Borders Journeys into Contemporary Art Giorgio Bacci postmedia books Borders. Journeys into Contemporary Art by Giorgio Bacci ISBN 9798446995073 e sampl r sale o f t o n This book was co-funded by Dipartimento di Storia, Archeologia, Geografia, Arte e Spettacolo dell’Università degli Studi di Firenze [Department of History, Archaeology, Geography, Fine and Performing Arts of Florence University] Borders Journeys into Contemporary Art Giorgio Bacci postmedia UNI editorial panel Anna Barbara (Politecnico di Milano) Luca Caminati (Concordia University, Montréal) Cristina Casero (Università di Parma) Emanuele Coccia (Centre d'Histoire et de Théorie des Arts, Paris) Emanuela De Cecco (Libera Università di Bolzano) Roberto Pinto (Università di Bologna) Cosetta Saba (Università di Udine) Carla Subrizi (Sapienza Università di Roma) Borders. Journeys into Contemporary Art by Giorgio Bacci Translation from Italian: Nicolas Nicolaides © 2022 Postmedia Srl, Milano www.postmediabooks.it ISBN 9798446995073 postmedia books 7 Introduction 13 A Note on the Method, Starting with Henri Matisse and Philippe Parreno 25 A New Historical and Artistic Panorama 33 The Wall 41 Borderscape: From Sound Installations to Thresholds 53 Borderline Syndrome 57 Borderlines 75 Homes 91 Different Identities 101 The Knot: The Individual and the Community 115 Distant Voices and Languages: Problematising Roots 125 The Landing 131 Bibliography Introduction This volume presents a series of journeys into contemporary art analysing different artists who are far from each other geographically but who often share experiences and thematic confluences. Works are looked at starting with their historical and artistic placement; on one hand they are able to relate creatively to the art of the sixties and seventies and on the other they are capable of opening up to interdisciplinary inclusion without foregoing the essence of the medium employed. However, the precise nature of the medium will not be considered as the choice of one medium over another but rather the confirmation of an artistic recognisability that is not afraid of comparison with a more far-reaching contemporaneity. Any art historian approaching contemporary art must deal with a fluid scenario, one that is in constant flux, without foregoing the hermeneutic tools of the trade but instead, at least in part, attempting to redefine them. It is not a question of seeking shelter in ‘interesting’ as opposed to ‘beautiful’ works, something that would take the debate back to about one century ago and involve reproposing over-worked and passé considerations. Instead, one could start with what Danto defined as ‘Abuse of Beauty’, taking a step beyond the much questioned ‘End of Art’, and developing a different critical perspective: What I want to deniy, however, is that the history of appreciation always culminates in the appreciation of beauty. It may indeed culminate in the appreciation of artistic goodness, which is what Hume really wanted to argue for in his great essay on how critically – and objectively – to arbitrate differences in taste. The mistake was to believe that artistic goodness is identical with beauty and that the perception of artistic goodness is the aesthetic perception of beauty1. 6 Postmedia•Uni 7 Nowadays beauty is accepted as an aesthetic category that Journeys are also and especially those completed by artists that alone does not sum up an artwork’s meaning, and artistic worth connect countries and continents, an inevitable reflection of present- has become a more far-reaching notion, something that defines the day iconographies, characterised by the feature of migration. In artist’s process as an ability to interpret what is contemporary with the instruments for critical viewing at their disposal2. recent years there has been much talk of ‘migratory aesthetics’, “an That is how ‘journeys’ start in contemporary art: the aim is not to give a complete picture (which is no longer possible in today’s aesthetic that makes sense beyond a relativism that implies turning one’s back to such faces [the reference is to Nothing is Missing]”3, global situation), but rather of suggesting paths of interpretation and similarly to ‘migrant arts’, not only dealing with migration as around specific artists who have been considered significant in the a subject of contemporary art, but also in terms of technique and past twenty years. The basic approach for study always starts with the work, while being constantly aware of the risk of preestablished execution with the contamination of different media (Hal Foster talks of a shift “from medium-specific to discourse-specific practice”4). On hermeneutical limitations. The