17/04/2024
Special thanks to INEWS Art Magazine, for the amazing article and interview with our curator Massimo Casagrande . You will also find the exciting text by Art Critic Vittorio Raschetti included in the catalogue. You can browse the magazine at this link https://bit.ly/inews68 . We are on pages 32/35. The publication is in Italian, but the English translation is below.
INTERVIEW WITH MASSIMO CASAGRANDE
1- What motivated or inspired you most in this area when you conceived and carried out the project?
Certainly, my stay of more than a year in this part of Portugal has allowed me to get to know the characteristics of this territory, which, from my point of view, offers emotions that only the power of nature can give. I have seen a forest on fire, I have often woken up to the wonderful sound of the waves breaking on the rocks, the land that is so dry in summer that it seems to be begging for "water where you are" and the wind that can be a breeze that cools the hot days but also a raging force that prevents you from walking. It was all this that made me conceive and share through an international open call - The Magnificent Four", Fire, Earth, Water and Air.
2- Your long experience as a curator has often enabled her to create interesting occasions for themes relating to nature and involving research artists. Choices of unconventional value that also set the tone for this event. What feedback did you find in the works of the artists you chose?
I have always been very sensitive to all that nature has to offer, and it gives me great satisfaction to try to involve like-minded artists and to succeed in stimulating them in their creation. For this project I was open to all forms that contemporary art has to offer. Nashir Karmali, an internationally renowned healer, will also be present. In a performance from an Ayurvedic perspective, he will guide the audience to understand and feel the pulse of life through the 4+1 elements of ether, air, fire, water and earth. In addition to this novelty, critically acclaimed artists and emerging talents have been selected to present works in painting, sculpture, photography, as well as site-specific installations and interactive projects. The result was very interesting, as the selected artists managed to approach the theme with extreme sensitivity, portraying both the beautiful and dark sides of Fire, Earth, Water and Air. The selected artists are Grazia Azzali, Hadeel Azeez, Michal Babiarz, Vera Balsemรฃo, Alessandra Bisi, Giuseppe Bergamino, Jonathan Durkovic, Hรฉlรจne Foata, Igor Grigoletto, Maria Inรกcio, Antonio Irre, Nashir Karmali, Jacqueline Lemmens, Milena Maffei, Federico Meneghello, Maria Nekh, Josรฉ Palhinha, , Rita Pierangelo, Imerio Rovelli, Andrea Santini, Moira Linda Toussaint, Vilma Vicente.
3- If you have another new project in Portugal or in another country, can you give us a preview?
First of all, I would like this festival to be repeated every year and to become a reference point for artists and audiences sensitive to this theme. Then I have many projects in the pipeline. The first one I would like to do is about storks and their symbolism, another peculiarity that is very present in this area, and we will probably also have an important museum space. They are everywhere, nesting in lamp posts, cranes, chimneys and even cliffs. I think they became a protected species a few years ago. They are beautiful. The second thing, maybe more of a dream, is to make a permanent open-air museum, because I haven't seen any here. Maybe just the four natural elements, inviting artists from all over the world to do their work in residence.
3- In this project, are your international relations and your collaboration with Prof. Raschetti's critical vision an added value and a further stimulus for the region?
Of course they are! The collaboration with Prof. Raschetti has been very stimulating for me and I was immediately impressed by his critical vision of art. I hope to work with him again. When we presented the project to our host partner, Salema Eco Camp, the doors opened immediately. They felt that 'The Magnificent Four' was in line with their environmental, social and governance strategy. If I may, as well as thanking your editorial team for their attention to this festival, I would also like to thank our main sponsor, Archeometra. A company that has always supported, invested in and financed innovative projects dedicated to the enhancement of artistic and cultural heritage in Italy and now internationally.
