci siamo resi conto che le immagini contengono in sé musica. Con la musica succede qualcosa di più antico e di più intimo: quando realmente ti commuove, puoi inventare le tue immagini e sognare cose che non sapevi che avresti sognato. La musica è come un bosco (anche la memoria lo è): ha dei limiti, ma non li conosciamo. La musica è la memoria dei sogni.” Il dittico visivo di Couscous è accompagnato da una voce che, in italiano, scandisce gradualmente la ricetta del couscous. Il cibo è il mezzo di comunicazione con cui si esprime il padre dell’artista: scandire una ricetta che gli piace è un modo di esprimere il suo amore, è spiegare le sue radici. In ogni ricetta c’è un aspetto lineare (il numero o lista degli ingredienti), ma anche un aspetto temporale, il codice per unirli (le maniere di tagliare questi ingredienti, di introdurli nel recipiente... i loro tempi). La ricetta di cucina è un linguaggio che non ha traduzione oltre la sua realizzazione. Qui il mangiare (il saziare la fame) si converte in alimento, Food si converte in Nourishment, in alimento amoroso, in nutrimento. Il termine proviene dal latino nutrire da cui viene nurse, infermiera, e dal preindoeuropeo nutri, che ci offre nuotare, fluire. Qui, in questo video del couscous, nel flusso della voce di Oreste, vediamo che la pentola non raccoglie degli ingredienti, ma delle esperienze vissute. Questo bollito, come territorio familiare, è un luogo sensoriale e allo stesso tempo un epicentro emozionale. Ogni patria ha dei limiti o limita, il luogo, no. Il cibo nem- meno. Il tema del cibo è presente nell’opera di Sagona, da un punto di vista negativo nel libro infantile No – Anna e il cibo, (Orecchio Acerbo Editore, Roma 2006). La storia di un “no”, di una bambina che non vuole mangiare e che, giorno dopo giorno, poco a poco diventa un “sì, voglio mangiare”. Il libro racconta la storia o meglio il percorso verso una visione positiva del cibo di una madre e una figlia. Le quali alla fine si prendono per mano e decidono di crescere insieme. È un libro proiettato al futuro, mentre Couscous è una “mémoire-contraction”, un souvenir-image, pure memory. Il film segue la logica del condimento, della cucina, per arrivare al sentimento e alla memoria di un territorio natale, quello spazio in cui siamo cresciuti. Sono la voce del padre che elenca gli ingredienti, il loro succedersi nella preparazione e lo stesso piatto a generare il vero sguardo su ciò che siamo. Come in Proust non sono delle semplici madelaine, bensì la preparazione del piatto che ci restituisce la memoria involontaria. In quest’atto di cucinare si riassume e si riappropria del territorio e dell’amore. Nonostante Ubi Consistam sia un saggio, Sagona non segue propriamente le regole accademiche, l’analisi comparativa, ma semplicemente ci presenta degli oggetti e spinge la nostra attenzione verso ciò che essi rappresentano, simbolizzano e soprattutto determinano. Ci presenta una geografia registrata su tre livelli (carta-rilievo-video) come se ci offrisse una mappa per poter percorrere un cammino che ci porta a una torre di avvistamento da cui riflettere non sul paesaggio, ma sulla nostra identità e sul salvacondotto che ci situa in un determinato territorio che chiamiamo nazione. Sagona struttura la sua riflessione sull’identità attraverso la sua identità burocratica, attraverso dei rilievi, rilievi che si riferiscono al suo corpo, e attraverso un video di interviste a donne che sopra-vivono in un altro paese. Ubi Consistam si può leggere come una storia civile, come una saga poco eroica e come un semplice racconto visivo, senza avventure, il cui asse e motore è la lotta per la libertà personale, per il desiderio e per la felicità. Nonostante i colori della bandiera italiana nelle iniziali MS del passaporto americano, nonostante il tricolore virato del film, nel racconto visivo di Sagona non c’è né l’orgoglio del nazionalista, né la tristezza dello scettico. Siamo esseri umani e non esiste un’appartenenza alla specie, non esiste una patria della specie. La stessa lingua, lo stesso passato... sono tutte queste cose che uniscono? Unisce la comunità? Unisce la famiglia? Uniscono di più l’interesse a vivere in pace, a potersi esprimere, a vivere confortevolmente, a godere semplicemente del paesaggio in cui ciascuno si trova in ogni momento. Sagona va oltre in Ubi Consistam: indica quello che siamo e quello che è la realtà politica, che ci da un segnale della nostra identità, il nostro passaporto, l’assurdità della nazionalità e la nostalgia della terra natale. Ubi nsistam, come un mémoire souvenir, cerca il senso profondo e nascosto dietro la burocrazia degli errori che affiorano su ciò che chiamiamo civilizzazione.&nbsp;︎ back https://marinasagona.com/New-Essay Mon, 30 Nov 2020 18:08:36 +0000 marinasagona https://marinasagona.com/New-Essay Testo di Mariacristina Lattarulo scritto per la presentazione del video Couscous all’Iper-festival, 10-16 giugno 2024.&nbsp;Mattatoio/Palaexpo, Roma.&nbsp; Couscous è un video sul rapporto padre-figlia, presente-passato, parole e reticenza, memoria e immaginazione. Lo schermo appare diviso in due parti, sulla destra vediamo delle immagini dell’archivio della famiglia dell’artista girate a Tripoli nel 1962 mentre la voce del padre spiega la sua ricetta del couscous. Sulla sinistra v’è, invece, un testo in inglese, non la traduzione della ricetta stessa, ma una sua decodificazione emotiva. Usando un dizionario immaginario, l’artista traduce la passione culinaria del padre in una conversazione del tutto nuova e anelata. Couscous è un condensato sinottico e rivelatore delle tematiche vitali che attraversano la persona - prima ancora che la pratica - di Marina Sagona: le nozioni di controllo, co-dipendenza, trauma e identità condivisa non solo reperiscono la condizione umana in sé ma – con altrettanta puntualità - anche il focus tematico di questa nuova edizione del Festival delle Periferie. Hic sunt leones, traccia di questa edizione e allusione alle assai antiche carte geografiche manifesto di terre ancora inesplorate, non ancora intaccate dal tempo dell’alienazione e della presunta civiltà occidentale - mi conduce alla discussione ripensando