‘Over Gina Pane_4 Sentimental Actions’ is a performative creation in which the bitter and harsh beauty pursued by Gina Pane in her irreducible artistic practice takes the embodied and disturbing form of the four performers: injured bodies, disaster bodies, martyr bodies, bodies saints who survived the nothingness of pain.
‘What role does pain play in your works?
What role? Here...I am crossed by all external stimuli of violence...
in partitions I no longer question the body, I no longer question it, I listen to it (...)’.
From an interview by Lea Vergine with Gina Pane (1985)
‘Over Gina Pane_4 Sentimental Actions’ is a performative creation in which the bitter and harsh beauty pursued by Gina Pane in her irreducible artistic practice, takes the embodied and disturbing form of the four performers: injured bodies, disaster bodies, martyr bodies, bodies saints who survived the nothingness of pain.
In close poetic and formal concatenation with the radicality of Gina Pane this iconostasis of Lenz becomes an affective and poetic mirroring of the extreme actions of the wound artist, ‘without lulling us into his memory, but trying to be reborn in the oxidized drops of his bleeding footprints’.
‘Over Gina Pane’ takes place-life at the center of the images-Remarks, created during Pane's 1973 performance which took place at the Milanese Diagramma gallery, entitled ‘Sentimental Action’, in which the artist's actions metaphorized female pain as an expression of love for humanity and Nature.
The religious symbolism of the torn body as a gift and of the wound as a multiplication of sensory capacity are elements of great germinative power in the training and artistic practice of Masters, whose 4 Sentimental Actions they return as the fruit of an inspiration, in an echo that is not radial, but multifaceted.
The symmetry between Gina Pane's research on the body of saints, characteristic of the last phase of the ‘Partition’ (works inspired by Saint Francis, Saint Lawrence, Saint Peter, Saint Martin, Saint John) and the body-martyr of the four interpreters returns to the present, in a pulsating conceptual reversal, in a process of identity transposition - Saint Apollonia, Saint Dymphna, Saint Agatha, Egyptian Saint Mary - the real physics of physical and emotional wounds.
The installation rereading of the saints by Pane is transmuted, in the iconostasis of Masters in performative revival, ‘Via Dolorosa’ (title of a work by Pane from 1988) to travel ‘here and now’ to reunite through the truth of their own poetic and existential lesions to the aesthetic and political thought of the artist.
Being able to be directly inspired by one of the reference artists of your creative path is both an aesthetic trap and a conceptual refuge. I will not try to stay in balance, well balanced between the parts, but I will oscillate in ‘partition’, divided between the painful memory of her wounds – the sentimental terrorism of Gina Pane – and the poetry of the sacred joy-generating force of her latest works. To fall and get up we will be multiple bodies, exorcists and adventurers of our underwater world. The scene dedicated to Gina Pane is not the canvas on which to paint the wound in dark colours, but the living space in which to erect the monument to the body neither tamed nor subjected to the profitable functioning of the discriminating ableism of our time.
In the early years of my education the extreme experience of Gina Pane represented a paradigm of unattainable beauty. His conception of the artistic act eliminated the categories of convenient art ‘by throwing off’ all my intellectual security, it required me to take an initial position in the face of the drift of good-natured art. Gina Pane's feelings forced a choice of moral field: the rejection of the work of art as a device of seduction and decorative complacency.
The apocalyptic power that is both intimate and public of his actions was capable of revealing an unprecedented and destabilizing dimension of the sacred. Gina Pane's body is a discordant manifesto of spiritual impulses and political reconnaissance, which in the wound makes itself a loving restitution to the world of its own female identity. The painful vicissitude as a path to knowledge freed from the canons of patriarchal knowledge. Gina Pane's self is always in relation with the ‘you’, it never closes itself in the narcissistic dimension of the artist, but becomes a broad, multiple body, a viral body, a contagion body, it hybridizes with the other unknown, it is engraved by unknown pluralities, it is made to travel by the silent presences of sanctities, it leaves traces of itself, it disperses its fluids. It is a body in rhizomatic extension, an attractive surface that welcomes us in its maximum weakness, in its maximum strength.