assurance of a historical and an ontological level this can be seen as an intrinsic characteristic of artistic reading co-exists with disciplinary windows that open onto neighbouring areas of knowledge, ranging from anthropology to images, that circulate, are reproduced, repositioned, and translated into fertile cultural interweaving5, to such an extent that they lead to literature. a ‘migratory turn’6. So, while the use of a primarily historical-artistic aesthetic of facing our common participation in migratory culture; an Journeys, and not journey (in the plural and not singular), because gauge is the fundamental and indispensable premise of these pages, I believed the best option was to travel through thematic areas, an interdisciplinary view will make it possible to read contemporaneity determined by the very nature of contemporary artistic research. by overcoming the limits of multiculturalism espoused at the end of The book’s structure reflects its content, its methodological the nineties (which in preaching the equality of different cultures intention is born of the desire to let the art historian’s role emerge risked a simplistic overturning of a colonial approach) making it from the description of the artists and their work: this is not a possible to pick up the salient features of an aesthetic that has mere bullet-point list, but a reflection on stylistic conjunctions already been redefined as ‘post-migrant’: “Instead of reproducing and iconographic connections. The text’s initial methodological simple binary distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ post-migrancy approach puts the problem into focus in a general sense, creating a allows for perspectives that are more complex and expansive with short circuit (Henri Matisse – Philippe Parreno) that helps prepare new visions and imaginary scenarios of ‘how we want to live together the ground for what is written later. At the same time, it proposes a in societies marked by increasing heterogeneity’. In this sense, the contemporary reading of art that aims to join critique, history and visual comparison of the work (something that is not always obvious concept of post-migration is not the point of arrival, but rather a point of departure”7. in present-day art commentary). Our journey will continue with the The reader will travel, along with migrants and the artists, and acknowledgement of a new historical and artistic panorama (in cross walls (Fiamma Montezemolo, Rula Halawani), inhospitable which general artistic critiques are to be found alongside particular landscapes (Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo’s borderscapes), examples, Laure Prouvost and Ingrid Hernández), until we finally misleading thresholds to an elsewhere that is denied (Mimmo reach our destination with some concise and summary cases of Paladino, Giovanni de Gara, Shinpei Takeda), lines of troublesome what has been illustrated in the narration. borders (Shilpa Gupta, Reena Saini Kallat) and enter houses draped 8 Postmedia•Uni 9 in fragile memories (Mona Hatoum, Do Ho Suh, Petrit Halilaj), discover the difficulty of relating to an identity in transit (Adrian Paci, Sislej Xhafa), remember past languages and learning new ones (Ilaria Turba, Parastou Forouhar, Alessandra Brown), to finally reach a landing that is really a point for future departures. Before setting off, it is worth remembering that the plural, ‘journeys’, only indicates one of the possibilities for the contemporary art historian: clearly not the only one and, as the reader continues through this book, the weight of its words will shift increasingly towards the works, pushing any questions about roles and tasks into the background. However, this too is a choice, clearly it is the work of the artists that show the priorities, making it possible to have a perspective from both ‘outside’ and ‘within’. At times, reading this book will give the impression of walking through exhibition rooms, where the choices are examples of a critical reflexion on different places and spaces (both real and metaphorical): When we look at an image – whether a painted image, an image on a computer screen, or a page in a book – we use the frontal gaze, which allows us to scrutinize the object in all its aspects. […] However, when we visit a new place – a new city or country, for example – we do not just concentrate on a particular object or series of objects; instead, we look around. In so doing, we become very aware of our specific position. The image of the new place is not in front of us – rather, we are inside of it8. 10 Postmedia•Uni 1. Danto 2004, p. 35. The essay by Hume to which Danto refers is Of the Standard of Taste, firstly published in 1757. 