l’immaginario e la memoria come territorio, corpo, limen - colonizzato, violato, liberato, rimosso, co-dipendente - tracciando una mappatura teorico visuale che abbia come oggetto elementi universali nonché costrutti sociali e codici personali, quali: il cibo, la lingua, la casa, l'identità. Dal titolo stesso dell’opera è possibile scorgere il posizionamento geografico prima ancora che le parole dell’artista fungano da supporto autobiografico. Chiare e leggibili si materializzano le origini libiche del padre dell’artista, Oreste, nato a Tripoli e dichiaratamente figlio di generazioni precedenti in transito, approdate a Tripoli da Malta - durante l’impero ottomano – prima - durante la colonizzazione fascista -poi. Capitale libica visceralmente Mediterranea, Tripoli, in cui Oreste Sagona abita fino al 1966 per poi trasferirsi a Roma, sua città d’adozione nonché futura città di nascita di sua figlia Marina. Punto cruciale che non risparmia me dalla menzione; la famiglia Sagona, dal fatto empirico, è la yalaa, la cacciata degli italiani dal territorio libico su comando di quello che fu il regime dittatoriale di Gheddafi, sancendo il definitivo non ritorno degli italiani in Libia e privando di fatto Sagona e la sua famiglia di farne esperienza diretta, collettiva econdivisa. Mentre Couscous procede e parzialmente racconta, rintraccio un raddoppiamento della condizione esistenziale, un’interezza dissociata ed un chiasmo speculare tra padre e figlia: un padre spartito tra la Libia e l’Italia, Marina, sua figlia, volutamente sdoppiata tra L’Italia e gli Stati Uniti, eleggendo New York come estensione possibile. Di fronte allo scaraventarsi di un passato che chiede asilo e a ridosso di tale quadro storico, non ho saputo non considerare il profilo di un uomo prima ancora che di padre, che incarnasse il duplice peso storico di colone e profugo, condannato, insieme ad altri italo-libici, ad un defraudamento - probabilmente anche in questo caso duplice - della memoria storica. Un passato migratorio che per eredità, osmosi o replica di controllo, vede Sagona, come citato in Couscous, volutamente lontana per essere libera. Una memoria politicizzata per esistenza, influenzata – invece - per lascito, anche nella rappresentazione artistica delle insite dinamiche relazionali. Nella circoscrizione dei territori inesplorati, Tripoli rappresenta una geografia non abitata e non esperita direttamente, tuttavia l’inesplorato può - nel caso dell’opera di Sagona - essere declinato e accostato ad un apparente inesplorato stato affettivo, con esplicito riferimento alla relazione padre-figlia di cui questo video è portatore sano. Una memoria visuale ed un archivio sonoro accompagnano un tentativo pioneristico di rappresentazione ed umana comprensione, non solo di questa Arcadia libica ereditata, anelata seppur mancata ma anche di questo padre, sagoma profondamente indecifrabile, irrimediabilmente avvolta da un’aura di ordinario enigma quotidiano. Allora Tripoli potrà verosimilmente costituire quella porzione di memoria ed esercizio in cui Sagona e l’inesplorato agiscono come fossero micelio e terra. Un riferimento quantomeno esplicito al cibo è contenuto a partire dal titolo stesso dell’opera, addensante di un’origine poco fraintendibile ed elemento - nella pratica di Sagona - soventemente dissezionato. Agente endogeno anche in Ballad of the Feeding Tube, opera altra dove soggetto ed oggetto s’incontrano – questa volta- nella figlia di Sagona. Il cibo rappresenta in CousCous non solo la breccia ad una comunicazione alternativa ma anche uno dei dispositivi di controllo tramite cui si dispiegano alcune – accuratamente personali - dinamiche relazionali. Come Sagona riporta in Couscous : his silence turns into food, food into nourishment and nourishment into control. Un’opera – quella di Sagona – in cui un alone di duplice oralità si dispone come soggetto dotato di resistente autonomia: la parola, l'accompagnamento verbale, il senso della nota scritta, la trasmissione, la disposizione; poi l'oralità come alimento, avidità, rifiuto, piacere libidico, comunione, assuefazione, viatico. Sappiamo bene il cibo essere un profondo attivatore identitario con un ruolo essenziale nella costruzione e nella rappresentazione del sé o delle sue macerie, il cui assumendo una funzione autobiografica e privata dove il gusto funge da metempsicosi di momenti e memento pregressi. Il cibo cucinato, osservato, introiettato, ingoiato, condiviso o rifiutato, pensato come dizionario o rimosso, racconta di trasformazioni individuali e collettive, costruzioni familiari e codici di convivenza.&nbsp; In una presa in considerazione del cibo come territorio striato e che per il padre e la figlia di Sagona ha rappresentato indubbio strumento di controllo e manipolazione affettiva, ovunque questo stesso cibo trovi collocazione nella personale esperienza di figlia, madre ed artista, potremmo -forse – far valere l’assunto che siamo ciò che ricordiamo di aver mangiato - o meglio – rifiutato. In Couscous il cibo si fa altresì linguaggio e possibilità di interpretazione di una – invece - impossibilità radicata di parola. Per l’appunto, mentre sulla destra scorrono in sequenza alcune immagini d’archivio accompagnate dalla voce del padre di Sagona intento a spiegare la sua ricetta del couscous, sulla sinistra vi si affianca un testo in inglese dell’artista, non traduzione pedissequa e letterale della ricetta stessa, piuttosto una personale decodificazione affettiva ed emotiva. Il linguaggio è - insieme alla casa e al capitale sociale – coordinata e categoria su cui l’uomo s’insinua in un infedele e dunque costante processo di riterritorializzazione, ricreando o sabotando il proprio habitat. Ancora il linguaggio, finanche trauma come identità mai scisso da sé stesso, al quale Lacan assegna la colpa primitiva di una coatta castrazione di godimento. Allora, la solidità attribuita al linguaggio affiancata alla presunta verità di cui siamo madri e padri putativi, viene – in una qualche maniera – depotenziata nell’opera laddove il linguaggio, la caduta del senso della sillaba è faglia, si rivela in quanto faglia, malgrado la nostra prossimità alla parola; partecipiamo