en – Giorgia Fiorio

Unveiling the metamorphosis of sculptural appearance in the variation of light, the project Humanum reconsiders the archetype figuration of ancient human statuary in the perception of our time. Intrinsic to a continuous transfiguration, the statuary aspect is not an attribute of its volume, it is defined by the way I see it, if I may suppose its different relief in a photograph, a planar surface by definition. Here the photographic mìmesis does not ‘document’ nor replicate the statuary in its inalienable archaeological status, it draws to light the presence of that “there—is ” which vision contains. When ‘being here’ is no longer real without “sharing” an evidence of our existence to some absent witness, in anytime contemporary, the statuary-archetype embodies the memory of life and contemplates each living presence passing by.

Named Parádeigma, works organise polyptych ensembles of different figures 1:1 scale of the original statuary in a number of figures multiplied by itself, symbol of an endless generation. No figure is equal to any other, identical, parts are each a unique-part indivisible from the oneness of one same—invisible—identity. The same identity sealed in each different footprint moving our steps. Just like the verbal paradigm’s infinitive root moulds all tenses, the archetype is the primordial “exemplar” (parádeigma, παράδειγμα) generating countless self-similar transfigurations. In a reflective-bond the original sculpted-subject and the living observing-subject, contemplate one another where the object of contemplation endlessly overlaps.

Humanum the archaeology of Being was presented in 2018 at the College de France in Paris hosted by Victor Stoichita’s European Chair. For this project, Fiorio has collaborated with Ca’ Foscari University of Venice; Scuola Superiore, Sant’Anna Pisa to which is affiliated since 2016, and has worked so far at the National Archaeological Museum and the National Acropolis Museum of Athens; the Louvre Museum in Paris; the Iraq Museum of Baghdad; the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Wien; the National Archaeological Museum of Cyprus in Nicosia; the Egyptian Museum of Cairo; the Royal Commission of Al-Ula at King Saud Museum in Riyadh; the Jordan Museum of Amman and the Al-Thani Collection in Paris.

¹Cfr. H. Bergson, La vie et l’œuvre de Ravaisson, in La Pensée et le Mouvant, Paris, Felix Alcan, 1934, pp. 264-265.

² M. Merleau-Ponty, L’Œil et l’Ésprit, Gallimard, Paris, 1964, pp. 12-13; 54 e 56.

reference texts

The Ontology of Vision. The Invisible, Consciousness of Living Matter · Giorgia Fiorio

Cumfinis

There are horizontal geographical borders and the incorporeal transparent air which from the heaven above cuts across sea’s circle. The space thus expands between that height and all that lies underneath: the cotton cloud adrift in the sky, becoming the inlay of ice that sharpens peaks akin to blades, drops into vast amphitheatres and immediately as liquid flows down the rocks, disrupting the silence of forests while quarrying stones at the bottom of valleys. Azure snakes, rivers on printed maps disentangle mutely. But how does water refract, what din polishes pebbles on shores and riverbeds? What is the gyration that as waves breathe dislodges sea’s lathe and forges a smooth stone from a rock? Contiguous borders that transform the continuous morphology of things into an osmosis of one with the other. What then is the prime-boundary the glance thrusts from the body where the heart pulses to the very finger tips? Where is thought’s final boundary that traverses that body and having crossed it projects before itself the world space that it contemplates within?

The Gift

Why do thousands of pilgrims slither on stone grounds of mountain ranges? Why are some naked, others covered up to their eyes, or clean shaven and with their long hair and beards wrapped under massive turbans? Some dwell in bodies striped with blood, limbs girt with belts, covered in ashes, decorated with bones, feathers and hooked implants? Who’s underneath the fire-tattooed skin or painted with intricate signs? Who’s behind the mask, who’s behind the veil? Before the cycles of Nature, vault of the Cosmos, the ancestral past, the intangible future, spaces, distances, proportions of things, a very quiver cuts across a labyrinth of paths, disclosing a pattern of gestures that codify the space-time ritual. Like “guest”, the term the gift in the transitive epitomizes a convergence of inseparable and contrary meanings- to offer and to receive; to sacrifice, to thank but also to take, render and particularly its most arcane sense that weaves into its opposite: in the Sumerian pictographs of 3000 BC the term khadra is an X in the middle of a circle: “what is inside”, “what lies at the heart”. The echo of a sole resonance overcomes all contradictions, binding them into a chain of correspondences, but what is the hinge for all the rituals that get caught around the mystery of the bodily evidence in its earthly limit? The Gift is life. It is the breath that animates and pierces life; what we inhale and exhale of that Spirit that, as is said, “renders itself” when we expire.

Men

At twenty what beckons is the blind memory of things never seen; I want to see, I want to look at everything that is impossible to come close to. The unearthed reality of men hiding in closed communities, human communities bound by codes of honour and brotherhood. Impenetrable communities, for the extreme confrontation with life, as is with death, is itself solitary and concealed from sight. Male communities only; woman who holds the mystery of life is the first ring in the human chain. Figures of what “is Of Men” and in its Latin equivalent of some men only. Diverse and indissoluble figures from “the fantasy of an ideal” of western male which belongs to a recent past. Invisible figures on the daily surface of the present moment: American boxers, carbon miners of Donbass; the Legionnaire of the Foreign Legion; the Matador de Toros of Spain immemorial; the American firefighters; sailors, fishermen and mariners of all ports, men of the Sea. Of Men questions the figure embodied by the unspeakable mystery each human destiny stands within and beyond its flame.

Portraits

Words I know not, nor how and where this viewfinder frame might have begun to expand; its clear-cut margin remains intact – thirty-six centimeter squares – in the viewer. Twelve shots, three times; four, at most five. At every shot the vision goes “black” until when the specular presence, turned upside down in the mirror, expands and at once leaves the margin of what “is seen” and rests also within an intention. And it both views itself and traverses the space of air suspended between that view and the one of the on-looker. But here, and in contrast to the pupil that envelopes and renders to the on-looker its own reflected glance, my subject to see itself needs to look within, for my eyes are now veiled behind the black camera. It is an instant. It flits away, rests and already too much has been seen.