Vincenzo Cabiati

Vincenzo Cabiati, Carbone

Rossana Campo

Rossana Campo, Le bambine albisolesi  1

Rossana Campo, Le bambine albisolesi  2

Rossana Campo, Le bambine albisolesi  3

Rossana Campo, Le bambine albisolesi  4

Rossana Campo, Le bambine albisolesi  5

Rossana Campo, Le bambine albisolesi  6

Rossana Campo, Le bambine albisolesi  7

So what am I doing at the Biennale of Ceramics?

The route’s the same; it’s just that I’ve been doing it backwards: as a child I lived in Piazza della Libertà, right in front of the Albisola Superiore’s Town Hall. I’d leave home in the mornings dazed and confused (I’ve always had trouble rejoining the world, especially early in the morning), and with my satchel over my shoulder I’d head across the village. I’d stop and buy a focaccia from the Pescetto bakery (run by the family of my classmate Riccardo, aka Ricchi) and then dawdle across the gardens surrounding Villa Gavotti before finally going into school (the school overlooked the autostrada and was behind the Bar Mara and the Studio Ernan Design). I’d meet up with my friend Damiano Rossello and various other classmates. Damiano and I got along really well, we both liked clowning around and we liked doing impressions of our classmates or the comics on TV. We loved doing Cochi and Renato, the duo who sung E la vita l’é bela. Damiano was really something of a star in drawing and once on my birthday he gave me an incredible red and brown ceramic mushroom that I kept on my bedside table for goodness knows how many years. Now we’re in 2003 and a fair few years have passed; damn it, it’s over thirty and Roberto Costantino has invited me to participate in the Biennale of Ceramics in Contemporary Art at Albisola and… well, it’s a nice coincidence. Something with a bit of magic about it. That’s right, because I immediately found myself following the same route (albeit backwards) that I followed as a kid to go to school. Now in the mornings (still with a certain difficulty in getting started) I leave my hotel near the motorway, cross the gardens surrounding Villa Gavotti, buy a focaccia from the Pescetto bakery (Ricchi’s there now) and go to meet Damiano Rossello in his workshop.
Quite apart from these coincidences, I would like to explain just why there’s something magical about all this for me. After having written a number of novels (seven to be precise), I took up painting. Not having attended art school of any kind and not having been much good at drawing even in primary school, it seemed like a major challenge, one that gave me the sensation of putting myself on the line once again and exploring new territories. I began working on large canvases with oil paints and pastels and I liked using the language of colours, of the hands, of gestures, of that which escapes rational control and the shells that begin to form as we move away from our childhood (and from the charge of emotions, grief, absolute joy and profound unhappiness that it entails). At times I’d ask myself what on earth I was doing? but then there were the works and words of the painters I’ve always loved, Dubuffet and Asger Jorn for example (and how about that for another coincidence, a painter who lived at Albisola for many years!), and the sense of freedom and openness to new possibilities that their works have always given me so I kept on painting and connecting up with my infantile, undomesticated side, the living, clumsy side of life (of my life). In short, painting makes me feel pleasantly insecure, unprofessional, not “adult.” For this reason, when I received Roberto Costantino’s invitation there really seemed to be something magical about it, because I could venture still further along this path and tackle that thing that my old friend Damiano Rossello did so well as a kid, that rather magical thing that consisted of giving form to earth and filing it with colour. And do so in Albisola, where I spent my childhood. So, when in the mornings I used to go out to make ceramics I felt I was finally getting in touch with something that had been there for some time and was ready to emerge and have its say. And that, now, I’d like not to abandon and not to forget.

Rossana Campo

Carlos Carlé

Carlos Carlé, Wall

Mauro Castellano and Leonardo Gensini

Leonardo Gensini, Preliminary drawing for the ceramic work 1

Leonardo Gensini, Preliminary drawing for the ceramic work 2

Leonardo Gensini, Preliminary drawing for the ceramic work 3

Leonardo Gensini, Madreforma

Leonardo Gensini, Madreforma

Motherform

The ceramicist has unusual fingers, as sensitive as those of a musician. He has the idea of clay in his head from when he begins to blend, wet, dig, scratch and model the soft, damp material. He gets his hands dirty.
His touch changes, delicate yet still mute, when the dry clay becomes fragile, unpredictably fragile. Then the fire that hardens renders the material strong and vibrant and forges a very different fragility. It requires yet another touch, a ringing fragility. The craftsman truly senses the integrity of the manufacture only when he skilfully plays it and makes it ring at length.
The acid sound of ceramics is, however, known to us all through the daily use to which we put the material. It’s a familiar sound, an archaic, primordial contact, as natural as the sound of water. Ceramics that wants to make itself heard in its forms of us. Keras that contains and protects.

