The patterns in an exercise

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you — Nobody — Too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise — you know!
(E. Dickinson)

I am sitting on a chair even though it is not Thursday. In front of the emptiness, in front of a mirror that is not there, a non-existent camera. I sit down to try to understand what it means to bare yourself, to give yourself,in a white meal, to someone or something unknown to us until an invisible limit is passed,. I sit in communication with an absent artist, as if the works that I store in my memory were a smoky frontier to be crossed in order to understand her truth. For years I have been watching Silvia Celeste Calcagno’s artistic quest with unflagging enthusiasm, and at this moment I feel the need to review the sequence of works. I metaphorically enter Room 60 in front of my dummies, as Wesker’s mistress would have done, even though the presences are not there, I can only imagine them internally. But nonetheless I listen to them, because today I don’t want to, and cannot, do anything else. I think of Celeste, Rose, The most beautiful woman, Je t’aime, MaiHome, Ring around the Rosie and the others: the experiments, the  studio trials, the incessant photographs that make choosing so difficult, aware of the fact that you have to abandon something. I sit down, knowing that, as the dramatist said, “we make plans, paths, conventional signs, code languages, timetables, we invent small one-act plays with imaginary dialogue, but nonetheless we never manage to predict what is going to happen.” But Silvia Celeste Calcagno’s artistic research at least gives me hope,if not understanding, an odyssey that reassures me as to the truth of Saint Augustine’s concept that searching is, in itself, finding. Taking a position, imagining myself, gives me a chance to progressively reclaim my identity, or at least so it seemed at the start. The lengthy timescale that I have set myself leads me to a slow and progressive disintegration, a gradual fading that seems to leave no trace of myself, while I use my memory to retrace the phases of a surprising, profound, unitary oeuvre. What Silvia performs on herself is a constant exercise of hygiene, leading to its inevitable consequences, as if she were an apprentice Saint Bartholomew carrying his own effigy in one hand and a curving knife in the other. It is a practice that gives the body an exhibited, sacred nature. It is an exhausting, repetitive act that leads to the progressive revelation of truth, a logical examination of what can be seen after having removed everything superfluous, a consciously shamanic act that is capable of leading from the personal to the universal dimension. An individual, like an empty building, undergoes a controlled, incontrollable demolition, leaving room for the possibility of a new and equally mysterious life. Art, like a ritual, guides me across the transitions, from one name to another. “The name is the key to a person. It is the delicate click of the lock when you wish to open the door. It is the metallic music that makes giving possible.”For Silvia Celeste Calcagno, the name is the piece of a puzzle, an opening that lets in some light, a symbolic expression that makes the unreal become real. At every stage, the home-body is consecrated, put to siege, and demolished, in an endless alchemical process. The temple of an indomitable spirit is examined, like Philip Larkin’s church, asking “who will be the last, the very last person, to search for this place for what it was,” and you are attracted by a place that “was the location, as they must have told him, suitable for cultivating knowledge, even if only because of all the dead people around it.”Construction, awareness, destruction, cycles. I sit, bless, and get up. New faces will see themselves mirrored in these works, new emotions and meanings will be attributed to them. Non-judgement resides in Silvia Celeste Calcagno’s poetic dimension, capable of transforming herself into a timeless votive painting. Identity is lost, and rediscovered. Right you are, if you think so.

Francesca Bogliolo