Intro

«Only the desert leaves lasting wakes, traces visible until the next strong wind blows, until the next sand storm. In physics, wake is the turbulence created in a fluid by a moving object that runs through it. The microscopic particles of a fluid create a minuscule net of threads, which moves at slower speed, therefore lags behind, creating small vortexes, and then disappears. In the desert, the sand, heavier than the fluid, is there to mark that passage, drawing it and preserving it until it can hold it. The work of the artist, like a moving body, leaves behind wakes with different persistence: some have short life, other longer, other last forever. The wake marks the time, the duration of the work of art, its power as it moves through space, the strength of its trail. The issue of the “space-time field” has been the recurring theme of our three-year long research on Richard Serra’s work/exploration, where the materials, installations and visual components have been key elements of the dramaturgy, the body of the actor, the dramatization of the imagery, and the audience experience. Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time allowed us to create a project that already had its own “material weight” and would not just be of moving thoughts. As for Wake, we think of a sand desert that can mark the various passages, the trails of the creative presence of guest artists and ours. There will be different spaces to move through, between historical monuments and city streets, theater house and contemporary museum, each transformed in its own creative desert, on which to engrave wakes of thoughts and artistic matter. Until the next storm».

Francesco Pititto