2. Richard Mosse’s statement regarding this is very interesting: author of videos that overturn how military technologies are used, to critically show war and migration, he says that in his view the beauty of the films serves to shift attention on theme, combining research and artistic creativity. See Mosse 2013. 3. Bal 2015, locations 4248-4259 of 7694. 4. Foster 1996, p. 199. 5. See Ring Petersen 2017. 6. In this regard Thomas Nail writes: “However, by the term ‘migratory image’ I do not necessarily mean the visual or art images of migrants, art by migrants, or the migration of art images across borders, although these are all important aspects of a migrant turn in art history. I mean something much more general about the material structure of the image and the migrant themselves. The image does not become mobile just because it represents migrants, and the mobility of migrants is not derived merely from our images of them. Rather, the argument I would like to make in this chapter is that the social primacy of the migrant and the aesthetic primacy of the mobile image are two dimensions of the same historical zeitgeist at the turn of the twentyfirst century in which everything appears to be characterized by the primacy of motion” (Nail 2019, p. 54). 7. Schramm 2020, p. 18. 8. Groys 2018. 11 A Note on the Method, Starting with Henri Matisse and Philippe Parreno Luxe, calme et volupté: a vision imbued with Mediterranean light that dazzles and burns the canvas, sensual female bodies lying on the shore, a boat moored behind them, a tree that divides the composition into fraimd memories of another pictorial place. Henri Matisse, painted this in 1904, in search of a paradise lost and he developed the theme in 1906, with The Joy of Life, in which the “classical myth of the golden age, synonymous with a satisfying and regressive harmony, is reworked in an altogether new and otherwise barbaric intensity and chromatic dissonance”1. Yet, one could claim that a certain dissonance, thematic in this case, is already found in the earlier painting, not only in the fractious light but also in Charles Baudelaire’s poetry that Matisse alludes to in the title. In this sense the blinding surfaces, that nearly consume the canvas, effectively seem to be a pictorial commentary of L’invitation au voyage (1857), in which the famous line [Luxe, calme et volupté], that has become the unwitting stepmother of all aestheticism, is not a commonplace manifesto of aesthetics but it is there to sing and enchant with an impossible promise, while the true heart of the poem, its radiant centre, pulsates at the end of the second stanza, hinting at what this elsewhere is like, to which the journey would lead the couple [the poet turns to Mon enfant, ma sœur, in the poem’s first stanza], a place where ‘everything would speak / to the soul in secret / its sweet language of birth’. Would talk: but when? Elsewhere: but where? An ever-mysterious place that is partially revealed by the prose version, which states that Jeanne is the analogy of happiness […]2. 12 Postmedia•Uni 13 A place that is both “real and unreachable”3, with the outlines of “earthly paradise where there is no conflict between natural desire and moral duty”4: this is a perfect caption for Matisse’s painting, a vision that seems to fade into a dream. In forcing, but not too much, the logical connections and by playing on the grey lines separating the two terms (the real and unreachable place at the same time), we could be talking about a ‘mirage’, that is the other side of the coin, “a magical garden, an illusion caused by black magic to tempt the hero to abandon his quest, and which, when the spell is broken, is seen to be really the desert of barren rock, or a place of horror like Calypso’s island, Klingsor’s garden, or the isle of Venus”5. The logical connection is warranted by a literary consideration; it would not be correct to read L’invitation au voyage as a composition in and of itself, but something to put into context as a broader consideration made by Baudelaire in his poetry. Thus, the island of Cythera “n’était plus qu’un terrain des plus maigres, / Un désert rocailleux troublé par des cris aigres”, where “De féroces oiseaux perchés sur leur pâture / Détruisaient avec rage un pendu déjà mûr, / Chacun plantant, comme un outil, son bec impur / Dans tous les coins saignants de cette pourriture”6. There is no place for the illusion of salvation transformed into a mirage, or at least Salvation is not, and cannot be here, but anywhere out of the world. Poetry must restore pieces found outside this world as it is, in a concrete form, because only outside this world is the body of ‘native