IN THE FRAME OF ÀMINA

From Sardegna to New York, and back

di Fabio Acca

Valeria Orani is a pragmatic and visionary woman. From New York, where she lives and works, she has been engaged for several years, among other things, in a journey to enhance and internationalize Italian theatrical culture in the United States, with a constant focus on her homeland, Sardinia. We have known each other for a long time, but our professional lives have never intersected until now: I have been too busy following the research of radical artists, which is not an easy task, and she has been too occupied with finding a delicate balance between the demands of art and those of the market. However, Valeria is also a determined and generous person. With the passion that has always distinguished her, she shares a belief in the common conviction that working on tradition, in this case insular tradition, does not necessarily mean showcasing the sacred symbols of Sardinian art in a folkloric manner. Rather, it means reviving the universal principles of culture as ancient as it is deeply rooted in the collective imagination, to once again uncover the necessary and original incandescence that, even today, although transformed, resonates with every soul, regardless of latitude.

With these premises, Valeria involves me in the conception of a project to be presented by 2018 within the framework of the IdentityLab 2020 call issued by the Region of Sardinia, aimed at enhancing and internationalizing, from an identity perspective, the production - not only cultural - of Sardinia. She in New York, me in Bologna, after exhausting online brainstorming sessions in front of our respective computers, Àmina begins to take shape. The idea, in some ways, is simple and, to some extent, relates to our individual biographies. What does it mean for an artist to be born in Sardinia? As a custodian of language, what signs, what matrices, do they carry with them when they leave their homeland and settle in another land, another country, another culture? What kind of transformation do these matrices undergo? And when they return to the land that bore them, have they transformed their roots into something that still resonates? How can they authentically convey them in a way that can resonate with others, for an entire community?

These questions, during the conception phase, resonate with Giorgio Agamben's famous pamphlet "What is the contemporary?" One of the most cited - and most trivialized, in many ways - texts when attempting to solve with a catchy slogan the eternal dilemma surrounding the definition of the present. Usually, the most eagerly quoted phrase is "Contemporary is the one who receives in full the beam of darkness that comes from his time." But what is this mysterious "beam of darkness" that Agamben talks about? He tells us a few pages later, that it is "a light that, directed towards us, infinitely moves away from us," a "secret rendezvous between the archaic and the modern," for which "the avant-garde, lost in time, pursues the primitive and the archaic [...] to be contemporary not only with our time and the 'now', but also with its figures in the texts and documents of the past." In other words, the "contemporary" corresponds to what Nietzsche already defined as "the untimely." That is to say, someone is authentically contemporary and does not entirely coincide with their own time, is not in conformity with it, nor does it adapt to its demands or trends, and therefore, in this sense, is untimely. But precisely because of this, precisely through this gap and paradoxical, anachronistic twist, they are more capable than others of grasping its meaning and contradictions.

This conceptual and "dark" suggestion thus becomes the axis on which all of Àmina's projectuality is based: an unexpected journey of return and departure, both geographical and temporal, among some ancestral forms that regulate the identity heritage - let's call it the soul - of Sardinia. "Àmina," in fact, in Sardinian means "Soul." A word that immediately suggests something deep and authentic, but at the same time, in its palindromic dynamic, invites us to move among its letters, to "dance in reverse," as Antonin Artaud would say, to grasp its meaning. The search for this "Sardinian soul" is, however, reversed onto the present, to regenerate the ancestral forms underlying the journey in a contemporary key, thus restoring a perception that can testify to its universality. The paradox, in short, is evoked by "tradition," which demands a noble "betrayal" so that the immortal value of the origin can remain alive and vital.

