Welcome
by paolo Angelosanto
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Motiv/Action: "Before thinking what I could bring to Santiago I asked myself: I am going to travel. Where to this time? To Santiago de Chile. Chile is, for a European, an anomalous country, the opposite extreme of the world, and how someone used to say: "a paradigm..." It is also a country that is very aware of what is being produced outside in the rest of the world. This is one of the reasons I wondered how I should deal with a performance in Santiago. When I arrived to that city, at the end of 1999, like any good traveler, I tried to collect small images of that place. I call these images "postcards"... When I had to do my performance there I thought I would show the last "postcard" I had left behind in Venice. I walked around the city looking in its bars and restaurants for red haired people like me. I invited some of them to participate in my performance that would take place in the "Gabriela Mistral" Gallery as part of the exhibition "Made in Roma: Emerging Artists from 2000 Rome". I presented a "postcard" (performance) from Venice: its waterways, its gondolas and gondoliers. Leaving Santiago de Chile the image that most impacted me and that I took back to Venice was that of the "Parque Forestal" and its "algodón de azúcar" vendors. I still have some photographs of them. I asked one of the vendors to teach me how to make "algodón" and he did. In Venice, in conjunction with "Nuova Icona" Gallery I improvised for the first three of the days of the 49th Venice Art Biennial, 2001, a kiosk where I made and gave away "algodón de azúcar". Some of its visitors where: Harald Zemman, Carlos Basualdo, Marilys Downey, Achile Bonito Oliva, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Khosut, among other artists and general public from different places of the world. "Welcome" was a way to greet them with an image from "somewhere else", one that only I guarded. I would like to go back to Chile and do something alike, a specific work that translates my perception of the city. I hope to be welcomed as an artist, to give to that place that offers such hospitality, an homage, a sort of welcoming act. This is way I have chosen the title of my performance: "Welcome". Memories, visual experiences, forgotten every-day-life gestures: are used and introduced in an artistic setting where their meaning is changed, re-contextualized. "Welcome": a sign of greeting, a performance in which the viewer will, as he leaves it, make the piece in his memory. A work that is always moving, shifting and always different. Wanting to say that art doesn't change, what changes are its reading, its interpretations, and the vantagepoint from which it is seen. Giving color, smell and form to the viewer, he/she will accept, observe, take with him/her and remember. The viewer will take along a "postcard" in his memory. |
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