What value and role can be attributed to roots and traditions in today’s world? In what language and form can they be translated in the present day, to enable their force and substance to nurture contemporary actions and choices? These are some of the questions around which my work as an artist and cultural operator evolves.
My research evolves within a continuous oscillation between two geographical and semantic poles: the rural and peripheral areas of my homeland, the North Italian region of Veneto, and certain global cities I stay in several months a year, mainly San Paolo in Brazil. They correspond to two different temporalities, the former deeply rooted in the land, typical of the way in which work was experienced and interpreted until a relatively recent past, abruptly replaced by the other, which starting from the advent of industry and technology, has radically transformed our present. My work consists in an on-going superimposition of elements deriving from these two contexts, which are played one against the other in an attempt to scrape the surfaces of the crystallizations and barriers that separate them and to enable a new perception of each.
A criticism of the linear concept of history is central to this process and takes the form of a keen interest in the past, which reemerges, not in the way of repetition or conservatism but rather as anachronism, as a matrix, an archetype whose renewed form is vital and generative.
The departure point, which is then condensed in the perception of the “global man”, is represented by the horizons demeaned by the temporality of capitalism, things considered to be “unimportant”, such as rubble, ruins, stories of peripheral and marginalized communities, which are subject to a fresh interpretation and metamorphosis to become opportunities for generating discussion, a new equilibrium, a new construction of meaning.
Alongside my work as a visual artist, backed up by the firm belief that art has the power to develop communities, in 2015 I founded the Humus Interdisciplinary Residence, an interdisciplinary platform which, in an on-going dialogue with local and international entities, organizes artistic exchanges, inviting artists to execute their own interpretations of the rural areas of Veneto through contemporary art.