The performers – Monica Barone, Carlotta Spaggiari, Valentina Barbarini, Tiziana Cappella – are the sublime sick people, the harsh experts in the crooked life, the scapegoats of a nature that loves to hide the reasons for its harshness. Resistant to evil because they were born in evil or destined for them without justice.
Performers not only present real wounds of autobiographical consistency, but embody the wound of the human being, who ‘is’ by nature and destiny sick and dying. The leakage of blood is only the visible, clear, evident consequence of the wound. What makes the wound permanent is the scar, its healing and reopening, its becoming an oxidized trace, its becoming a permanent incision in the psychophysical memory of individuals.
I think of the convergence between the skin cracks of Gina Pane and the cuts of Lucio Fontana's canvases. In these 4 Sentimental Actions the blood takes on the suspended dimension of waiting (‘Waiting, Red Spatial Concept’, Lucio Fontana 1965) and of memory, the outcome of the wound is transformed into a spatial concept, into emotional architecture perceived in the present, into the persistence of the performative act. In this iconostasis of ours we do not use violence against bodies, so already tremendously violated and saddened, we do not praise immolatory martyrdom, we have no sins to atone for, we do not want to be ‘Criste’. We reject the saving function of the cross, on the contrary we understand the artistic act as an act of rebellion against suffering, both in its individual inevitability – derived from physical and mental pathologies – and in its collective dimension – caused by the violence that victims of wars, racial, social or religious persecution suffer.
The conceptual knots that guaranteed the enormity of Gina Pane's work returned forty years after her death to question us about our condition, in a system that continues to obscure the salvific propulsiveness of eco-feminist thought. Returning to the themes of Pane, being recrossed by his speculations, his visions, his contradictions, allows us to critically reconsider the issues beginning the need for the function of the artist in contemporary society, torn apart by injustices and intolerances. The armed poetry of Gina Pane is a guide-book that deminys simplifications, that warns us against the restorative benevolence of the work-confect, that prevents us from trivializations, the easy modulations of moralizing and reassuring messages.
Francesco Pititto
The tables of history (story-board), the drawn scripts, the graphic narrative both preparatory to the action and replacing the action defined the artistic, aesthetic and ethical practice of Gina Pane in her exposing herself to the other as a social, biological and rigorously poetic.
Photography has always been present as well as the theme of the sacred in every performative action, or installation where the body of Gina Pane is not there, but where always photographic images – together with strongly symbolic objects – refract, in the here and now of the common space of Partitions, the previous actions.
Maria Federica's four performers in ‘Over Gina Pane_4 Sentimental Actions’ acted in the same habitat where Gina Pane's Observations were exhibited and themselves become body refractions of that photographic score placed on the wall.
My visual refractions, in this context, do not document anything of what happens or will happen live, except as tables of a story (storyboard) that overlap, adding in different paintings, in different spaces and at different times.
Some digital images come from the tests that precede the actions, some in the theater and others in the room where the Observations were exhibited. They undergo a passage on Polaroid film – the only one that allows you to immediately participate in the birth of the analogue image - which blurs its contours, dimensions and frames.
Re-photographed again, even from the screen, with overlaps that sometimes emerge from the square format of the Polaroid in a space-time flow that tends towards the impossible embrace, as in Partitions, between past and present. Then placed permanently in the square artifact of a false digital polaroid.
My refraction is a sum of surfaces, complex layers of the complexity of each instant referring to the work of Gina Pane, communicated in a simple way with a single layered image. How to browse the image above or below the layers, a metaphysical image.