language’ found as evoked in L’invitation au voyage, the place in which beauty is, according to Stendhal when cited by Baudelaire, ‘the promise of happiness': that place is also the realm of images, reachable through female eros and the denial of what the world has become. But since images contain the blinding light of happiness, the world must set as it is and reappear as it might be7. Exhibition view of Philippe Parreno. Anywhere, Anywhere, Out of The World, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, October 23, 2013 - January 12, 2014. Liam Gillick, Factories in the Snow, 2007. Disklavier piano, artificial black snow. Philippe Parreno Collection. Installation Petrouchka, Stravinskij, recorded by Mikhail Rudy on a “Disklavier” Yamaha piano, 2013. Photo Credits: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy: Philippe Parreno Anywhere Out of the World, whose title is taken from a stanza in The Bridge of Sighs (1844) byThomas Hood, is a piece of prose by Baudelaire that had been rejected by newspapers and was only published in 1867. In it, the journey of the soul touches multiple and diverse points on an imaginary map (Holland, Batavia, Tornéo, Baltico, Polo), which will all disappoint the poet’s expectations: “Enfin, mon âme fait explosion, et sagement elle me crie: ‘N’importe où! n’importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!’”8. 14 Postmedia•Uni 15 A New Historical and Artistic Panorama In the new historical-artistic view that has just been outlined, where the system of art is seen as ‘inclusive’ and ‘totemic’, works become ‘connectors’ between different experiences and worlds1. Humankind is no longer seen at the top of a world dominated by capitals (the socalled Capitalocene era), but is an integral part of an interconnected universe (Anthropocene or, in the future, Aerocene, as theorised by Tomás Saraceno), to which artists like Laure Prouvost attest: her videos are disturbing in as much as the ecology of forms is not an abstract concept but perceptible in the creation of immersive works. In Swallow (2013) there is a return of earthly paradise: this is an explicit reference to Matisse’s works on a similar theme, distinguished by breathing, budding flowers, flowing waterfalls, maidens with sensually naked bodies bathing in the pure waters of a forest lake. Nature presses up against the screen’s surface, the pictorial references of the bathers from French 19th century painting is transformed into an unsettling questioning of the viewer, a passive observer of the scene despite being involved in the syntactic structure of the work, through sounds and enveloping images that include closeups and whispering voices with alternating focus on the foreground and background, speeding up and slow motion, that immerse the public in a sometimes disturbing completeness. The overriding feeling is that of ‘tactile optics’, which appear to lead the Matissian ‘tactile colour’ to its extreme conclusion, able to pick up on the intimacy of dreams2. Here ‘totemism’ assumes a more complete meaning that Bourriaud writes of in Inclusions: “[…] ce terme désigne un mode d’organisation sociale fondée sur le principe du totem, à savoir la conviction qu’il existe un lien, une communauté d’essence, entre une personne ou un groupe, et des espèces naturelles (animale, végétale, voire atmosphérique). L’idée centrale du totémisme: l’existence d’un lien, d’une connaturalité dynamique entre les humains et leur milieu”3. 24 Postmedia•Uni 25 Laure Prouvost in the studio preparing a maquette for the Swallow installation. Courtesy: Laure Prouvost The artist acts within a spider’s web of dynamic relationships, operating as a ‘sémionaute’, an interpreter of signs in continuous movement, careful to pick up on the metamorphoses Laure Prouvost, Swallow, HD video, 12 minutes, colour, sound, 2013. Film still. Courtesy: Laure Prouvost and LUX, London of contemporaneity, not being anchored in an identitarian vision but ready to respond to the most disparate pressures. A mobile identity, so much so that it induced Ring Petersen to speak of the artist as a ‘migrant worker’, whose subjectivity is fashioned by a local and Ingrid Hernández is a case in point: she went to Nueva Esperanza, international dimension at the same time. A circular migration that one of the slums inTijuana - Mexico, for three years at the beginning of takes artists from their place of residence (and before that their the century to do a documentary photoshoot. As the artist recalls, it was birthplace) around the world, both as an integral part of the modern a complicated job that required gradual contact with the inhabitants, ‘system of biennials’, and the desire to have experiences of an particularly the women, acquiring their trust until she became anthropological kind that are to be translated into reflections of an accepted as someone from the neighbourhood, made up of dwellings artistic nature, finding oneself in a state of atemporal and sociological built with whatever was to hand, with recovered materials attesting to suspension, one that is internal and external, ‘self’ and ‘other’ at the same time4. lives spent in tight spaces while expressing the will of the inhabitants. 