al dire bensì qualcosa resta manifestamente sfuggevole e manchevole. Quest’operazione di decostruzione e ricostruzione di un alfabeto privato in Couscous, ben si ripresenta – sotto simil spoglie – in Ubi consistam, altra opera di Sagona nella quale, in concomitanza all’ottenimento del passaporto americano nel 2017 (primo dispositivo coloniale e di controllo) ed aver – in tale circostanza - sentito la parte italiana della sua identità saccheggiata, Sagona decide di intervenire attraverso la stampa di alcune pagine di tale passaporto, appropriandosi di altrettante esatte parole del documento, sovrapponendoci – infine - le sue iniziali con il tricolore italiano. Ecco, se per il padre e la figlia di Sagona il cibo ha corrisposto a mezzo di controllo, è assai pensabile che nel caso dell’artista, invece, sia il linguaggio con le conseguenti rappresentazioni di quest’ultimo, ad essere spazio manipolatorio, in un tentativo di riappropriazione e ridefinizione emotivo-territoriale delle sue stesse origini. Dove stiamo dunque andando? Sempre verso casa è l’epilogo a cui segue il principio; la pacifica collisione tra il non esplorato della traccia tematica del festival e il moto a luogo - verso casa - dell’opera video in questione. La casa come spazio, suolo fisico e psichico, dialettico e dialogico dove il pensiero dell’uomo – su riferimento deleuziano - muove fra e e per territori, mai oggetto sempre spazio, terra con il quale simpatizzare in vicinanza piuttosto che secondo possesso. La casa e consequenzialmente il nucleo familiare come primi perimetri sociali in cui si fa esperienza dell’inevitabile e della relazione. Ecco, quel privato a cui sottende il ricordo, quella dimensione accostata al confort o all’ipotesi di riparo, è quello stesso luogo in cui - prima di ogni altro contesto – si innestano meccanismi di controllo, forme di potere, abuso e subordinazione, suggellati da altrettante manovre di auspicata liberazione e indipendenza. Anche il concetto di casa, come quello di cibo, invoca il privilegio spartendone decori, privazioni o nevrosi i cui brandelli si ricompongono in una maggiore rappresentatività volta - attraverso l’opera di Sagona – a decostruire e disarticolare la - a volte ostentata e semplificante - comodità per conferire dignità ad un non confort come prisma e possibilità di creazione nel reale, un reale considerato nella sua complessità esistenziale. Tale complessità sociale, storica e politica – in questo caso più specificatamente libica tuttavia estendibile a contesti paralleli – non concede omissioni circa la portata mortifera - da Gheddafi al trattato di Bengasi - della rinnovata complicità italo-libica con gli assai attuali memorandum di contrasto alla vita, non viceversa. Se la complessità insegna realmente a relativizzare, allora l’immaginazione farà rima con corruzione di una qualche guardia costiera libica e probabilmente Casa - non sarà un paradigma universale o un diritto acquisito - ma l’auspicio di non crepare tra un centro di detenzione ed una porzione di mare. Tra pretesa e realtà, le pratiche del quotidiano tentano di ricomporre un’integrità spaziale, accatastando geografie e memorie domestiche distanti pur centrate in un corpo medesimo. Puntuali e complici risuonano le parole di J. Bahloul: La casa ricordata è una cosmologia su piccola scala che ripristina l'integrità di una geografia frantumata. Che Sagona sia mai tornata a casa o cosa non lo sia mai stata è un interrogativo incestuoso tra spazio abitato, suolo occupato e assenza prosciolta. &nbsp; Il cibo, la madre, le nevrosi, il Mediterraneo, i padri, le cellule chimeriche, i figli, tutto quello che pare essere patrimonio collettivo in potenza, che sotto definizione junghiana citiamo come inconscio collettivo, archetipale, si fa questione privata, come un ricettacolo di famiglia che sopravvive in nome dello strappo, condiviso nella pratica, realizzabile nel suo unico farsi. Il dosaggio per fare la vita e disfare i sottintesi in un tempo che vomita e ripete. Seguitando l’intuizione del festival a questionare l’esistenza di una porzione bianca e radicale di rivoluzione dove l’immaginazione agisca in un assetto del residuo possibile, inequivocabile è il suo disporsi tra libertà e esproprio. Tale superficie bianca, è custode di una verginità parziale - poco o nulla immacolata - piuttosto sporcata come sporcato è il passaporto di Sagona in Ubi consistam; così come lo è il linguaggio nel tentativo di sorreggere verità assolute destinate a liquefarsi. Con soluzione di conflittualità - come un focolaio il cui nome proprio chiama il nome dell’altro-da-sé somministrando reciprocità, contaminazione, restituzione e attribuzione di senso - leoni, corpi e spazi terzi sperimentano una convivenza possibile. Tra contrasto e decentramento di un potere allineato e sorvegliante, la nozione di exforma - è personale pretesto, non casualità – atto a considerare e ripensare l’agglomerato di forme e simbologievita.centralità e marginalità, tra inclusione ed esclusione e – per non predicare omissione - tra riconoscimento e nonriconoscimento, con supplementare allusione alla Palestina. Nell’esserne - il lavoro di Sagona – testimonianza attiva, nessuno spazio di resistenza può essere abitato senza una soggettività che produca sé stessa in quanto capacità di memoria; una memoria benjaminiana come effrazione nel presente di un’occorrenza dal passato, esautorata da qualsivoglia intento restaurativo, risignificata in un presente dischiuso e vivo, plausibilmente anch’esso diretto verso casa. Nel tragitto tra residuo ed esistenza, un quesito ennesimo irrompe interpellandoci su cosa resta: di una vita, questa vita. Tratti da La poubelle agréée, una sequenza di singhiozzi di Calvino citano e contornano in ordine sparso memoria – memoria perduta – il conservare e il perdere ciò che si è perduto – ciò che non si è avuto – ciò che si è&nbsp;avuto in ritardo – ciò che ci portiamo dietro – ciò che non ci appartiene...». Dove c’è memoria, c’è resto e perdita; quel che rimane, quella parte della vita e della lingua che salviamo dalla catastrofe - come ricorda Agamben - ha senso solo se ha a che fare col perduto. La lingua dell’arte, della poesia, quella lingua volutamente residuale, ci è vicina perché è nel nome della perdita, invoca ciò che si perde, poiché ciò che è sperso è di Dio.