FIRE EARTH WATER AIR
By Vittorio Raschetti
Uniqueness of moods, perceptions and emotional reactions poised between order and dissipation: while unexpected forces shift the point of view on reality, abandoning habits, allowing themselves to be welcomed by landscapes forgotten over time. A way of sensitivity, a plural world, a trace in the territory, which brings beauty and the search for meaning back to the center of attention, revitalizing places with the unconventional sensitivity of contemporary art. Beyond modernity, which has made urban centers the meeting place par excellence for artists, contemporaneity prefers new unexpected horizons, where the genius loci contributes to the inspiration and creation of site-specific works enriched by the aura of the place. In nature to return to being, freeing the magic of instinctive forces, wrapped in the privilege of distance from everything. It is about creating a synergy between symbolic-artistic, ethical-environmental and political-media action. The project is inspired by the environmental poetics of an organic vision of art capable of symbolically reflecting the cyclical processes of nature. A romantic vision of art perfectly coherent with the natural and symbolic form of the hinterland and the ocean front. A pause, in transit between dreams of water and natural architecture, inhabiting that geological and symbolic threshold of the last edge of Finis Terrae as an artistic metaphor to be re-semantised and re-territorialised. A widespread laboratory immersed in the landscape, a field of creative forces against the light, against the wind, because art is the dream towards the unique, noble, restless, unexpected, free thought, immersed in the mobility of time. Solitary but connected in the convergence of a style of thought, a way of coming into contact with the world, patient and impatient. Constellations of analogies, sharing dreams in the landscape shaped by secret signs, already willing to lose habits, living inspiration. A latent interconnection is revealed, a precious empathy with the processes of nature and the natural order of things. Attitude, desire, energy, style: uncontainable intensity, beyond the predictable, variable structure of intensity and direction. Sharing a way of experiencing space and sensitivity, awakening a sensorial, bodily and spiritual balance, perfect integration between nature, imagination and culture. Creation as an extended action, not limited to the creation of the artistic object, but as a creative commitment to living, entirely embodied in practices and behavior. A thin thread of affinity binds the world, in an incessant search for the weaving of conceptual, anthropological and existential relationships, a gesture of patient suturing of the fault lines that open up in the dissociated structure of the present. Proliferating sacred synchrony between forms and rhythms of nature, self-generative spirit of exotic fusion of colors, a secret garden, suspended in the innocence of the becoming of the seasons. Nature reveals itself, unfolds within itself, becomes both ontology and epiphany of itself as a tautology of life and as a vital impetus. Only unexpected forces know how to shift the point of view on reality, abandoning habits to enter the unknown land already willing to delve into interior mysteries, welcomed by landscapes forgotten in the deep time of ancestral rites. We come from water, of which we retain an archaic memory. Tidal currents cross our depths. Salty and amniotic water flows through our veins. We migrated to the mainland only to escape from an ecosystem where the pitfalls of the food chain and evolutionary selection had made life precarious and dangerous. The sea is restlessness, desire for freedom, rejection of mental restrictions and cultural boundaries. The hinterland is a natural proscenium overlooking the spectacle of reliefs andgreen reflections of vegetal waters, between strips of coasts jutting out onto the sublime perspective of a vegetal arabesque of intact lands, fissures in time and outposts of freedom of the mind. A utopian and intransigent direction encroaches on the languor of the landscapes, a lyrical expression of reconciliation with the metric of nature, with the authentic origin embodied in a sculpture of relationships: a vital instinct, a primordial impulse in tune with the unspeakable name of a beauty timeless, with undertones of complicit friendship with the simple nature of things. Spirit of the times hidden in books of stone, pages of water, trails of letters of wind, titles of fire. The spirit of the times hidden in burnt books buried under mounds of earth, between pages of water and trails of letters thrown in the wind. Under the epidermis of the Earth, between telluric fissures, the insurrection of form appears: unknown depths of time, forces of germination, infinite varieties tremble and shatter, mixing, undoing and remaking under the pressure of vegetal ramifications and envelopments. In the interconnected nature of the universe, each gesture includes all the others, in the awareness of the attention paid moment by moment, art chooses the measure of composure and patience of form. Through highly evocative environmental installations, paintings and sculptures, the artworks focus on the sense of the rite of passage, the arrival in a new world as an ontological, biological and anthropological metamorphosis, reflecting on the symbolic and ethical value of crossing the threshold of a horizon of knowledge for a new opportunity for survival. A universe collected in an infinite catalog of samples, natural finds, dust, atoms of reality collected one by one, ready to build a symbolic combinatorial universe of variations of the world, collected in memory drawers that contain all the possible alchemical variants of possible worlds. The hermetic and encrypted language inscribed in the metamorphic movement, in the hidden design of Nature is expressed in the dichotomy of โNatura Naturansโ living and acting as morphological thought, but also โNatura Naturataโ in the condensations deployed in highly symbolic material concretions. Nature unveils itself as the dynamic destiny poetic forms always exceeding themselves, already projected towards a future further definition. The law of metamorphosis follows an intentional disorientation where everything plays with something else, supporting impulses that do not remain closed within their own self-referential perimeter but which establish links and relationships between forms in a game of continuous selftranscendence of the form. Guided by a still and hidden center, implacable and lacerating, between a combination of natural forces that can only be understood in relation to its invisible background, being able to enter the internal pulsation of the work, allowing oneself to be invaded by the overflow of the reliefs, discontinuous elements, clearly analyzed , strongly rhythmic, which define a stable and symmetrical space. The trained eye knows how to find the shapes hidden in the camouflage of nature, camouflaged under the appearance of vegetation. A sort of geomancy, of divination through the earth, to grasp the breaking thresholds of the faults of destiny between allegorical microcosms, a filigree of thin lines vibrate between glimpsed forces that cross the textures of an encyclopedic organic world. Not a natural history museum, but a natural art museum locked inside a case in the apnea of time. The artist's vision is both the autopsy gaze of a forensic doctor, but also the maieutic gaze of someone who collaborates in the birth of a life that is always regenerated like nature, a metamorphic premise and promise that changes to be reborn, lives by reliving. Art, like nature, preserves by incessantly transforming, which is why it is reborn in all eras, continuously, and every time, forever.