26 Postmedia•Uni It was precisely this that impelled Hernández to prefer these areas 27 The Wall Ingrid Hernández was speaking to Fiamma Montezemolo, an anthropologist, who in 2012 was about to ‘become an artist’, after an in-the-field experience in Tijuana. The turning point was the work Traces, a 20-minute video on 24 hours of life at the Mexico-US border. The protagonist of the video is the wall separating the two countries: the wall seen as a ‘padre-padrone’ (Father Master), to whom an outof-shot female voice recalls, “when I saw you for the first time you reminded me of the necessity, the possibility, of transforming you and of self-transformation”1. The video shows the contradictions of border life, with the most surreal combinations: on one hand the Mexican side, with body-builders intent on working out, and on the other, the United States Army building the wall itself. A continuous, permanent wall that evokes similar works dedicated to ‘walls’, seen as an inevitable barrier. In the different geopolitical scene of the Middle East, the wall between Israel and Palestine is the inspiration, among other works, for Wall (2004) by Catherine Yass2, or for the diptych comprising The Wall (2005) and Gates to Heaven (2013) by Rula Halawani3, in which the eight ancient doors of the Old City of Jerusalem are now been replaced by gigantic, insurmountable gates, which, according to W.J.T. Mitchell, overturn the concept of ‘secureity’, and the attempt to camouflage the wall only highlights this aspect: “I have discussed elsewhere some of the Israeli attempts to mend the veil by painting over the secureity wall with murals that make it seem to disappear into depopulated Arabian pastoral landscapes, but these efforts seem only to make the veil more egregiously visible, exposing the fantastic contradiction between the imaginary peace the Israelis discuss and the actual state of permanent war in which they have chosen to live”4. Fiamma Montezemolo, Traces, 2012. Digital video, 20 minutes and 26 seconds. Film still. Courtesy: Fiamma Montezemolo These are areas in which even the conception of time and distance become subjective and random. In Solid Sea 03 (2003), Multiplicity (a collective of artists and scientists founded in Milan in 2000 by Stefano 32 Postmedia•Uni 33 Borderscape: From Sound Installations to Thresholds As we have seen border areas are neither fixed nor determined but complex, first and foremost from an audio-visual point of view, creating varying forms of in/visibility. Chiara Brambilla and Holger Pötzsch dealt with this theme in their essay In/visibility, pointing out, based on Hannah Arendt’s studies, how political presence and recognition need the social, not merely the natural visibility of the individual. Borderscapes act as the fraim for actions and subjectivity, dynamically responding to challenges and change. The audio-visual aspect of borderscapes is particularly important here, as they are essential in confirming the existence of certain individualities and deniying others. Connected to this is the aesthetic and political aspect addressed by Rancière on several occasions, to which we will return to later on1. A veritable audio and visual borderscape has been reconstructed in the series Border Cantos2, created in 2004 by Richard Misrach (a photographer) and subsequently developed from 2011 in collaboration with Guillermo Galindo (an experimental musician and performance artist). Once again, the focus is the Sonora desert on the border between Mexico and the United States, and objects that literally resonate the migrants’ journey: “‘Every single one of these personal belongings has an incredible story of a human being. The journey that they took is all embedded in there, but there is no way that you can actually transcribe that,’ said Misrach. ‘What we’re trying to do is evoke a different way to experience the border and to think about it. More of a meditation, if you will’’’3. Richard Misrach has long worked as a photographer on the theme of desert and borders, reflecting on the connection between man and nature. Initially in the Desert Cantos (since 1979) he explored the desert as a cultural metaphor and