In a creative process of a-hierarchical association and dissociation between psychological and formal propositions, composed of mixes and simultaneities, symmetries and synergies with the work of Gina Pane, the original sentimental action is transposed into action of rebellion, putting into dialogue, in this first performance, the sacred iconography of the ‘Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia’ sublime miniature by Jean Fouquet (taken from the ‘Book of Hours of Etienne Chevalier’, completed between 1452 and 1461) with the short circuit created by Buster Keaton's slapstick corporeality, silent ‘Scapegoat’ (‘The Goat’ title of one of his films from 1921) and sacrificial lamb par excellence, mythical figure in cinema history.
In Action No. 1 the agent presence –performer Monica Barone – establishes an unequivocal correspondence with sacred iconography, an authentic mirroring with the figure of Apollonia (the saint whose teeth are torn out), in absolute coincidence with the personal martyrdom suffered. Through the performative act recalled and practiced by the performer, the wounded body is transmuted into a healed, liberated, resurrected body in the loving gesture of self-giving to the world in new political evidence.
«With this work inspired by Gina Pane - writes Barone - my research contains and investigates pain from a certain perspective: that of care, both as an instrument of social control and as an expression of self-determination. Drawing on my own clinical history, I chose, specifically, to develop the performative action around the insertion of the nasogastric tube, as a reversal of a maneuver suffered in a ritual, aesthetic and poetic gesture, in the reversal of the violence of force-feeding in an awareness and power grab. The use of this medical device, which at the same time is a crossroads in which autobiographical memories and universal symbolic meanings converge, represents the possibility of going beyond pain, as a point of arrival or intent, to perform an act of reappropriation of a feeling of body-psyche unity.»
Articulation of s-partition no. 1
The parchment of which the miniature is composed materializes in shape and size the wooden panel on which the saint is tied while she is martyred – her teeth are pulled out with pincers.
The whiteness of Apollonia's dress is transfused onto the new paper table.
The pincer and a glass of milk are arranged by the new saint on a small glass cube.
The cube offers metaphors of spatial reality: the void is confined to its six walls, it is ordered and bent to human measures as in a Unitarian temple in which the tools, instruments and vestments necessary for the re-desired power supply are arranged.
Destruction of the possibility of chewing.
Mythography of the orifice and visual compensation: the mental_bandage is a memory of martyrdom and a simulacrum of perpetual wound repair.
_Who acts today?
The inexperienced of the world? The sick girl at the beginning, the goat to be slaughtered, the little girl on Easter Monday, the one found inside the broken egg?
In a creative process of a-hierarchical association and dissociation between psychological and formal propositions, composed of mixes and simultaneity, symmetries and synergies with the work of Gina Pane, the original sentimental action is transposed into storytelling and fable dynamics, putting in concatenation, in this second performance, the sacred iconography of the ‘Martyrdom of Saint Dymphna’ - the saint beheaded by her incestuous father and protector of people suffering from mental illnesses - and the visual activations of the plates of Riyoko Ikeda, famous mangaka author of the Lady Oscar comics.
In Action no. 2 the agent presence - the performer Carlotta Spaggiari – establishes a profound correspondence with the different iconographic planes, in a very delicate mirroring between her own psychic sensitivity and the image of the young saint fleeing from paternal violence, which by symbolic extension is the attempt to escape from patriarchal dominance, authority and male power.
The excess of her emotional contagion emerges in the plastic reconversion of the sentimental chromatography of the Saint and the Artist: in the final phase of the performance, in full coincidence with the final image of Gina Pane's performative act - the drops of blood that come out of the incision caused by the thorns of the rose - the performer rebuilds the wounds, transmuting them into a new plastic form, apparently childish, playful, harmless, yet by an extremely raw and sorrowful empathic conjunction, as traces of hemoglobin densify into new imaginative architecture of suffering.
Similarly, the verbiages recall in obsessive repetition the vicissitudes of Saint Dymphna, returned by the performer in an anaphoric phrasing, in which the underlining of the incipit ‘my father’ is the mental representation of an ineliminable persistence, of a nagging figure, of a presence impeding the female creative identity.
