Poetic rewilding of lost natures in the urban present
A performative thought that artistically interprets the political-cultural assumptions of environmentalist associations to enhance practical actions to restore nature on a large scale.
The project tends to re-imagine the nature that has disappeared in cities and to restore the memory of the lost environment, through the power of short verses according to the Japanese haiku formula dedicated to the sacredness of existence in the re-living animal and plant.
Project for poetic and performative repairs of the Urban Habitat and enhancement of the Museums of the University of Parma, the University of Bologna and the APE Museum of Parma.
The assets that make up the museum collections, monumental spaces and historical places of the city can dynamically represent the history of the knowledge of humanity, its being a propulsive energy for cultural and social emancipation in our present.
After the presentation and appreciation by IBC - Institute for Artistic, Cultural and Natural Heritage of the Emilia-Romagna Region of the Opera sull'Opera Project, Lenz Fondazione intends to plan actions to reactivate this heritage, through the creation of new maps and new routes in the use of museum assets.
Furthermore, our many installation and performance experiences in large monumental complexes of enormous historical-artistic value such as the Royal Palace of Colorno, the Pilotta, the Archaeological Museum of Parma, the Rocca di San Secondo, the former Ospedale Vecchio, the Guatelli Museum, the Temple of Valera, the former Prison of San Francesco, the Abbey of Valserena, the former Church of San Ludovico have revealed to the public new ways of using monumental spaces, in an aesthetic stratification/activation of the historical heritage through the signs of contemporary artistic languages.
We believe that innovative action within museums and historical spaces acts as a process of ‘restoration’ and reinvention of the imaginative power of the works contained in them, thanks to which it becomes possible to regenerate the Past/Present into an Imminent Past – citing the title of the great Project of Lenz Foundation for Parma Italian Capital of Culture 2020+21.
Museum from the ancient Greek mouseion, the place sacred to the Muses, the daughters of Zeus, protectors of the arts and sciences and of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. In the first Museum, that of Alexandria in Egypt by Ptolemy I, it was already scientific and literary research, there was the universal library of Alexandria where philology, the search for words and style, was born.
The etymology of the word university derives from the Latin universitas, complex of all things, which, in turn, derives from the adjective universus, whole. Like the world.
Today, networks, synapses of the past, present and future must be traced out of objects, architecture, works of art and ancient finds, the history of peoples, the tools of science and technology, fossils and minerals to imagine. Connections must be outlined between encyclopedias of knowledge, without necessarily a linear direction; the historical time of a time and a place can be millennia ahead of a temporal elsewhere on planet earth, the most ancient civilizations may already have inhabited the future, and our present may have already inhabited the past.
It usually happens when you don't glimpse a happy future, when you glimpse apocalyptic horizons where no single human, animal or plant being would have time to look at themselves in front and reveal themselves, reveal themselves in front of a God or Nature. The past alerts us.
Then from museums, from universities they could rebuild themselves – virtually, as a metamorphic Ovidian cyclical virtue - a golden, silver and bronze age of the present, to return to reconsider themselves citizens of a single planet of the iron lineage, to avert the end of man, to save the world of all.
If museums preserve things, the future will preserve more and more images, numbers, geometries, magic. Memory will become more and more similar to an enormous brain of memories, things will lose their materiality and only the words, the silent voice will remain of them, only the language of poetry will speak, as in Pier Luigi Bacchini and Francis Ponge, two poets who gave voice to things.
Museums and Universities, by their very reason for being, have the task of conserving these clusters of atoms so that everything, be it painting or stone or artefact, in every single scientific or artistic field, can be a stimulus to the subjective, cognitive, aesthetic and thought experience of every living spectator.
Planetary memory traces, NOW.
The Lenz Foundation project pushes us to reflect on that HOUR, on the dynamic reading of the finds of science, art, botany, human thought through performative actions that inhabit contemporaneity, that bring the original poetic function back to the center of the MUSEUM place.
The regeneration of the past in an Imminent Present means a work of restoration and new life for every preserved good, a new imaginary habitat in which everything can represent itself, through the languages of contemporary art, in its essentiality together with the intrinsic aesthetic and historical value.