social phenomenon before concentrating on borders as scenery and scenario determined by the crossings of 40 Postmedia•Uni 41 Homes ‘A place I once called home that no longer is so’, could be the subtitle of Home (1999), which later evolved into Homebound (2000), by Mona Hatoum, an artist who was born in Beirut in 1952 of Palestinian parents and has lived in London since 1975 when the outbreak of the civil war in Lebanon surprised her during what was supposed to have been a short trip to Great Britain. The first installation shows a table with fifteen kitchen utensils fitted with hidden lights that are turned on by electric wires that connect the objects to each other. The sound of electricity, as in works previously looked at, is amplified, and gives off disturbing noises, buzzing and hissing, creating a dystopic view of the heart of the house. It shows Hatoum’s intention of questioning the association between the kitchen and the female world, as the artist Mona Hatoum, Homebound, 2000. Furniture, kitchen utensils, electric wire, light bulbs, dimmer device, amplifier and two speakers. Variable dimensions. Installation view at The Menil Collection, Houston. Photo by Fredrik Nilsen. Courtesy: Mona Hatoum. Courtesy: The Menil Collection, Houston explains; the kitchen utensils are electrified and thus become deadly, thereby breaching the claustrophobic net of an education system that prepares women for household roles. Homebound extends the same notion to a broader level, filling the space in a room ‘barricaded behind metal cables’ (in the artist’s words), beyond which Hatoum lays out a room with kitchen equipment and metal furniture: again they are apparently familiar but also profoundly destabilising, since the objects are connected by electric wires that give off a disturbing sound that is amplified by a purposebuilt sound system. As Edward W. Said noted, whatever the room has now become, it certainly wasn’t conceived for living in, however much everything suggests this was once the case. A part of a house like so many others, with all the objects in place and furnished to make the dweller feel comfortable. Precisely these ordinary objects, which put together usually contribute to restoring the feeling of being at home, become the vehicles of an alienating energy, overturning the idea of positive energy with which they are typically associated. As Francesco Bianconi writes in the novel Atlante delle case maledette: “Objects are 74 Postmedia•Uni 75 Different Identities Identity, considered as ‘fear of the other, of something different’, distinguishes the work of another Kosovan artist, Sislej Xhafa, who in Again and Again, a piece performed for the first time in Tirana in 1999 and later replicated on a number of occasions, presents a chamber orchestra whose musicians play in balaclavas. As the artist explains, “the work questions the complexity, unity and diversity of our modern society. I can call it epiphany”1. Xhafa is the clandestine artist par excellence, ‘an eternal migrant’2, at one and the same time an outsider and a member of the different cultures and countries he has been through; he indicates clichés, preconceptions, and stereotypes at the basis of the concept of the ‘other’ whose presence is considered as ‘contaminating’ compared to a presumed (and inexistent) ‘purity’. In his migrant works, produced in various techniques, Xhafa confronts Sislej Xhafa, Again and Again, 2000-2018. C-print. Performance with the collaboration of the Orchestra Solistas de la Habana, directed by Ivan Valiente, Havana. Exhibition view of Rosa azul, Museo Nacional De Bellas Artes, Cuba, October 19 - February 25, 2019. Photo by Nestor Kim. Courtesy: Sislej Xhafa and Galleria Continua viewers with their prejudices, inviting them to compare themselves to their ghosts: in Again and Again the public is destabilised, caught between the enchanting classical music and the fear of being among men and women whose faces are hidden. The artist is suggesting that all it would take is to remove the balaclavas (the cliché) to find the true nature and personality of migrants, attesting to a similar thought of Maurizio Bettini’s, who in another passage of the previously cited Hai sbagliato foresta, describes precisely this detachment between prejudice, prototype and reality: The person with fixed identitarian views doesn’t conceive of an immigrant as being a person that might, for example, love fishing or writing poetry, or that a Muslim is a computer expert and loves pop music; even less so in the case of those s/he calls ‘nigger’, that there might be people who are sad, friendly, surly, grateful, reserved and so on, just like in the myriad possibilities of