&nbsp;Dopotutto - nell’opera - la memoria come atto e attimo di conoscibilità costituisce potenziale esercizio di non possesso tra l’accaduto e il non vissuto. Memori, spersi e trafficanti si arriva finanche a conclusione, di un epilogo che non nega sé stesso fino a supplicarne replica - come il ritorno a casa – ammissibile solamente attraverso le ultime sei parole del componimento dal titolo Niente del siciliano B. Cattafi: la memoria è sempre un contrabbando. https://marinasagona.com/New-Essay-copy Mon, 30 Nov 2020 18:36:43 +0000 marinasagona https://marinasagona.com/New-Essay-copy Kosme de Barañano MS, MÉMOIRE SOUVENIR - 2020 The current exhibition by Marina Sagona shows her work Ubi Consistam, a visual ensemble that consists of 30 small sculptures divided into two series (Organs and The Five Senses), 16 printed drawings titled Passport, and a video titled Self-Portrait.Ubi Consistam works as an essay, that literary genre, written in prose, in which an author develops his or her ideas about a specific topic with a personal cha- racter and style: a short piece of writing on a particular subject, often expres- sing personal views, according to the dictionary; always with a critical spirit. This essay, Ubi Consistam, is a composition that turns a coherent set of ideas (the here and now of papers, objects and a film) into an story about one’s sense of identity (both personal and national). It is not a linear essay, but a reflection on three levels and in three diverse techniques. It does not lead the reader or the visitor of the exhibition along a structured path following a linear logic, but rather to a perspective that goes from the document (the passport that ascri- bes us to a nation and to a territory) to a series of reliefs, some of which can be clearly identified with parts of our body and others with our senses and their respective organs—an ear, a nose, etc., and finally to a film that includes six in- terviews. The three components of Ubi Consistam are not sections or chapters of an essay. They are more like argumentative movements, what we would call adagios in music, around the same topic.The group of prints titled Passport consists of 16 images based on the dou- ble pages of a US passport, which have been enlarged (to 61 x 45.5 cms.) and modified. Each of the 16 pages of the passport is illustrated with an American landscape, some sentences by American Presidents and quotes taken from the Declaration of Independence. It is the artist’s own passport, which she received in 2017, having lived in Brooklyn and Manhattan for 22 years. The US passport is a new (bureaucratic) identity that is added to an Italian identity, the artist’s ex- perience of her family home, located in Rome but still impregnated with the air of Tripoli. Over the illustrations on those pages, the artist prints her initials M.S. in green and red. The position of those two letters, M and S, on the different pages is not random. Sagon places or uses them to highlight certain specific words that, out of context, form a new independent narrative.The term passport—whether in English, Italian or Spanish—comes from the French word passeport, made up of the verb passer and the noun port. During his reign, King Louis XIV of France granted certain travel documents to some of his subjects. The document was called a passeport, which literally means“passing through a port”, because most journeys outside of France were made either in sailing boats or through the gate (also port) of a city. Historically, a passport is then a document that identifies us in order to leave or enter “our” territory. Sagona makes us reflect on this document, now with her initials su- perimposed on sentences and landscapes. We sometimes forget where things come from. What is a passport? Until the 1st World War, passport were not ge- nerally required to travel within Europe, and crossing a border was a relatively simple procedure. Today’s passport somehow appeared in conjunction with the railway in the 19th century, when trains started moving thousands of peo- ple around at a new speed, thus overwhelming the European system of pass- ports and visas. For this reason, France abolished passports in 1861. By 1914, this kind of document hardly existed. But the war brought about a renewed concern for international security, so passports were required once again. The British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, which was passed in 1914, clearly defined the notion of citizenship and issued a passport in the form we know today. It was valid for two years and, in addition to a photograph and a signa- ture, it included a physical description, including details such as the “shape of the face”, the “build” and “other features”. Many Britons complained about the “nasty dehumanisation” of a person being described by a civil servant. In 1920, thanks to an agreement by the League of Nations to standardise passports, the famous “old blue” passport was issued. This was an iconic image of the British traveller until it was replaced with the maroon European version in 1988.However, the origin of the passport or safe-conduct can be found in the Bible, in the Book of the Prophet Nehemiah (2:7-9), which dates back to circa 450 B.C. Here it is said that Nehemiah, a public servant under King Artaxerxes I of Persia, asked for permission to travel to Judea; the prophet, who worked as a royal bartender, wanted to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. Artaxerxes granted him permission and gave him a letter “for the governors beyond the river”, re- questing a safe passage for him while he travelled around his lands. In the 20th century, the safe-conduct went from being a travel document to becoming a key tool of identification as a security measure both for crossing borders and for the Government to recruit men. A travel document that certifies the identi- ty and nationality of its bearer, a document that protects, becomes a document of control, of submission.These questions about one’s nationality, and