Over Gina Pane_Azione Sentimentale n.3
Memorial Day
Per l’intera giornata del 27 gennaio sarà disponibile alla visione la terza azione di Over Gina Pane in streaming video [+]
[Visione consigliata a un pubblico adulto: per tutelare le persone minorenni è necessario accedere con il proprio account Vimeo gratuito.]
'What role does pain play in your works?‘
What a role? Here... I am crossed by all the external stimuli of violence...
in the partitions I no longer query the body, I no longer question it, I'll listen to it (…)’.
From an interview by Lea Vergine with Gina Pane (1985)
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 won't try to stay balanced, well balanced between the parts, ma oscillerò 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 his 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 colors, but the living space in which to erect the monument to the body not tamed nor subjected to the profitable functioning of the discriminating ableism of our time.
OVER GINA PANE_4 SENTIMENTAL ACTIONS 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, bodies of the disaster, martyr bodies, holy bodies that survived the nothingness of pain. In close poetic and formal concatenation with the radicality of Gina Pane, this new iconostasis by Lenz becomes an affective and poetic reflection of the extreme actions of the wound artist, 'without lulling ourselves in his memory, but trying to be reborn in the oxidized drops of his bloody footsteps'. Over Gina Pane_4 Sentimental Actions takes place at the center of the images-Observations, made during the performance of 1973 by Gina Pane which took place at the Diagramma gallery in Milan, 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 physical and psychic wound as a multiplication of sensorial capacity are elements of great germinative power in the training and artistic practice of Maestri, whose 4 Sentimental Actions return as the fruit of inspiration, in a non-radial echo, ma multiforme. 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, San Lorenzo, Saint Peter, Saint martin, Saint John) and the martyr-body of the four performers returns to the present, in a conceptual flip button, in a process of identity transposition – Saint Apollonia, Santa Dinfna, Sant’Agata, Saint Mary of Egypt – the actual physics of physical and emotional wounds. Gina Pane's installation rereading of the saints is transmuted, in the iconostasis of Maestri in performative revival, 'Painful way' (title of a work by Gina Pane del 1988) to be explored 'here and now' to reunite through the truth of one's poetic lesions, physical and existential to the aesthetic and political thought of the artist. Over Gina Pane_4 Sentimental Actions Ideation, creation, installation Maria Federica Masters OVER GINA PANE_SENTIMENTAL ACTION N. 3 In a creative process of a-hierarchical association and dissociation between psychological and formal propositions, composed of mixtures and simultaneity, symmetries and synergies with the work of Gina Pane, In this third Action, Maria Federica Maestri suspends the reading of the Sentimental Action and works on the transposition of the Psyche action of 1974, shifting the conceptual focus of the third performance towards a meta-historical reconnaissance of violence: Sentimental Action n. 3 wants to place the sacred iconography of the 'Martyrdom of Saint Agatha' in dramatic concatenation – the saint whose limbs are broken and her breasts torn out – and the re-enactment of the experiments on bone regeneration conducted by Nazi doctors on women – Jewish, lesbians, communist, Jehovah's Witnesses, abortiste, socialist, rom – deported to the Ravensbruck camp. In Action no. 3 the active 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 of one's recent pathological condition, a severe degenerative syndrome (la Sindrome di Ehlers – Danlos, which together with a progressive physical disability entails multiple consequences, such as tissue fragility, atrophic scars, bruising even from minor trauma, ernie, joint dislocations, cardiac-valvular problems, chest deformity, rupture of muscles and tendons) and the image of the interminable torture of Saint Agatha by the Roman proconsul Quinziano, ferocious persecutor of Christians. His frightening martyrdom – flogged, stretched with ropes until her ankles and wrists sprained, subjected to the violent tearing of her breasts with pincers – is represented in numerous classical paintings (Sebastiano del Piombo, Lanfranco, Zurbaran, Tiepolo, Piero della Francesca) 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 – they are preserved in a very precious casket and in a bust chiseled in his image in the Cathedral of Catania. For the compositional stratification it was chosen to re-activate a performative segment of Psyche, the one in which Gina Pane unbuttons her shirt to lick and suck her own breasts, translating it in this third performance into a soothing dynamic, in a need to affectively register one's body, a body, that of Valentina Barbarini, marked by many scars caused by the surgical procedures undergone. The theme of rebellion against social constraints, enunciated with extraordinary poetic force by Gina Pane, it engages in a dual human and aesthetic transposition: while fully recognizing themselves in the new psychophysical identity that metamorphoses into a new expressive perimeter, Barbarini rebels against the pain, he 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 will to dominate of the Roman autoretas inflicted on the Christian dissenters and that was scientifically caused to the victims of the experiments conducted by the Nazis in the concentration camps, he finds no space for immolating self-satisfaction, on the contrary, his testimonial evidence becomes a political act against any past and present violence perpetrated by regimes against people with deformities. Articulation of the s-Partition n. 3 Elements of the third Sentimental Action inspired by Saint Agatha: nice paradox, emotional contact, sentimental pictorial, statics of pain, plastic rooting of the wound. Against the wall is a large mirror in which the spectators are reflected in symmetry with the background figures of Sebastiano del Piombo's pictorial representation. + Azione object standing Maria Dolores Pesce – Curtain A figurative but at the same time paradoxically 'iconoclastic' show’ (as far as he knows how to dissect figurativity) and deep, articulated figuratively and dramaturgically, capable of distilling beauty from pain and in which the relationship with the inspirer Gina Pane is not celebratory but aesthetically productive of new and necessary artistic truths. Un’esperienza nutriente, straniante, straziante, interrogante (a ben vedere le quattro funzioni dell’arte quando è tale, forse) [..] ci si sente chiamati dentro, molto dentro. Chiamati per nome. Gina Pane, una bellezza dura da inseguire. A Parma, le quattro azioni sentimentali di Lenz Fondazione dedicate all’artista Gina Pane, figura estrema della body art: ce ne parlano Maria Federica Maestri e Francesco Pititto.
Performative iconostasis
Performers in co-creation Monica Barone, Valentina Barbarini, Tiziana Chapel, Carlotta Spaggiari
Visual refractions Francesco Pititto
Setup care Giulia Mangini, Alice Scartapacchio
Planning and organizational care Elena Sorbi, Ilaria Stocchi
Communication, Press office Elisa Barbieri
Diffusion, graphic care, training Alessandro Conti
Assistants Mattia Goldin, Anna Zucca
Photographic documentation Elisa Morabito
Production Lenz Foundation
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 private collections in Parma’
In Sentimental Action n. 3 a short final text will be read by a 'You' present.
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 within its six walls, it is ordered and bent to human measurements as in a unitarian temple where the tools are prepared, the tools used in martyrdom. Shelf on which the reliquary-memory of Santa'Agata is placed.
A white cloth_sacred veil that envelops the performer.
Head bandage.
White Mary Jane shoes with high heels.
+ Hypertrophic action
+ Action under metahistorical pressure
+ Infiltration action
Michele Pascarella – Gagarin
Giuseppe Distefano – Exibart