Articulation of s-partition no. 2
A small sword is placed on a glass cube.
The cube offers metaphors of spatial reality: the void is confined to its six walls, it is ordered and bent to human measurements as in a Unitarian temple in which the tools and instruments used in martyrdom are arranged.
Four white plastic bags filled with plastic bricks of four colors (with variations) green, blue, red, pink.
_Who acts today?
The chocolate cream puff eater – without icing that she doesn't like.
In a creative process of a-hierarchical association and dissociation between psychological and formal propositions, composed of mixes and simultaneities, symmetries and synergies with the work of Gina Pane, Maestri suspends in this third Action the reading of Sentimental Action and works on the transposition of the Psiché action of 1974, shifting the conceptual focus of the third performance towards a metahistorical reconnaissance of violence: Sentimental Action n. 3 wants to place in dramatic concatenation the sacred iconography of the ‘Martyrdom of Saint Agatha’ - the saint whose limbs are broken and her breasts torn off – and the re-enactment of the experiments on bone regeneration carried out by Nazi doctors on women - Jews, lesbians, communists, Jehovah's Witnesses, abortionists, socialists, Roma - deported to the Ravensbruck camp.
In Action no. 3 the agent presence, the performer Valentina Barbarini, interpreter of the director's most significant creations from a very young age, establishes a full correspondence with the different iconographic levels, in an extreme mirroring between her own recent pathological condition, a serious degenerative syndrome (the Ehlers Syndrome – Danlos, which together with a progressive physical disability entails multiple consequences, such as tissue fragility, atrophic scars, formation of ecchymosis also for mild trauma, hernias, joint dislocations, heart-valvular problems, chest deformities, rupture of muscles and tendons) and the image of the interminable torture of Saint Agatha by the Roman proconsul Quinziano, a fierce persecutor of Christians.
Her frightful martyrdom - flogged, stretched with ropes until her ankles and wrists were sprained, subjected to the violent tearing of her breasts with pincers – is represented in numerous classic paintings (Sebastiano del Piombo, Lanfranco, Zurbarán, Tiepolo, Piero della Francesca, Parmigianino) and makes Saint Agatha one of the most venerated figures of Christian hagiography. His relics –the skullcap, a femur, a breast, the sacred veil, the feet, the hands - are preserved in a very precious casket and in a bust chiseled in his image in the Cathedral of Catania.
For the compositional stratification we chose to re-activate a performative segment of Psiché, the one in which Gina Pane unbuttons her shirt to lick and suck her breasts, transducing it into this third performance in a soothing dynamic, in a need for emotional registration of one's body, a body, that of Valentina Barbarini, marked by many scars caused by the surgical practices undergone.
The theme of rebellion against social constraints, enunciated with extraordinary poetic force by Gina Pane, is grafted into a double human and aesthetic transposition: while fully recognizing itself in the new psychophysical identity that metamorphoses it into a new expressive perimeter, Barbarini rebels against pain, rejects the saving function of the cross and claims for himself the anesthetic justice of morphine.
In this third sentimental action the suffering that the desire of the Roman autoritas to dominate inflicted on Christian dissenters and that was scientifically procured for the victims of the experiments conducted by the Nazis in the concentration camps, finds no room for immolatory complacency, on the contrary its testimonial evidence becomes a political act against any past and present violence perpetrated by the regimes against people who are carriers of deformity.
In Sentimental Action No. 3, a final short writing is scheduled to be read by a ‘You’ present.
Articulation of s-partition no. 3
Wheelchair, pedestal for the procession.
A golden ostiary is placed on a small glass cube. The cube offers metaphors of spatial reality: the void is confined to its six walls, it is ordered and bent to human measurements as in a Unitarian temple in which the tools and instruments used in martyrdom are arranged.
Shelf on which the reliquary-memory of Saint Agatha is placed.
A white cloth_sacred veil that envelops the performer.
Head bandage.