the submission to a passport, reminds me of certain reflections in Jours caucasienes (1945) by the writer Ba- nine (1905-1992), a pseudonym used by Umm El-Banu Asadullayeva, who was born in Baku, Azerbaijan. Jours caucasienes is a mémoire of a young woman who grew up in that territory of perpetual contact between East and West, between Islam and Christianity, between Arab and Russian, who, after expe- riencing the luxury of Berlin and Budapest, ends up in Paris. A woman who is always pursued by the need for a passport in order to be free, to be herself.It also reminds me of that note on the blog Apuntes e Instantáneas [Notes and Snapshots] by another nomad who settled in Barcelona, David Mauas, author of the film Goya, the Secret of Shadows (2011, Spain, 77 mins.). In a note from November 2010, he writes: “Colombian consulate. Visa process. One woman tells another: «giving up your homeland is like giving up your mother, my land is my land.» The woman notices my attention. A reproving, condescending look.” In Sagona, the mother country is the home, her manual is to be happy be- hind closed doors. Paradise is each person’s home, and the home-refuge has to be an emotional fort; but she does not give up her mother country. All her registers, from Passport to Self-Portrait, are stamped with the colours of the Italian flag.The second core element in Ubi Consistam is a double set of sculptures, two series titled Organs and The Five Senses (2018), made in plaster and covered in enamel, in the three colours of green, white and red. The first series, called Organs, consists of five pieces (each one measures 5 x 8 x 1 inches) that represent the trace or print of five organs in the human body: the brain, the trachea, the liver, an intestinal tract and the heart. The second series, called The Five Senses, are negative prints of a finger, a tongue, two eyes, an ear and a nose. These reliefs represent touch, taste, vision, hearing and the sense of smell through the negative space of the corresponding organ. The 30 small sculptu- res are shaped from the desire to give form to a vacuum, to an identity derived from a lack of definition. They all have a physicality, a feel. They are templates of human features, of their organs and viscera, but they are also empty spaces, the memory of what they once were, the negative space of what they really are. Each series repeats itself three times in green, white and red (the colours of the Italian flag). As I have already mentioned, these colours are also present in the initials MS in Passport and in the tones of the video Self-Portrait.The formula of the flag, playing with its three colours, is like the caro amico or the apostrophe “fra ‘Guittone” in Trattato d’Amore [Treaty of Love] by Guittone d’Arezzo (c. 1230-1294). I am referring to the manuscript Escorialense di rime italiane antiche (Latin codex in parchment me.III.23 in the Saint Lorenzo Royal Library at El Escorial, Madrid). The poet reinterprets, in a moralist way, a long literary tradition, which lasts from Ovid’s Remedia Amoris to the troubadours, until the poets of the cosiddetta tradizione ‘veneziana’ delle rime dello Stil novo. Guittone transcribes poems and analyses them, while he reinvents or “reinitia- tes” them by explaining their images, by modifying them, as Sagona does with the prints in Passport.Besides poetry, Guittone reflects on the importance of the poetic and meta-poetic interrelation between the written word and the image, becau- se the dynamic relations within a singular text and those of the text in space (the material space of the handwritten book and the metaphoric space relatedto its production, distribution and reception) are also shown as a lyrical and ico- nographic representations, as complementary parts of the author’s macro-tex- tual planning. In Sagona’s series of sculptures, Organs and The Five Senses, we also see this medieval hermeneutical practice for the various degrees or levels of meaning: from the figurative (literal, pictographic), to the figurato (meta- phorical), to the figurale (moral). In the field of the interpretation of writing, this is equivalent to «secundum historiam, secundum allegoriam, secundum tropologiam». Let us remember that sculpture is an ars mechanica in the sys- tem of medieval arts, of a docere per Visibilia (teaching through the visible), which belongs to the sphere of the literal, in the figurative-pictorial sense. In Sagona’s work, a human being’s senses are described as a relief, as a “figure” or shape. In other words, as an image.The third storyline or core element of Ubi Consistam is the video Self-Portrait (25:55 mins.). It contains six interviews with six different women about six di- fferent topics. One is the artist herself, who talks about co-dependence and abandonment. Another is her daughter, who was born in New York and talks about the different ways of growing up in one country versus the other. The remaining four interviewees are Judith Thurman (writer), Ingrid Rossellini (pro- fessor), Giovanna Calvino (author) and Anna Funder (writer). Three of the female protagonists speak English and three speak Italian. These women’s discourse shapes a portrait of the artist in that she selects certain words said by the others and inscribes them on the screen. The montage of the interviews and the underlining of the others’ words in the video editing form and confirm Sa- gona’s visual thinking.There is an element of nostalgia in all the interviews. The word “nostalgia” comes from the Greek vocables nostos (returning home) and algia (pain). The term was recovered in the 17th century, when some Swiss doctors diagnosed a strange new contagious disease in mercenary soldiers. The treatment for this mysterious “nostalgia” included the use of leeches, hypnotic emulsions, opiates, and a trip to the high mountains of the Alps. During the 19th century, the term was used to refer to a greater evil, a melancholy felt by many human beings, a destiny, a kind of passing illness. Nostalgia turned historical and became the sickness of the century. In The Future of Nostalgia (2002), Svetlana Boym iden- tifies two types of nostalgia, each of which emphasises