If the temporal gap, from an ideational point of view, becomes increasingly stringent, the geographical one presses in an equally precise direction. Precisely New York City, the epitome, also symbolically, of the contradictory values of the contemporary, constitutes a pole of attraction to which one cannot remain indifferent, also by virtue of the concrete opportunities for project elaboration determined by Valeria's longstanding presence in that world city. From Sardinia to New York, and back, thus becomes not only a mythical image of a journey for the project but a model of work, a concrete opportunity for application inspired by the transformative trajectories conceived in the previous phase. A journey articulated in three stages. The first (the origin), in Sardinia, as design and identification of an action connected both to the production of the involved artists and to forms of insular cultural tradition; the second (the journey), in New York, as a research residence aimed at studying and experimenting with the action in relation to contemporary culture; and finally, the third (the return), back in Sardinia, as restitution in the form of artistic intervention in the landscape and in some evocative places linked to archaic themes. Three distinct moments, dedicated primarily to artistic elaboration, but also to meetings, relationships, and contexts of public sharing that can generate interest, consensus, and potential revitalization by public and private entities. In particular, the third and final stage in Sardinia is configured as a real sharing for the benefit of a targeted group of international cultural operators, specifically selected and involved due to their potential investment in artists and the territory.

Artists capable of operating in such a dynamic must be identified based on decidedly particular characteristics. First of all, they must be natives, born and raised, not only artistically, in Sardinia. They must carry on their body, in their condition of existence, the traits or memory of an original cultural belonging. Secondly, from a disciplinary point of view, they must be able to move freely, in an amphibious manner, among languages, in that sphere of project liquidity that characterizes the contemporary art of the present and that has its most effective synthesis in the wide spectrum of the "performative": without dogmatic aesthetic or disciplinary provisions and with a strong predisposition to the relational dimension. A third element, equally important and indispensable, is that while being attributable to Sardinian artistic heritage, they must not be in any way subservient to it. In other words, they must have already experienced the sense of uprooting of those who leave their land, to favor through their artistic action new connections and contaminations with other and different cultures.
An intricate analysis, therefore, driven by the curatorial determination of the author, soon leads to the idea of involving Maurizio Saiu, Alessandro Carboni, and Cristian Chironi. These are vastly different figures, yet they are united by a body of work in which traces of their original culture coexist in admirable balance with contemporary accelerations dictated by constant engagement with an international context. Each of them can be considered an excellence in the field of experimenting with languages in which artistic action summons the presence of the body, in a dynamic that becomes a threshold and disciplinary synthesis, spanning visual arts, plastic installations, performances, choreographic, and musical arts, traversed with varying degrees of intensity and gradients.

Maurizio Saiu: con Maria dopo Maria

Alessandro Carboni: testo e contesto

Cristian Chironi: un camaleonte

Post-scriptum

The third and final section of the project, originally conceived as an artistic intervention in the landscape of Sardinia and in some of its evocative locations linked to themes of the archaic, was initially aimed at a group of international cultural operators, specifically selected and involved due to their potential investment in artists and the territory. However, due to the Covid-19 pandemic that dramatically affected communities worldwide since 2020, it became necessary to swiftly change the project and reshape the intervention, specifically considering its cinematic fruition.

Hence, the creation of three short documentaries curated by Fabio Acca: "Contèx-ere," focusing on the experience of Alessandro Carboni; "Camaleonte," on that of Cristian Chironi; and "C’è ancora un filo di luce nel mio cielo," on Maurizio Saiu's experience. These are not strictly "works" in the traditional sense, but rather notes that, despite their aim to document an extraordinary experience, they also embrace an authorial impulse from both the artists and the curator. In this way, one of the main objectives of the project was preserved, namely the possibility, through subtitled film products, of disseminating and internationalizing a journey that places at its core the process of transformation and contamination of the original culture into a collective resource that can be interpreted anywhere in the world.

I would like to take this opportunity to remember and thank all those who contributed to the realization of the three short documentaries from September 2020 (when the artists' interventions in Sardinia took place) to May 2022 (the last days of film editing), and who, due to narrative coherence, have not been included in the story thus far: Paolo Carboni, Andrea Cannas, and Edoardo Matacena (camerawork); Davide Dal Padullo (editing); Michele Boreggi (audio post-production). A special thanks, finally, to Raffaella Mascia (production manager), whose care, perspective, and sensitivity always made very difficult things easy for all of us.