White Mary Jane High Heel Shoes.
_Who acts today?
Not her in person, too afraid of the performance galleys, but her in them, but them in her, like riding them full of joy with purple bridles.
In a creative process of a-hierarchical association and dissociation between psychological and formal propositions, composed of mixes and simultaneity, symmetries and synergies with the work of Gina Pane, Maestri suspends in this fourth Action the reading of Sentimental Action and works on the transposition of ‘Action II Case no 2 in the ring’ from 1976, directing the tension of the fourth performance towards a new conflict, that between social presentability and deviant behaviors.
The distancing, isolation, disapproval, exclusion of the anomalous subject from the normed socio-cultural system, constitute the driving factors of this Sentimental Action No. 4., which wants to place in dramatic concatenation the sacred iconography of Mary of Egypt –prostitute becomes saint after having erred forty-seven years naked in the desert – and the vision of the artistic act as praise of imperfection, as renunciation of the meekness of harmony, as exaltation of the unruly phenomenon, in absolute coincidence with the rebellious aesthetic of Gina Pane.
Corresponding to the different iconographic planes, the agent presence, the performer Tiziana Cappella, becomes a conscious and pathetic protagonist of this clash with social habitus, in a precise mirroring between her own psycho-physical fragility and the image of Maria Egiziaca, a woman with an unruly past, penitent and hermit, always engaged in a tiring journey, in search of a poetic state that justifies its existence.
In Sentimental Action No. 3, a final short writing is scheduled to be read by a ‘You’ present.
Articulation of s-partition no. 4
A razor is placed on a small glass cube.
The cube offers metaphors of spatial reality: the void is confined to its six walls, it is ordered and bent to human measurements as in a Unitarian temple in which the tools and instruments used in martyrdom are arranged.
Mass of gray hair.
White Mary Jane shoes with low heels.
_Who acts today?
They are her – the human matter – in it – her cries, her whims, her spasms.
They. And so they are tinged with the pallors of the welcome misfortunes that they together are: a genetic exception resistant to evil since they were born in evil or destined for them. Nate wrong cannot make mistakes, this is what makes them infallible unconsciousness.
Concept, creation, installation Maria Federica Maestri
Performer in co-creation (in order of action) Monica Barone, Carlotta Spaggiari, Valentina Barbarini, Tiziana Cappella
Visual refractions Francesco Pititto
Curating Elena Sorbi
Organization Ilaria Stocchi
Exhibition care Alice Scartapacchio, Giulia Mangini
Comunication, press office Elisa Barbieri
Promotion, graphic design Alessandro Conti
photographic documentation Elisa Morabito
Production Lenz Fondazione
Project created in collaboration with: Department of Culture of the Municipality of Parma and Solares Foundation of the Arts.
Special thanks to Simona Tosini Pizzetti, curator of the exhibition ‘Contemporary. Masterpieces from the private collections of Parma’
Maria Dolores Pesce
OVER GINA PANE - Concept, creation, installation Maria Federica Maestri
A figurative show but at the same time paradoxically ‘iconoclastic’ (as far as it can dissect figurativeness) and profound, figuratively and dramaturgically articulated, capable of distilling beauty from pain and in which the relationship with the inspirational Gina Pane is not celebratory but aesthetically productive of new and necessary artistic truths.
Michele Pascarella
The spot (or post?) of the images: Lenz on, with, by and against Gina Pane
A nourishing, alienating, heartbreaking, questioning experience (on closer inspection the four functions of art when it is such, perhaps) [..] one feels called inside, very inside. Called by name.
Giuseppe Distefano
Gina Pane, a hard beauty to chase: in Parma four “sentimental” actions dedicated to the great body artist
Gina Pane, a tough beauty to chase. In Parma, the four sentimental actions of Lenz Fondazione dedicated to the artist Gina Pane, an extreme figure of body art: Maria Federica Maestri and Francesco Pititto tell us about it.