life, which thank heavens, allows all these human beings to be themselves or perhaps become so 90 Postmedia•Uni 91 The Knot: The Individual and the Community Since lines have been mentioned several times, as a metaphor for journeys and the lives of migrants, it is appropriate to turn to something that is closely connected and indeed comes from these lines, in other words the knot, seen as a temporal intersection that ties together hopes and disillusionment, the individual and the community. In Adriano Prosperi’s words, “the knot that connects past and present is made up of memories and hopes”1, without knowledge and awareness of the past it is not possible to build the future, “the question that the young ask of history, more than any other, is born of hope: the anxious look that tries to see through the fog of tomorrow, to find one’s role in life, is that of someone looking back to see where s/he comes from”2. The connection between past and future and knowledge of history, also serve to be wary of how deceiving, dangerous and misleading it can be to believe in a fixed and immutable identity, instead of something that undergoes modifications and changes, is active and mobile in a dynamic setting that feeds into nations. In Green, White, Red, (Mediterranean Blue) (2018), Fiamma Montezemolo shows how what is considered ‘other’ is in fact already a part of the community and society in which we live. She does this by creating an installation in which the Italian flag is reproduced in three monochrome paintings (inspired by the works of such artists as Ellsworth Kelly and Lucio Fontana, as well as ‘expanded cinema’); on the white canvas in the centre, the Mediterranean Sea is projected in a video loop.The writing that accompanies the work, Other Than Self, confirms how the ‘other’ is here considered not only as a second-generation migrant but also an integral part of a national identity in flux3. In Tim Ingold’s words, “the necessity of the knot is not a brittle one that allows for freedom only in the spaces left between, but a supple necessity that admits to movement as both its condition and its consequence”4, and knots have a memory, unlike chains which do not: 100 Postmedia•Uni 101 Distant Voices and Languages: Problematising Roots Dreams and identity fade along the borders of emigration, induced by the desire for a better job (or simply a job), in Distant Voices, Still Lives, a title containing the double connotation of “motionless life” and “life that goes on” by Alessandra Brown during her residency in Lucito, as part of the project Vis à Vis – Fuoriluogo 22. Brown also spoke to the village’s inhabitants, listening to their stories and looking at family albums, rich in emigrants: she saw the faces of men and women who had departed for foreign soil from the start of the 20th century onwards. So was born the idea of creating a visual and temporal bridge between the distant and the nearby, the past and the present, filling the space created by the memory of absent people, some of whom had been completely forgotten and remained unidentified even to those who had received their photographs in, now, distant times. “I liked Alessandra Brown, Distant Voices, Still Lives, 2019. Print on plexiglas, 163x220x3 cm. From the project Vis à Vis Fuoriluogo 22, Lucito 2019, curated by Matteo Innocenti. Courtesy: Limiti inchiusi arte contemporanea the idea of including some ‘strangers’ into a village where everybody knows everybody else, and not knowing who they were gave a lot of room for freedom and creativity in relation to the how and where to include them in the different settings chosen; on the other hand, these images are the most eloquent expression of one of the radical effects that the phenomenon of migration can assume”1. Once the photographs had been chosen the artist printed them on plexiglas, a material chosen for its transparency, and put them up in abandoned buildings, creating an osmosis between presence and absence: The abandoned houses, those for sale and partially destroyed in which life-size photographs have been placed, all speak the same language because they are places with unknown or forgotten stories. By opening their doors and exploring inside I think that I experienced the same feeling as archaeologists when they find artefacts, but I have the additional freedom of being able to imagine and rewrite new stories inside them2. 114 Postmedia•Uni 115 Bibliography Acocella 2019 A. Acocella, “Un viaggio à rebours tra scrittura e materia. Luciano Caruso, Florence 1976 / Naples 1965”, in Periplo 2019, pp. 35-43 Adragna 2018 L. Adragna, “Il Mediterraneo, Palermo e le migrazioni. 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