one of the two roots of the word. The first type is inescapably linked to the home. It longs for a return to the mythical place located on the island of Utopia, where a “greater homeland” will be rebuilt. This nostalgia is collective and has a reconstructive function; it is a “restoring” nostalgia, which is so characteristic of nationalisms that formu- late and fabricate custom-made historical myths. The second type of nostalgia emphasises the act of yearning in particular; it is a feeling of loss and displace- ment, but also a romance with one’s own fantasy. It does not seek to rebuild the lost mythical place and it takes pleasure in distance. It does not search fora reference, because nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. This is an ironic nostalgia, fragmentary and unique. This nostalgia considers exile in a double exposition or a superposition of two images: home and abroad, past and present, dream and daily life. As soon as we try to force it into a single image, Sagona sees it breaking the frame or burning the surface. Moreover, with an ability to penetrate into detail as Walter Benjamin did, Sagona is, in Ubi Consistam, a stroller, a flâneuse, who moves around the essay between Das Passagen-Werk [The Arcades Project] and Einbahnstraße [One-Way Street] (1928).The interviews are additionally coloured in three hues: the first two in green, the third and fourth in white, the fifth and sixth in red. That is, once again, the colours of the Italian flag, like the colours on the casts of body organs or in the initials MS that are printed on the drawings in Passport. At heart, the interviews also reveal a vision of the nature of identity. The most emphatic expression may be found in the words of the Australian writer Anna Funder: “I didn’t want to be a window frame with the wind blowing through it.”The theme of identity was already in Sagona’s work as a book illustrator or in previous exhibitions, such as her exhibition titled La donna al plurale [The Wo- man in Plural], presented at the Tricomia Illustrator’s International Art Gallery in Rome in 2011. The artist’s works were inspired by the poem Song of Songs by the Czech poet Vitlezlav Nezval (1900-1958) in the book La donna al plurale (Einaudi, Rome, 2002). And the theme of one’s roots had also come up in her picture books for children, such as Voglio essere un albero (Einaudi Ragazzi, Rome, 2007).Ubi Consistam means stable point (a fixed base or location) and it is part of the Latin translation from ancient Greek of a phrase Archimedes allegedly uttered after discovering the law of the lever: “da mihi ubi consistam, et terram coelum- que movebo”, which has been translated into that hackneyed phrase“Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth”. It sums up a human being’s need to have, or start from, a stable point, a solid foundation, from which to create his or her world and existence; an existence, a vital force, not only of a physical nature, but also of psychological needs. It is a re-flection on one’s self, in terms of the body (our senses) and of paperwork (the identity a passport gives our existence). The physical self and the citizen self, the body and its number plate to travel the world. It is ultimately a reflection on the unique human history, of how the individual is re-presented, identified by a piece of paper.As a whole, Ubi Consistam is a project about how we build ourselves an iden- tity and how our own identity is sometimes blurred. It is not about (physical or psychological) changes in oneself, but about how we are changed by the contextwe live in (whether it is due to social forms or to that a priori that is our passport or ID card, the paper that certifies and affirms our existence.) A passport vali- dates our organs, the body we inhabit, with which we perceive the world. Our perception is determined by our organs and by our senses. And our memory is printed in those interviews, which are so diverse and yet so similar. In a way, the real (the passport) indicates to us the orientation of the false (I am Libyan, Italian, American). For me, that identity manifests in other spheres: the land of birth, the homeland, takes place within the self, inside oneself, in the involun- tary memory in food and in the voice, or rather the tone of voice; in how it is modulated and how we hear certain terms, such as pentola, chiodo di garofano, etc., in Sagona’s extraordinary 6.17 minute video Cousous (2020).Couscous is a short video that is structured like a diptych. On the right side of the screen, various clips of family footage are shown, while on the other side of the screen, we see short, linear information about the artist’s father and family over a coloured picture of hummus. Born into an Italian family that had lived on the island of Malta for over 200 years and then moved to Libya during the Ottoman Empire, the father, Orestes, gets married in 1966 and moves to Rome. The rest of the family does so in 1969, after the Gaddafi coup. Malta is populated with people from Italy, an island that Ferdinand of Borbon, King of Naples and Sicily handed over to the British Empire in 1816, after the signing of the Paris Treaty in 1814 and the Vienna Congress in 1815. Since Italian was banned as the official language of Malta in 1936, many Italians then moved to Libya. They cross the Mediterranean, as wandering Jews had done before them, with resignation but also with vitality and good intentions. What nobody can take away from them are those times that are their very own, as much as those others of inhe- rited years and centuries they carry in their blood and their memories, and in their homeland, so to speak, the one that has never been a physical place but a mental place. Couscous condenses a memory of happy survival.French philosopher Henri Bergson distinguished between two memories, or rather two ways of analysing what we call memory or recollection of the past: the memory that comes from, or is stored through, the mécanismes moteurs [motor mechanisms], is attained with the effort of will; the memory that comes from, or is stored through, souvenir independents [independent memories], is a spontaneous