mercoledì 29 aprile 2015

Excerpt from the norvegian sketch diary

Nation: Norway
Country: Finnskogen forest
Date: November 17 2014
Coordinates GPS: N 60° 5'37.53'' E 12°20'50.64''
Track: Smorholmen Lake (second step)
Temperature: min -3° max +8°
Equipment list: compass, work gloves, map, insulation mat, multitool, thermal blanket, stove, fire stell, tarp, cords, water pot, scotch tape, sketch book, pencil and camera.

The forest is a natural cathedral, an arboreal shrine, an elite place to breathe silence and to cross its wild forest bulwark.
The preparation takes me a long time, especially since the climate has changed and I try to make a careful selection between water-proof clothing and emergency equipment.
The path is hostile and at times very swampy - Norwegians call it "MYR" - it’s a land soaked with water, where the feet sink as in quicksand; a step is like five and one doesn’t seem to advance at all.
Everything is decomposed humus: “locus horridus”, but sublime to the sight and smell, everything is water and chlorophyll.
My steps perceive a real sense of danger; the environment dominates.
I climbed the stream stretches thinking of reaching the lake, but I always find myself in front of a chaotic barrier, a maze of conifers and so the perception of space vanishes. (The birches dropped by beavers are like bridges that I use to cross the more swampy areas).
I can go even beyond those woods, but going through it, seems but a matter of mindset.
I saw two huge mooses and a small white ermine, which were are too quick to be photographed; on the ground there were skulls and bones of animals. (forest archaeology)
Numerous trees fell because of snow and water weight. Huge uprooted trees created caves and holes in the ground similar to Trolls’s danes. To cross them I have to go around them or get into the intricate branches webs.
The thoughts were accompanied by London’s suggestions: my Klondike was in front of me and its gold was the green path.
The trail is marked by little old and faded blue circles. I have the map with me, but it’s old and inaccurate. I cannot remember how to use the compass, the GPS does not work here, so I put on some red tape on the birches to have reference point upon my return.

I'm lost.

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sabato 18 aprile 2015

Wilderness (in a country where happiness is married to silence) by Antonello Tolve # 1°part




The charm of a trip, i was suggesting a little time ago thinking about “L’invitation au voyage” of Baudelaire, is represented by the "nostalgia for a country ever seen," by curiosity, the pleasure that feeds itself waiting to reach a destination, by the intention to explore (to search) a real country "where you breathe fresh life." But also by a hope, a desire to find, after a long (or short) pilgrimage in search of something. Perhaps simply to find himself, to rediscover (and rethink their imagination), to reread its clinch with the nature of things, and to build an interior notebook, creating an intimate diary - and because intimate, really valuable.

Since its first projects and jobs, Daniele Girardi has placed trust in this subtle condition  - the condition of the traveler and explorer, more precisely - to produce aesthetic itineraries whose formal nature feeds itself of climatic, environmental and socio-anthropological prefixes. Inner Surface (2009), The Road (2011), What Remains (2012), Natural Industry (2012), Life Sketch Books (2012-2013) and The Great Valley Project (2013), all those project follow this methodological angle, this poetic declination that invites the viewer to retrace a poetic catalog linked to eco-sustainability and an ethical that wants to take care of the world to feel the mood, the smells, the flavours, the distant voices that are lost in a pasty nostalgia for land.

With the recent exploration / residence organized by the Norwegian Atelier Austmarka, Girardi has marked, with greater insistence, his poetic vocation, his will to evade the archeology of knowledge to foster a discussion related to the history of ideas, "to all that treacherous thought, to all that complex of representations that are flowing anonymously between men", to the side noise, secular themes, ​​fluctuating languages and themes (apparently) unrelated. It is, in fact, a process that goes through various disciplines - anthropology, sociology, archeology of nature, alchemy and phrenology are some - to tell the story of the secondary aspects and marginal, to treat and reinterpret, with a style of analysis lyrically holistic, the splendour of the same simple things.

Invited 10 to 26 November 2014 in the vast forest of Finnskogen, the artist is immersed in an uncontaminated nature to find the same origin of the culture. Of an innocent culture of intellectual harmony through which start an plastic exercise - made up of images, words, objects, minimal materials - leading to expressive cores where the present becomes ontinuously the past, archive of a memory that wants to keep (obsessively) each track and redefine it, reconfigure it, redrawing it, according to a  creative dictation never satisfied to tell a personal and passionate story that flows naturally in the public view, in the social landscape.

His listeners assist (attend), so, in a series of exchanges, a series of intermediate steps, to offer a posthumous performativity through photographs - creamy as boza - that serve as testimony of a journey, travel notebooks (in some cases intentionally deleted, charred, reduced an unreadable mass), light installations that assemble objects collected along the way, things captured by the gaze, memorial fragments collected and classified meticulously, "also in the studio I find many suggestions in the objects that I use for my trips or into “fetishes found on site or randomly", yet, in the "drafting of the daily diary. "

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