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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