A portrait of G. Olmo Stuppia, a singular artist from Italian Archipelago Sicily and Venice Lagoon.
“The grabbing hands grab all they can
Everything counts in large amounts
The grabbing hands grab all they can
Everything counts in large amounts”
– Depeche Mode, Construction Time Again (1983)
How was your singular choice to invest in Palermo and Venice Lagoon, opening first Cassata Drone and then your studio, in cities without a primary market?
It has been a very slow path, based on a deep study of military history, political traces and the filmic vitality of Mediterranean gestures. Language first codifies your inner feeling, so your aesthetics. I love wandering at dawn, like Remi Oudghiri, and I detest the pollution and noise of places like London or Milan. I lived and often live in Paris, thanks to the help of the D&D Collection of historical patrons, who follow my work with great interest. Some memories of the 19th-century friendship still linger on the islands, reminiscences of chivalry, of style. Something completely different in hyper-productive places and plains, where there is no mutual help, no islanders’ resistant gaze. Or at least the cooperation in competition. I lived in Milan for years when I was a child, and I’ve always struggled with the racist, hyper-labor and classist mentality that’s so common in big cities, especially in Milan (where the Fascist party was born). The Experience districts tend to encompass every gesture more than elsewhere. But even in Milan, I’ve now restored a small cellar. It’s in the Arab and South American area of Via Arquà, where I was born, before moving back to Sicily. The second most populated Region of Italy after Lombardy, the ones that decided on Democracy, in 1994 Sicilian’s led by bullshit mafia’s boss Graviano shifted to a new form for this Country: Berlusconism. Its’ take at least one century to intellectual recuperate and deconstruct this Imaginary trauma for italian fragmentations and for Italians economy which is now very bad for more than half the local populations. In Deep Lagoon, as in Brancaccio, or Khals district we can still find what’s Pier Paolo Pasolini call’s “Ragazzi di Borgata” but in a Digital preserved trap way: “Quaggiù tutto è tutto preumano, e umanamente tutto gioisce”. As spotted in Atlantide by Ancarani, and decades before by Jeremy Deller in Venice for i.e. I suffer a lot, but I suffer less once I drift around with this perverse drug addicted proletariat than in a GetFit Special offer experience with a nouvelle cuisine chef and a little bourgeois, “whitification” life on my back. Dirty, hide, run away is art, Raw materials is art. Creating sculpture in wax, creating images which deal with the inner and truth of your soul is art. Display a sentimento and a “torso” of your screaming “earth” as an ingenious kid can be art too. Then sometimes we negotiate our position because of work duty. Because of “ricatto” monetario. To create, you need time, lots of free time and the possibility to breathe. To profoundly care for yourself and others. To mend traumas and bereavements. To truly desire it. A true artist always works: Memento Audere Semper. It was then a phrase exploited militarily, but audacity really helps. To spark an intimate experience between things, between natural landscape and social life, between technique and desire. Is a strong duality Induced needs as a sort of “light” terrorism that seeps into everything. As stated by James Bridle, we are living in a dystopian “Nightmare of total illumination”. According to me, art is a matter of intuition, a kind of dual tension between immediate fire and technique, and a desire to share another worldview. Is a multidimensional gaze fabrication. My artworks are time-based sculptures, objets trouvés, photographs, draws and audio-visual productions mixed as a vital collage. Everything, however, stems from long walks and navigating with the boat ‘Salmarsa’ that I run with Yoses Stringari and Fabio Scrivanti reading poems all night long. The islands are also a great source of inspiration. There’s the loud shouting at dawn, the misplaced response even if you’re in front of a local who’s asking for information, and the sure help that comes to you when the 2004 Yamaha 9.9 engine breaks down. These are just some of the things that can be reproduced in Laguna. Sicily is the Italian laboratory par excellence. It has three volcanoes, sacred rituals, heavy militarization by the dominant empire, ancient languages and powerful architecture piled on top of each other.
In your last project, the winning work for the First Prize at Palazzo Balbi (Regione Veneto), you work on lagoon micro-organisms, with a photograph, how does your shooting work?
It’s a marvelous silver print. It’s almost an extinct technique in Italy now. In that case, it was preliminary work for Sposare la notte, which was later commissioned at the Venice Biennale, in the Public Program of Gian Maria Tosatti’s Italian Pavilion, together with Adriana Rispoli and Eugenio Viola thanks also to Chiara Bordin, general secretary of the Pavilion. Sometimes I want to immerse myself in water to feel better and relax, even into the so-called “dirty” water of Venezia’s rios. I did the same thing in Venice. The picture was taken with an analogue Canon and diving suit on the surface of the water in the Rio Cannaregio Canal. The algae and microorganisms look like the moon, the cosmos, and the universe. That’s why the breathing sandbanks are like a universal lung for the forces of water and the lunar tide. In black and white and placed vertically, these images absorb an abstract, powerful, and for me also very sweet vision. Almost as if they were sugars. Algas can be poison but some drop in alchemical and pharma doses can curate Your eyes, your feelings.
Marrying the Night has already seen four chapters, now you are working on the fifth, a journey through “the Italian night”, global pollution but above all a different way of behaving, for the 8 hours of walking in the “Tarkovskian” areas of Palermo and Venice, can you tell us more?
