Bn PROJECTS - Maison GREGOIRE

It all started with a late May journey to Caltanissetta. Alessandro and I had been invited to develop a contribution in the framework of the recently opened exhibition project in the Catania’s venue of On the Contemporary - Palazzo Manganelli - Urpflanze des Mittelmeers - curated by the artist Anna Guillot.

Guillot, who has been the initiator leading force behind this catanese free art laboratorium for 7 years, has recently opened an antenna - OTC in the garden - in Caltanissetta, at the ground floor apartment of an historical palazzo opening up onto a lush garden.

On the way, the contemplation of the harsh yet magnificent Sicilian landscapes elicited in us the reminiscence of Dino Buzzati’s « Deserto dei Tartari ». A feeling of « limes », and frontier, whilst paradoxically approaching the very center of Sicily.

We arrived in the early afternoon : The town was, Sicilian style, at this hour of day, almost empty but for an impressive number of male subsaharian migrants, « extra-comunitari » as they are called by euphemism in Italy. The concentration for such a small town was particularly striking.

A direct explanation for this observation lies in the fact that Caltanissetta houses in its immediate vicinity - at Pian del Lago - one of the main asylum centers in Sicily, The center, combining the three typologies of the genre, is strategically placed in a former powder factory, a witness of the former and now decayed industrial glory of this once prosperous mining city.

Indeed, Caltanissetta’s city center displays in its architecture many testimonies of a former grandeur and prosperity which made it one of the most industrious cities in the reign of the Two-Sicilies, before Italian unification. The area of Caltanissetta was particularly known and prosperous for its sulfur-mining industry, the « zolfatare » where many poor uneducated children (the « carusi » in Sicilian) were working at the risk of their lives under the bowels of the earth.

It naturally came to us that the show would and should revolve about this idea of non visibility, of meta- infra-visibility or, rather, of invisibilization of these two prominent, yet partially covered up aspects of the past and of contemporary socio-economic history of Caltanissetta.

The title of the exhibition, « Won’t you not see ? » subverts the common idiomatic invitation to notice something in English, thus acting, conversely, as a metaphor for the efforts often displayed by social forces to cover up critical facts and challenging realities.

Alessandro Costanzo comes up here with « Oscuru » (i.e. dark in Sicilian language), a series of sculptural installations linking in a dialectical way the interior of the venue with its exterior, the lush and semi-wild and abandoned garden. As raw material for his sculptures, he used a mixed agglomerate stone combining limestone, marl and chalk, which he found in the abandoned « zolfatare ». The raw stones have been partially cut and severed so as to allow the obliterated or forgotten voices of Caltanissetta to emerge and be heard.

Costanzo managed to interview several former « carusi » who survived the decay of the « zolfatare », alongside migrants, whom he asked to evoke the obscure and dark moments of the long journey that brought them to Sicily and, eventually, to Caltanissetta, where most of them await their fate to be sealed (accepted or sent back to their countries of origin). These latter interviews are recorded in « broken » Italian and in their original mother tongues (wolof/ pulaar). The recordings are integrated to / emerge in a feable yet resilient way from the stone sculptures which stand out out as odd appendices to elements of this bourgeois domestic space (its dining table, the sofa, the door to the kitchen..).

The biggest « stone / speaking sculpture » is placed in the garden, as if the voice from Caltanissetta’s bowels and obliterated recent past was re-emerging from the ground.

For some years now, Anna Guillot’s practice has been investigating the potential of genealogy as an epiphanic catalyst and prism to explore the present. This is what she has also elaborated, if in a lateral way, for « Won’t you not see ? Chapter C ». Starting point of her installation « Nucleus (Cor) » is a research around the writings and areas of investigation of her own father who was an author and researcher in agrarian sciences for ICE - I.

Textual printed and autograph material around agrarian sciences, botanic biology, physics chemistry and maths form therefore here the base of the installation which, as often in Anna Guillot’s work, finds a further expanded aesthetic and conceptual articulation through a film projection centered on photosynthesis, giving a dual interpretation for the title of the installation putting thus nature and its autogenerative processes on a par with the fatherly figure.

The conceptual hybridization at work in anna guillot’s proposal finds also a visual metaphoric resolution in the way notes, fragments, images are inserted and integrated in the projection.

Responding in its specific way to the red thread of the exhibition, the unearthing process of the rhysomatic associative intertextual approach dear to anna Guillot leads to unveil ancestral and primordial characters all too often relegated in oblivion.

Emmanuel Lambion

Opening Saturday 21 September 2024, 6 p.m.

Palazzo Mazzone-Alessi
Via Camillo Benso conte di Cavour, 29
I- 93100 Caltanissetta

Promoted by On the Contemporary —in the Garden, Koobook Archive
With the support of Comune di Caltanissetta, torronificio Geraci, Balloon project