recollection, an image that becomes present.Years later, Gilles Deleuze would make a distinction, from a different pers- pective, between mémoire-souvenir (souvenir pur) and mémoire-contraction (souvenir-image). The first type of memory, which is voluntary, is stored in the brain (matter). The second type is stored in one’s consciousness (life, mind). With the help of perception, the brain reviews or scans the memories-recollections and selects those that are needed for the action of living or surviving. Automaticmemory, which is preserved in the body, so to speak, with its automatic reac- tions to situations that arise in life, has been translated into English as “habit formed memory”, “habitual memory” or “pure recollection”. This second type is the enduring memory of each person, which consists of their individuality, in the entire mix of a person’s past and present. Bergson calls it independent, be- cause the images that are stored in it are always intact as such, regardless of the situation an individual experiences. This is known as “pure memory”, a memory that comes as an image that one preserves of oneself, like a contraction that evokes a certain moment and shapes our present. This can be seen practically in the six interviews in Self-Portrait. The time of consciousness is not spatial, reversible time (it cannot go back and repeat the experiment like in science). Its basic feature is duration: the self lives in the present with the memory of the past and the anticipation of the future, which only exist in the consciousness that unifies them. In Passport, Sagona not only stamps her civil data, but also landscapes and quotes. Passport is also the impression and the trace of that tangle of experiences Sagona gradually sketched out later while waiting for her nationality.In his posthumous book Time Regained (1927), Marcel Proust said that we also retain the smell and taste of beings and objects of the past, whose memory sometimes lasts much longer, like the smell of madeleines: “Remembering, wai- ting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.” In Couscous, this edifice of memory is built by Sagona, not just with the memory of what was filmed, the beaches, the streets, the architecture of Tripoli, but also with the sound, the voice of her father explaining a culinary recipe. The saxophonist Gato Barbieri, in his album Caliente! (1976) claims: “The images of memory have a sound. With cinema, we realised that images have music. With music, something older and more intimate happens; when it really touches you, you can invent your own images and dream of things you didn’t know you were going to dream. Music is like a jungle (as is memory); it has limits, but we don’t know them. Music is the memory of dreams.” The visual diptych in Couscous is complemented with an Italian-speaking voice that explains the recipe for cous- cous. Food is the means of communication through which her father expresses himself: describing or breaking down a recipe he likes is his way of expressing his love and explaining his roots. In every recipe, there is a linear aspect (the number or list of ingredients), but there is also a timeline aspect, the code to combine those ingredients (how to cut them, put them in the pan, and the timing). A cooking recipe is a language that has no other translation than its making. Here, eating (satisfying one’s hunger) becomes food, and food beco- mes nourishment, loving food, nutrition. This term comes from the Latin word nutrire, which is also the root of the word nurse, and from the pre-Indo-European term nutri, that which allows us to swim, to flow. In the video Couscous,in the flow of Orestes’s voice, we watch the pan being filled, not with ingre- dients, but with experiences. That cooking pot, as a familiar territory, is a sen- sory place as well as an emotional epicentre. Every nation has limits or it limits, but the place does not. Neither does food.This subject of food is already present in another one of Sagona’s works, from a negative perspective, in the children’s book No – Anna e il cibo (Orecchio Acer- bo Editore, Rome, 2006). The story of a “no” by a girl who does not want to eat becomes, day by day, step by step, little by little, a “yes, I do want to eat”. The book narrates the story or the path of a mother and daughter who transit toward a positive view of eating, which is growing and living together. It is a book toward the future, whereas Couscous is a mémoire-contraction, a souve- nir-image, pure memory. The film follows the logic of the condiment, of cuisine, to reach the feeling and the memory of a native land, that space we grew up in. The voice of the father rolling out the ingredients and their order in preparing the dish, as well as the dish itself, are what provide the true look at who we are. They are not mere madeleines but, as in Proust, it is the preparation of a dish that brings back the involuntary memory. In that act of cooking, land and love are both summed up and re-accepted.Although Ubi Consistam is an essay, Sagona does not follow the genre’s typical academic rule: a comparative analysis. She simply presents us with some ob- jects and directs our attention to what they represent, manifest, symbolise and, above all, determine. She shows us a geography registered at three levels (pa- per-reliefs-video), as if providing a map to be able to travel a path that leads us to a vantage point from which we do not reflect upon the landscape, but rather upon our own identity and the safe-passage that places us in a given territory that we call nation. Sagona structures her thoughts on identity through her bu- reaucratic identity, through some reliefs that refer to her body and through taped interviews with women surviving in a foreign country.Ubi Consistam can be read as a civil history, as a non heroic saga, and as a simple visual story, without adventures, whose core idea and engine is the fight for personal freedom, desire and happiness. Despite the colours of the Italian flag in the initials MS on the American passport, despite the three hues of the film, there is neither a nationalist’s pride nor a sceptic’s sadness in Sagona’s visual