Marrying the Night is a counter-postcard of my Country. A polycentric heritage and stratified cultures that suffers globalism trauma more than others. That looks at the impact of visual eternity, Italian heritage, and the way it’s been “raped” by the desacralizing mentality of industrialism and linguistic commodification. I put out an open call and 150 people flocked for each chapter. For example, in Marrying the Night Ep. I, their walking, their selection of glass fragments, their waiting for… was the work. It was the people who discovered the bridge crane on the island of Sacca San Mattia, among brambles, rabbit skulls, abandoned glass beaches and radioactive phosphogypsum abandoned by criminals in 90th and 80th, directly dropped into the Lagoon. I decided to take away their smartphones, to take their fingerprints in a Fabriano DIN3 paper, reversing the process of algorithmic policing that was taking place all over the institutions. We get tired, we get exhausted. It’s just the way it is. Microplastics aren’t the result of decayed industry. They’re the “night” of humanity, the exponential increase of carcinogenic diseases, and the death and decay of our life’s possibilities. The earth and the planets will still rotate without us. It’s therefore worth going through this life with deep rigor, discipline, and inner splendor. Marrying the Night Ep. II went for a 25-km run along the north coast of Palermo’s Arenella at night. Marrying the Night Ep. III lived in Brancaccio, even taking over a church that had been closed for 30 years and filling it with young people. Then they went as far as the Hotel San Paolo, and then to Venice, from the Italian Pavilion to the MOSE. Once more, an island was rediscovered, and we disembarked with six boats, dipping our feet into the lagoon current (which was made stronger by the engineering changes of the MOSE). We then had a succession of poems and a 3am return, which was a bit damp and cold, but we were still alive. Chapter V is a sculptural and filmic outcome, dedicated to the impact of emigration and industrial areas such as Marghera or Gela on people’s lives, and then arriving in Manhattan. It starts with the inhuman architecture of the factory, which made grandparents and fathers dream so much. A small boat crosses Raul Gardini’s abandoned hull, an opening inspired by Bellocchio and at the same time by the future from which we draw to imagine a path of hope. James Bridle called it a ‘new dark age’, which opens up uncertain scenarios, battle axes and many desperate masses in search of a future.
A viaticum of souls that each time gather at the “Sposalizio”, a recurrent wandering, lucubrating about spaces and places. You told us about returns at 3 in the morning, but is there a dawn, a télos that envisages a final meeting between Lovers?
When you free your mind, devote time to your body, you always release an enveloping and profound energy.
As Battiato observed, every person who achieves a ‘mystical’ state, a prayer, a meaningful sign with his chosen art, dedicates his entire existence to the universe and humanity. The space between the clouds has nothing to do with the terrifying edges of our laptops or the Fincantieri, or the H24 Line that steals the lifetime of hundreds of people for a hundred and fifty minutes; the boxes that transport us buzz around, among cables, branches, lights, fibers. For people like me, who still write letters, buy roses, read books extensively, love to waste time talking politics, engage in struggles that many people don’t even imagine exist, questions of perspective are essential. The empty time, the clear brilliance of the air of the Sicilian countryside is something sacred. Which is often broken by noisy drones and helicopters that use, use, use to make us dance the macabre dance. When they are ‘in action’, every gesture becomes part of a score of the heart, every reverberation and burst of rage disappears in the “Segno” of the wedding and the night. In the shots, in the videos, in the performances I make, there is ecstatic wonder and volitional power, the desire to change everything, knowing that St Gregory was not right, time is a violent structure.
“La nostra anima è attraversata da sedimenti di secoli, le radici sono più grandi dei rami che vedono la luce. La violenza vuole, mentre la meraviglia non vuole nulla.”
– Maria Zambrano
From your erratic wandering in the Peninsula, I want to refer to a passage from the Dialectics of Enlightenment. In dealing with Odysseus and the relationship between Myth and Enlightenment, an entanglement that can be linked to the dichotomy of Sposalizio (contractual rationalization of socio-economic relations) – Night (mythical source), Adorno and Horkheimer emphasize that ‘the mythical world is secularized in the space he [Odysseus] travels, the old demons populate the extreme margins and islands of the civilized Mediterranean, driven back into the rocks and caverns from which they emerged one day in the thrill of the primordial. […] The adventures give each place its name; and their result is the rational control of space […]. He [Odysseus, the hero, ed.] indulges in them again and again, trying and trying again, incorrigible in his desire to learn, and sometimes even foolishly curious, like a mime who never tires of rehearsing his parts’.
In each of my artworks, an enigma is collected. I see a path of a single, unique symphony. Mahler, Rachmaninoff while Russia liberates Stalingrad, with Jude Law targeting the heads of the Nazis. In every project of mine, light and darkness are hybridized, design sketches and cosmic breath. Cinematic vision and narration that monumentalize “small unproductive gestures.” Odysseus is recognized by a servant and by the Dog, who dies from emotion, in an unempathetic era, I send letters and demand to be heard when I am in front of a person, weighing every moment and every word as if it were the last. The Iliad is guarded in Venice, we are the guardians of darkness in this phase of authoritarian Neoliberalism. For example, in the work “Archeologies of the Future,” at the INHA in Paris curated by Anna Battiston, I also addressed the trauma of Berlusconism, as well as that of body profiling with drones. Or in “Marrying the Night” from which installations, videos, and photographs derive, I literally forced hundreds of people to wander in extreme and polluted places of the Lagoon and Palermo. Today, the shock of advertising is too pervasive, without dictates, no one wants to break out of their sad self-speaking laziness. No one or very few, especially in the so-called “culture”. We must not cultivate the exceptional, seek the hero, the other form of the leader. We must make the people rise, enlarge the people’s brain, furnish it, differentiate it, make it human.
Credits:
Artist : G. Olmo Stuppia / @g_olmo_stuppia
Interview: Fabio Scrivanti
Editor: Maria Abramenko / @mariabramenko
Assistant: Annalisa Fabbrucci / @annalisa_fabbrucci
Soundscapes vol.160 / Schicktanz