THROUGH 

The body, the myth, the landscape 

Confronting the forest overwhelms us. We realise that we are just small mobile entities. Once in contact with nature we recognise that it can lead us to salvation. Nature defines the pace at which we interact, a slower pace, a pace more suited to us.

Entering the forest means entering ourselves, that which belongs to us, the patterns of our souls. The rows of trees become the fabric of our muscles. If the mind forgets, the body does not: and the forest has a memory stretching back through millennia. In our bodies, all our history, all our trauma, all that we have tried to drive into the well of forgetfulness, is stratified and recorded. Nothing is lost, the signs remain, as in a tree whose rings tell us the story of the years that go by.

From these considerations comes the artistic project THROUGH, sprung from the profound desire to provide a narrative to a body that changes, grows, and dies, just as every vegetal organism in nature.

Nothing stays the same, everything is impermanent.

Is it not the same force, the same vital compulsion that challenges every gravitational law that allows the blood of every human body to circulate in the same way as xylem – the structure that moves water and minerals in a plant? Is it not the same creative force that engraves these ontological signs on to every living form? These are perhaps deeply rooted signs that blood and xylem flow and run together between the human body and tree in the forest, on a singular path, in one evolutionary history.

And the artist, like the Sybil of ancient beliefs, becomes the spirit of nature itself, a nymph and a goddess that interprets and reads these engraved signs, these evolutionary similes, interpreting these astral geometries contemporarily.  The artist becomes the narrator of an ancient story that needs to be reinterpreted. There are dances that recall the past, when one through myth met the ancestral world and actually experimented with nature, and not just looked on from the outside. Myths are the precursors of our modern-day investigations into our psyche: they are the invariable in all of us.

The forest becomes a place of unveiling, today as yesterday, allowing one access to primitive secrets. The papers used on the canvasses depict the tears and lacerations that come from our intrusion into this frayed and violated nature. But they also narrate the erotic power of nature, of its intrinsic creative force: vaginas, ready to receive the seed of what will be a cycle of eternal impermanence.

The canvasses seek to evoke, as an oracle, the creative force of this Vesuvian territory.

Melania Acanfora är inbjuden av Mattias Larson, mattias[at]candyland.se

Under beskydd av Regione Campania