Alchemy of the soul. The polyphonic installation by Alice Schivardi on display.
Six personal real-life stories, six private episodes have been wrote down and donated to the artist. This is both the point of departure and arrival of Equazione Uno – the polyphonic installation by Alice Schivardi, that Gallery Apart in Rome hosts in which the different stories intertwine.
Her interest in collecting stories, in establishing human relationships, has been driving Alice’s artistic path since the very beginning of her career, leading her towards an inner pursuit of the other as well as of the self which opens to the universe, revealed in the most troublesome moments of the life, when the social construct leaves room to the instinctive emotionality. The stories that Alice has collected over the years are returned to the world through works that employ different techniques and **which, based on her insight and genius, take different shapes: photography, videos, performance, drawing, embroidery and sound, such as the one that structures and completes the installation currently on display.
The six stories that compose Equazione Uno are told by voices that are ‘different’ from those of their authors. Recorded on a magnetic tape, they are played simultaneously through a number of loudspeakers scattered throughout the exhibition space. Sinusoidal sounds, that is sounds which stand out for producing pure sounding tones, composed in collaboration with the Italian maestro Giacomo Del Colle Lauri Volpi, overlap and interweave with each voice in order to create, Alice says, “an acoustic illusion that becomes echo even before voice of the self.”
The visual aspect of the work provides a counterpoint to the multifaceted sound component : in the artwork A Immagine e Somiglianza, images and universal symbols inspired to the stories unfold on a sheet of acetate paper – chosen because of its transparency – which runs along the perimeter of the gallery for 12 metres. Six works fitted into oval frames – a shape that has always been dear to the artist as it evokes the memory of the past as well as the cycle of life – close and open the exhibit.
The drawings, which are partly embroidered, immediately catch the visitors’ eye, plunging into a poetic world, thus saving them from the overwhelming impact of the opening sounds and the murmur of voices. Hence, within the visual component, a parallel sound aspect reveals itself, an ‘emotional feeling’ revived by the images, also tuned to the continuity of the single sheet and the narrative autonomy of each representation. The embroidery, which traces some of the contours of each drawing, featuring some hanging threads, becomes the primary link between the things, between the artists and the stories, between the art-making process and the finished art work.
The concept of time is also parallel and balanced, hectic and modern in the simultaneity of transmission, slackened and old in the poetry of the drawing that relieves the subject from the tension and frames it again with its fair pauses, even those that are necessary for the embroidery activity that involves physical effort, precision and reflection. The transparency of the paper reveals the embroideries which, on the impulse of an emotional and ancestral need, are partly knitted on the back of the paper thus overlapping the front image.
Hence, the work becomes an introspective investigation that from the individual rejoins the universe. The art-making process, the matter, such as the resin of the oval frames made and painted by the artist herself, the physical effort, is all part of a research, which does not end with the finished work, on the contrary, it continues in the beholder’s heartstrings that the sounds and the images make resonate.
Everything is intertwined. The overlap of words, images and sounds can be isolated and reassembled in a choral and universal story in which the beholder is called upon to participate as a vital component. As the visitor comes close to each loudspeaker, the humming sound of the overlapping stories dies down, the words pronounced by the voices are now distinguishable, the tales finally take shape and, in their intersection with the pure sounds, they find their first universal value.
Everything, therefore, is placed on the same level: the stories, their authors, the performers telling the stories, the artist, the words, the sounds, the orality, the writing, the content, the materials, the science, the art, the rationality, the emotionality, the plain and the purl stitch, the positive and the negative. Several variations of the subject that build to parallel stories, everything is balanced and homogeneous based on an equity that easily evokes the work’s title, Equazione Uno (Equation One, TN). Equation is a term also used in physics to calculate the ‘propagation of the waves’, a pictures that perfectly suggests the backward and forward movement made by the alternation of actions, of giving and receiving and the moment of its propagation: the stories are donated to the artist who receives and examines them, works them out to give them back to the world where they rejoin the planetary entity. Unfortunately, I don’t have here enough space to detail the content of the images. In each beholder such images will evoke, by empathy, different suggestions and memories. Everyone has the right to have their own free imaginary world so that the game of synesthetic correspondences – which Alice’s work sparks off – can accomplish its task.
Equation is a word of Latin derivation, “aequatione”, literally “equality” (from the Great Italian Dictionary of Use edited by Tullio de Mauro, UTET, Milan 1999)
E. G. Rossi
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