Leonardo Gensini

Mauro Castellano, Brief Return Waves (piano figures). Transcription for pianoforte of the sounds of the ceramics by Leonardo Gensini

Mauro Castellano, Brief Return Waves (piano figures). Transcription for pianoforte of the sounds of the ceramics by Leonardo Gensini, 2, 3

Mauro Castellano, Brief Return Waves (piano figures). Transcription for pianoforte of the sounds of the ceramics by Leonardo Gensini, 4, 5

Mauro Castellano, Brief Return Waves (piano figures). Transcription for pianoforte of the sounds of the ceramics by Leonardo Gensini, 6, 7

I have recently seen stunning new cymbals and percussion instruments created on Leonardo Gensini’s wheel that, struck and left to vibrate, release wonderful resonances into the air. These ceramic sounds had colours — a musician frequently sees colours in sounds — similar to the “bells over the calm lake of memories” (De Pisis), memories that for me are the bells of Venice, similar to my research into piano resonances.

Mauro Castellano

Giuseppe Chiari

Giuseppe Chiari, Pezzo per pianoforte e ceramica

Giuseppe Chiari, Drawing for Piece for Piano and Ceramics

Giuseppe Chiari, Drawing for Piece for Piano and Ceramics

Giuseppe Chiari, Pezzo per pianoforte e ceramica

Giuseppe Chiari, Pezzo per pianoforte e ceramica

Giuseppe Chiari, Pezzo per pianoforte e ceramica

Giuseppe Chiari, Pezzo per pianoforte e ceramica

Piece for piano and ceramics

I’M HERE IN A CHAIR AMONG THE MANY LINED UP IN THIS LARGE HALL.
IN FRONT OF ME, FAR AWAY, ABOUT ONE METRE HIGHER, ARE 50-60 PEOPLE DRESSED IN BLACK.
EACH ONE IS PLAYING A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT.
THEIR COLLECTIVE PLAYING IS ORGANISED.
SHEET MUSIC OPEN IN FRONT OF EACH MUSICIAN GIVES DIRECTIONS.
A MAN STANDING IN THE CENTRE, 30 CM HIGHER, MAKES GESTURES THAT SET THE RHYTHM.

MUSIC.
WHY ALL THIS?

Giuseppe Chiari

Nicola Cisternino

Nicola Cisternino, A-naì-lí-sˆu (Lettera al proprio Dio)  1

Nicola Cisternino, A-naì-lí-sˆu (Lettera al proprio Dio)  2

Nicola Cisternino, A-naì-lí-sˆu (Lettera al proprio Dio)  3

Nicola Cisternino, A-naì-lí-sˆu (Lettera al proprio Dio)  4

Nicola Cisternino, A-naì-lí-sˆu (Lettera al proprio Dio)  5

Prayer for Baghdad

a-naì-lí-sˆu (Letter to one’s God)
...Because it is in prayer that God weaves the threads of our fraternity: those between spouses, between parents with children, between brothers and sisters; even between brothers of faith and brothers of no faith, or between brothers of different faiths. Because the confines of the man of prayer are the confines of God, i.e. there are no confines. If in fact we have the spirit of prayer: because we then have the Holy Spirit of God within us, to suffer with sublime suffering, to pray for us, to initiate our very desire and to complete it. This spirit that soars above the abyss...                               
(David Maria Turoldo)

