Details

Details are the nest in which our humanity resides, our characteristic features, those that define us and from which we develop our own mindset.

And when details change, whether by chance or by intention, the context no longer gives us the certainties to which we have become accustomed, our fixed points of reference crumble and fall, and sometimes the sense of disorientation is so powerful that it becomes difficult to establish new bearings.

It is at that point, at the instant of a new beginning, when details change and disappear, that the unexpected shape of our relationship with reality is revealed, in all its dramatic density. It is precisely there that Silvia Celeste Calcagno now finds herself: at the moment in which something is changing, her frame of reference – visual, physical, habitual, reassuring –and she has to search for new handholds.

This can be seen in Hotel, the first work that the artist presents in this installation: a still life comparable to the classical canons of art history, an episode of banal familiarity in which the fragility of objects, revealed by the open door of the refrigerator, suggests the sense of temporary existence that will explode, detonating in the visually extreme images that appear in the other videos in this exhibition.

The particular detail that triggers this situation is not important here. Luckily for Silvia (and for us), there is her work, the possibility – even when cornered – of showing its worth, playing its cards, and revealing the new coordinates by means of an intimate yet universal language. She makes a fresh start from the image of herself in order to discover a new sculptural identity, when she needs more than anything else a new stability.

When she seems to lose the outlines of objects, of herself and her body, she decides to stamp it onto the work (Room 60), with a powerful, decisive motif, in a series of views that mirror and double her presence, re-establishing it more powerfully, saying “I am here” with a greater degree of certainty, becoming an object, a souvenir, or anex voto, almost a simulacra of herself.

With the same stubborn determination she continues the same intention using another medium, abandoning the physical materiality of ceramic and translating her identity in the immaterial physicality of a video. She had already used the technique in the recent piece 5 breve freddo, an intimate and mysterious work made in 2017, to which Bless this house is linked in certain ways. In this piece, the artist is embodied in certain buildings that, filmed in slow motion, implode, demolished by interior explosions, a metaphor of how she herself now feels.

These scenes mark a return to a territory that is familiar to her. They are dramatically coloured in an unsettling red, and they describe a personal apocalypse in which everything crumbles, walls, floors, certainties, everything is razed to the ground, everything is destroyed and apparently eliminated. But, as we know, this annihilation is a prelude to a new beginning, a new construction, searching for a new start that will lead her to new frontiers and new challenges.

When we are in a tight situation, when reality calls on us to develop a new personal vision of ourselves, when the shapes of the things superposed onto our identity seem to dissolve, the time is ripe for the emergence of a new physical dimension, even more imposing and structured, even stronger and more durable, like the soul of their narrator.

An so we discover the truth of what Cesare Pavese wrote: “The only joy in the world is that experienced when you start. Living is a pleasure because living means starting, always, in every instant;” because at every new beginning, with the challenge of starting out afresh, there is the possibility of discovering all the surprising potential of humanity.

DavideCaroli
Curator, MAR Museum of Contemporary Art, Ravenna