The poetry in action acts according to the principle of reparation: the damage that man has caused in nature is not in fact limited to the effective destruction of the environment, but affects the very ability to know/feel us in everything, part of a plural cosmogony: beings in the multiple.
So regeneration will have to be twofold: repair the loss and rebuild what we have lost ‘outside’ and ‘inside’.
In HAIKU_WHERE BEFORE ERA flow in a pulsating flow the lyrics of Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ingeborg Bachmann, Ezra Pound, Antonia Pozzi, Friedrich Hölderlin, Patrizia Cavalli, Marina Tsvetaeva, and of course the poems of Pier Luigi Bacchini, a poet from Parma who passed away in 2014, beloved author to whom Lenz dedicated numerous and vibrant stage readings from 1996 to 2015 curated by dramaturg and visual artist Francesco Pititto and performed by the body-voice of Sandra Soncini.
We who have become double bodies of air-water-wood-rock can cross the separation surface and so, apparently broken, we experience - finally - a change of direction. Not in a solitary dive but in a flock, reunited with the winged puppets we throw ourselves headlong attracted by the relief of the sentimental crust. And even if our end is certain, close to the columbids on the bituminous mantle, we continue to run at breakneck speed in the rose storm and, breathless from the climb, to climb the forgotten mountains without tears.
Haiku is a new chapter in the book that Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto have long been composing with rare sensitivity, with empathetic perception that goes beyond the ordinary to make the ‘extraordinary’ ordinary, magicians and at the same time alchemists of a theater that powerfully mixes poetic word, mythical narrative and, almost resulting from them, icastic and illuminating images of reality. And their paradox in the end is precisely that of finding sincerity by distorting the fake realism, the obsolete realism, in the profound reality of the imagination, psychological and metaphysical.
We need two major works of regeneration: that of nature, which has been progressively impoverished by the advance of urbanization, and that of culture, which must rewrite its ecological alphabet with new scientific and moral awareness. This is also why Lenz's contribution is precious: it helps us look at reality with different, surprised, non-habitual eyes, which in many ways is already an ecological exercise.
Ideation, composition Maria Federica Maestri
Dramaturgy Francesco Pititto
Performer Sandra Soncini
Sound Andrea Azzali
Setup care Giulia Mangini, Alice Scartapacchio
Curating Elena Sorbi, Ilaria Stocchi
Communication, press office Elisa Barbieri
Promotion, graphic design Alessandro Conti
Production Lenz Fondazione
Special thanks to LIPU
The verse already lives inside every material and immaterial thing, memory and present as an elusive image, streaked with light and shadow like a cut of sun among oak branches, rhythmic and refracted wave.
In the first chapter of the HAIKU project, various lyrics by the poet and some verses chosen by Pier Luigi Bacchini from the production of Ezra Pound, Friedrich Hölderlin, Rainer Maria Rilke flow in a pulsating flow, in a ’systolic’ gallop. From 1996 to 2015, Lenz dedicated numerous and vibrant scenic transcriptions edited by Francesco Pititto to Pier Luigi Bacchini, a great poet from Parma who passed away in 2014.
Always then water, and water and water and in front and behind us, the many faces of now and of old. The verse is heard spoken by the poet, or through the body of an actress who changes it into something else, or finally in the silence of a reading in solitude, behind water.
The second chapter of the HAIKU project intends to recall the element of water, through the verses dedicated to the feeling of liquid by Pier Luigi Bacchini, William Butler Yeats and Giovanni Pascoli.
Having become double bodies of air-water-wood-rock we can cross the separation surface and so apparently broken, we finally experience a change of direction.
In the third chapter of the HAIKU project, the verses of Pier Luigi Bacchini, Emily Dickinson, Ingeborg Bachmann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Friedrich Hölderlin take inspiration from the most impalapable and vital element: air.
And even if our end is certain, we continue to run at breakneck speed in the rose storm and, with no more breathing room for the climb, climb the forgotten mountains of life.
The last chapter of the HAIKU project is dedicated to rock, a silent and hard element like the power of the verses of Emily Dickinson, Marina Tsvetaeva, Antonia Pozzi, Patrizia Cavalli, Thomas S. Eliot, Friedrich Holderlin and Pier Luigi Bacchini.