One afternoon I was reading the book Prayer as battle by Father Turoldo that for too many months had been waiting to be opened, preparing to give substance to the idea-project of a Prayer for Baghdad as requested by my friend and Bussottonian classmate Mauro Castellano, for the Biennale of Ceramics in Contemporary Art, when (terribly bitter…) comments and observations spewed from the radio to the effect that in the wicked (but planned and to what extent?) plunder of the “liberated” Baghdad nothing was being done to stop the looting of the famous Archaeological Museum. If smart bombs ever reached the atrocious dictator targeted for elimination, far more destructive bombs, in the bellies and caverns of history and memory, were reaching the very heart of the land of Uruk, of the city of Ur, of Babylonia, in today’s absolute “non-consciousness.” Who knows if the scribes of the cuneiform writing of the past — in fact, the actual invention of writing — had ever imagined that what they were promulgating to the humanity of the future, one day would never be able to be used at all against the constantly renewed “barbarians” of all time. Emotional and certainly shocking associations that leave a bitter aftertaste. In that same radio program, a famous Italian archaeologist who had worked very closely with those archaeological sites said: “…unfortunately, the so-called ‘smart’ bombs probably do exist but there certainly aren’t any ‘cultured’ bombs.”
A-naì-lí-sˆu (Letter to one’s God) is a composition-installation for piano (meaning Mauro Castellano’s, to whom it is “fraternally” dedicated), sand (a lot), monitors and “stone scores,” the latter made with terracotta in workshops and with the indispensable assistance of the skilled ceramic masters of Albisola, and that follows on, naturally, from my creation over the last few years of the Tibetan Prayers. Prayer as a “vibrant entity” and infinitesimal part of our intimate divinity, as we are taught by the ancient Tibetan Lama texts, and first and foremost by the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
A-naì-lí-sˆu (Letter to one’s God) is the name of a 7x5.6 cm terracotta recipient-envelope (currently of Louise Michail’s famous collection of cuneiform tablets) of unknown origin from the Paleo-Babylonian period, that contains a still well-sealed (not all “messages” are meant to be read) and just as small “illegible” tablet, illegible like the name of God according to the teachings of the Torah.
For many years I had hoped to create some of my Sound Graffiti scores — the writings with which my compositional research can be easily recognised from its very beginnings — on stone (certainly the most appropriate material); I made only two small experiments on slate tablets “taken” from the island of Saint Michel a few years ago.
In this case, the cuneiform alphabet is freely used to transform it from the visual dimension of the “reading” to the sound dimension, that original one of the “Word,” to make it linear writing – beyond any notational simulacra — i.e. a transition of thought and action of the act of the imagination and listening (Absolute Silence) to a manifestation of sound (Music and Singing).
A-naì-lí-sˆu (Letter to one’s God) can be performed only in the concert version (the “tablets” as a score) or in its “complete” traditional concert-installation version based on the following actions:
a) in a scene full of sand there is, in the centre, a piano under which fragments of 4 terracotta tablets (a good portion of which are buried in the sand) are sticking out from the small dunes. The same number of monitors (4), semi-buried in the sand, are located around and not very far away from the piano. A child (5-6 years old) or — as an alternative, the actor who in this case moves around the instrument — is playing under the piano and discovers the “tablets.” The first one (and so on) is offered to the pianist when he arrives; the pianist puts the tablet on the podium and performs the composition.
b) A few seconds after the beginning, the first monitor turns on to display the image of the typical “snowy static” (the dots are, however, the colour of the sand, like grains…); gradually, as the composition is played, the “pulverised” image condenses into that of the tablet… and remains fixed.
c) At the end of the performance of the four “tablet-scores,” the monitors (which have also become “tablets”) that have gradually been “activated,” remain on with a shot of the tablets in the gradual and complete darkness of the hall.

Nicola Cisternino

Plamen Dejanoff

Plamen Dejanoff, Il volto felice della globalizzazione (fatto ad Albisola)  1

Plamen Dejanoff, Il volto felice della globalizzazione (fatto ad Albisola)  2

Plamen Dejanoff, Il volto felice della globalizzazione (fatto ad Albisola)  3

Trisha Donnelly

Trisha Donnelly, Untitled

Rachmaninoff

The yelling in the studio was not at me. It was normal. And Caruso only sang to eat. But he sang and sang.
And that gave you the background to think. And listen. And to realize that a studio is a studio is a studio. I don’t even have a studio. Mine is in the library or as a passenger. But it’s the same feeling. The noise that work makes should not be bothered. But it can be if you want.
Thinking is working. And time makes time for both.
And no radio played. Sometimes the TV showed cycling (which seems so funny to watch). And sometimes visitors would stop by and talk briefly to Giovanni or Matteo or Silvana or Piero. Short sentences. Lots of nods and folded arms.  But for the most part, the sounds of someone slapping the air out of the clay and the wet wheel dripping out mud.
And I get to know the history, in rapid lessons. Filtered through Simona.  The plates on the walls. The compressed past of San Giorgio Ceramiche. The photo of Giovanni Poggi with Wifredo Lam is framed just like the picture of Poggi with the Pope just like the picture of Poggi with the cyclist.
All is even. And wonderful. And regular.  All at the same time.
In Albisola trompe l’oeil panels frame windows and doors. Leaning cherubs and elaborately marbled dormers. Tiziana told me that at a time when marble and stone could not be afforded artisans used trompe l’oeil to decorate the buildings. Referenced precision. 3 dimensions into 2.
This is it. The dumb answer to the dumb question. That work is in the observation. That the attempt is it. That time and perspective are the handlers of value.
But whatever.
Everyone already knows all this.
So I say to Poggi: “This thing will make the tiniest sound within Rachmaninoff.”
And he says (in Italian): “Seven bells for seven notes. Yes.”
And I nod.
And he nods.
And Alberto listens to Lou Reed’s Ecstasy in his car.
And Caruso is now in the freezer. With the other birds.
And when I get back home I send them some prunes from California.

Untitled, 2003

Small ceramic device to be fit inside of the body of the piano. To be used only with Rachmaninoff. When the darkest moments of the composition are reached, the bells will ring.
A high distance from the depht.

Trisha Donnelly

Wang Du

Wang Du, Tapis du piéton (serie 1-a)

Carpet

For me, the ceramic medium is just one possible form of expression in the world of art. This is a material used not only for pragmatic motives and decoration but also for conceptual reasons, just like video and film. You can utilize it and you can change it, but when the copulative relation has taken place between the clay and your concept it releases its exceptional latent energy.

Wang Du

Sylvie Fleury

Sylvie Fleury, Fountain

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