storytelling. We are human beings and there is no belonging to the species, no homeland for the species. The same language, the same past, do those things unite us? Does our community, does our family, unite us? We are more united by our interest in living in peace, in being able to develop and feel comfort, in simply enjoying the scenery where each of us is at each moment. Sagona goes beyond that in Ubi Consistam: she points to who we are and what the political reality is, the reality that gives us a distinguishing feature,our passport, the absurdity of nationality and the nostalgia of our native land. Ubi Consistam, like a mémoire-souvenir, seeks a profound, hidden meaning behind the paperwork of the errors that float above what we call civilisation. https://marinasagona.com/Lea-Mattarella Wed, 20 Sep 2017 19:18:43 +0000 marinasagona https://marinasagona.com/Lea-Mattarella At HomeLea Mattarella — At Home, 2008 Let us begin with feet. Or rather, shoes. That is, from the end; from the final image in this technicolor film conceived by Marina Sagona. No two ways about it: shoes speak. "They summarize and define" says Marina. The shoes in question are propped up against an armchair, there is no body in them; they have no need of one. Alone they are enough to convey the message-let's get it out in the open, let's be frank: the worst is over. The protagonist of this image-tale is gathering her forces. In a moment she will stand up, open the door and leave the home that has in part protected her, in part held her prisoner. The end (a happy one, all things considered). Roll credits. “I wanted to talk about intimacy and the claustrophobia of domestic life utilizing the phisical space of a home”. &nbsp;Marina's tenacious exploration of the home deserves close attention, for it is not exactly all that it might appear to be at first glance. Her style is light and lively. Even when monochromatic, her paintings give the impression of expressing itself through colour. Her brushstrokes are soothing, everything flows free of obstacles. Glancing at her works, the viewer is struck by a certain sense of joyfulness: they seem forever in perfect harmony with the world. When drawing, Marina is in control of the situation in every way. Yet these splinters of life—confined, walled in, trapped behind tightly drawn curtains—also exude pain, the visible presence of absence, emptiness intended as loss and not as a natural, peaceful and even indispensable counterpart to fullness.That bed perfectly made, those raindrops slightly hindered, and a little injured, the marks that cover the kitchen space and finally enclose it, the skeleton in the closet that becomes a mirror of the artists surrounded by ornamental elements; all are stories of melancholy, of silent and intimate solitudes, of fear and anger. Case in point: when Marina depicts household linen, the material she uses is fabric from her own house, one that she inhabited in a previous life. Here between dazzling lemon yellow stripes, her shadows move. They reside in a beautiful world: this we must acknowledge. Yet one feels that they are forced to be there, vestals that repeat the same involuntary gestures, angels of the hearth whose opinion nobody has bothered to ask. Shattered dreams, dashed hopes. And there you are, doing the ironing. Exiled from yourself.But Marina Sagona is an artist of the Almodóvar school. Her women do not surrender, they shower in their high-heels, and they reclaim life and drag it to safety. &nbsp;Indeed there is the figurine showering with her shoes on: she seems an icon of daring femininity. “Good ideas flow under the shower,” suggests Marina. In this case the illumination must really be a stroke of genius—like the one that here chose silk and cotton as materials with which to depict household linen. Linen thereby interprets itself. In the end, and in spite of everything, one perceives the scent of lightness, an irresistible insolence victoriously insisting upon its right to be however and whatever it wants. The clouds looming over the kitchen are whisked away by life's breeze. And then there are the objects. Marina's god of small things transforms them into amulets that exorcise suffering. Books, a teapot, Mozart, photographs, masks, and so on, represent for Marina “self-portraiture via objects of daily use.” Identity—that is, existence in this world—is composed of so man pieces of a puzzle that mysteriously fit together. Viewing this exhibition and the book that accompanies it is a little like thumbing through a photograph album in which we finally recognize a part of ourselves.How often have we felt that way, just like her, amid the chairs and tables that flow together and ebb away from one another as if they were people? We can't, at this point, avoid mentioning “Mobili nella valle” (“The Furniture in the Valley”), pieces of furniture that de Chirico imagined in conversation together. We know that it is possible that our frames of mind are mirrored in the corners of our homes, almost oozing from them. Such things do happen. And so, here is Marina's work resembling that of the Proustian author, a "kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The boundaries of this story, the confines of this living room in which one can be transformed into animals as in the oldest myths (for if we turn to the East, we all have the same destiny) are those where redemption comes in the end. In the room of her own that Virginia Woolf dreamed of &nbsp;for her Judith one can first and foremost fantasize and collect one's own thoughts, and show them in some way or another. Just as Marina has done by creating her constellation of domestic "moments of being". They are ours, too. For this reason I return to the beginning; that is, to the end of this sequence of images, to those shoes with the little belt cinched tight around the ankle. There, I see them walking, they step over the doorsill. Now, the woman wearing them has her back to me, she’s in the street, wearing the same green dress that earlier she had cut into pieces. She looks a little like Marina. Just a little. For the most part she resembles us. (Translation by Michael Reynolds) ︎ back