Last winter, at least for us, was a shit. That is, from an emotional point of view. When this happens we tune in with the city to go and discover or rediscover places that have the ability to make you feel regenerated, with their strength. For this reason on a morning at the end of February we took a walk around San Giovanni’s church in Carbonara. The two staircases taking you to the church’s bowel, seem to intertwine like a piece of DNA string informing you of the beauty you are about to see. The frescos located beyond the apse, after passing under King Ladislao’s grave, tell about monastic life and attempts to corruption, medicinal herbs and overloaded mules. There are also, of course, the angels, God almighty and Mary with her annunciation, but those are the side dish. It seems to us that the main course is rather the rats painted on a ledge, the nobles not quite camouflaged among the angels, the hermits caught in their routine. But we’re digressing here. The point is that if you go out from the stairs, and you bend to look on the left, you discover other stairs leading to a little door.
It’s behind that little door that, as an oasis for the thirsty, King Ladislao’s park hides. A garden actually, rather than a park, with orange trees, medlar lemon and apricot trees, grapes. Not many trees, but one of each kind. Outside the chaos, inside the birds.
The old monastery, next to the church, is completely abandoned and enclosed by a wooden fence from time immemorial. It’s on this surface that we decided to let our spring sprout up. The seasons’ sequence evokes cycles that become death. Yay!
The silence, but also the colours of the garden, we couldn’t rape them with our chromatic violence, at least not the one we use to assault the city. And so we decide to change the medium, therefore the message. We want our work to blend in, more than in other places, with the pre-existing one. In order to give life to the shapes incubated in the winter sickness mentioned above, we chose the lightest paper on the market: the tissue paper.
We ask to the department of culture and environment if we can avoid going there at night. They agree. So after a few visits with specialists and gardeners, and that minimum wait for the bureaucracy, we can start.
During our intervention (it’s surgery, not painting) the last winter showers were already consuming what we were creating, they were fading its colour and letting the moth-eaten wood, absorb the tissue paper’s veils in its veins (when the words are so similar (there must be something) / (I smell a rat)).
We met few people in there, but to tell the truth they were all interesting. Luca first, who is about thirty and has two sons. A complicated story behind him but a great desire to understand the world. He says it is a superior force that made us meet. He and his mates had been looking at our works in the city, especially at some in their neighbourhood behind the park, and they wondered if what they grasped corresponded with out intentions. If only we knew our intentions… Luca insists: «the social control, the development, the new world order, the Vatican rumors, you talk about this!». He doesn’t put it in these words, he has grown up in the streets and in the mornings he’s got a stand at the Maddalena, but that’s the meaning. «A chille do terzo munno comme c’‘e miette ‘e scarpe ‘o pere» which means, how do you civilize those of the third world? They’ll do it little by little he says, by cable at first and then with everything else. We neither deny nor confirm: we like to think that those little veils of flimsy paper can make similar or different questions arise.
Then there was Anna, that hangs out in the park before lunch. She walks with a wooden carved bird in her hands, repeating constantly «Comm’è bell’auciello, comm’è bello». She loves to listen to the twitting, that’s why she sits under the medlar tree, where the birds, blackbirds mostly, often rest to taste its fruits.
Veline (which means tissue paper, but also showgirls), twitters, are words that evoke other meanings in the present “technological middle ages” (called by some media ages). Our will of confronting their sounds with our meaning, or if you prefer, their meaning with our sounds made us call Veline the installation that we’re going to inaugurate, along with the summer, on the 21st of June from 16 to 19.30 (the park’s closing time). With us there are going to be Rosanna Salati, a wonderful mezzo-soprano that always looks straight in the eyes, Ciro Riccardi and Bruno Belardi, respectively with the trumpet and the double bass.
At last, just today, we passed by the carpenter that owns the shop right outside the park. We are going to use a board that fell off the fence to make some little paintings. It was long and full of old rusted nails, it looked suffering. That’s why we entered his shop a bit upset and almost shouting «Get this over with: cut its veins!». (cyop&kaf)
