Literature, architecture, landscape and light make up the DNA of Bianco Valente's work. In recent years, the use of language as a tool for interpreting reality has taken on a central role in their research, and the word - present in various forms, from video (Sulla Pelle) to calligraphy (Unità minima di senso) to collective participation (Come il vento), to name only a few - is declined, each time, with a different ethical and aesthetic value.

Adriana Rispoli: From the Capri belvedere at Punta Tragara to the harbour of Acciaroli, your works seem like suggestions offered to distracted holidaymakers. While Towards you implies a spatial dimension, inviting the gaze to turn from the outer horizon to the inner one, Summer is almost gone alludes instead to a temporal dimension. Two interventions different in their formal realisation - the first in white enamelled iron, placed directly against one of the most famous views in the world, the other in neon on the sixteenth-century tower that closes off the little harbour of this Cilento town - but which share, above all, a public dynamic. What does public art mean to you?

Bianco Valente: For some years now, our most frequent interventions have developed within a public dimension, which we feel is much closer to us than an event to be staged inside a closed space, be it a museum or a gallery. We like to share our work with a wider, more heterogeneous public, not only one devoted to contemporary art, but also made up of those individuals who aren't regular visitors to art spaces.
In Latronico, for example, a small town in Basilicata, we've been running, for ten years now, together with another artist, Pasquale Campanella, a project involving the creation of an A cielo aperto [Open-Air] museum, made up of works by artists we invite year after year to conceive an installation designed for the territory and closely tied to the community. The work is then permanently installed within the urban fabric, and is almost always created with the involvement of the local residents.


Adriana Rispoli: Set on historic monuments, related to nature, or as a direct expression of community in collective urban space, your interventions - necessarily site-specific - call for different modes of interaction with the public. How much does this affect your artistic practice?

Bianco Valente: Sometimes the works arise from reflecting on the historical, architectural or urban peculiarities of a place. We weave them together with our own lived experience, which leads us to a different point of view compared to those who normally live there, and thus allows us to bring out aspects that are practically invisible to the locals.
In some cases, the element we engage with is the landscape, as with Towards you, a work installed at the Punta Tragara belvedere in Capri, characterised as a line of meaning that comes between the landscape and the person observing it, inevitably altering the perception one usually has of it.
In other cases we decide to enter into relation with the people who make up a community, and we work to interweave their respective experiences so that they become the load-bearing structure of the installation. That was the case with the many flags set up in Piazza Indipendenza in Pontinia, as part of the celebrations for the eightieth anniversary of the town's founding, each bearing an emblematic phrase drawn from the various stories we had heard, from the first settlers - mostly from the Veneto and Ferrara areas, who arrived in the 1930s - but also from the new Indian settlers who have been arriving in Pontinia over the past 25 years. It was striking to notice how similar the needs and desires expressed by both groups of settlers who came to Pontinia, so many years apart, were, in seeking to free themselves from the hardships of their respective homelands.
We chose to use flags, placed on the roofs of the central square, which still retains its original rationalist design, so that the wind could give voice to the stories of those who, over the years, arrived in that place in search of a new future.

Adriana Rispoli: Songs from all over, from the Doors onward, have celebrated the end of summer with all the longing and languid regret it carries with it. You, on the contrary, use this work to inaugurate the summer season in Acciaroli, one of the jewels of the Cilento, whose population multiplies tenfold during the summer months. Doesn't your message seem a little premature?

Bianco Valente: Summer is almost gone is, for us, a hymn to life, an invitation to enjoy every moment of one's existence. It can apply to people, to things, to situations - in short, a kind of carpe diem, seizing and knowing how to appreciate the beauty life offers us, while avoiding leaving ourselves too exposed to worries about the future. It seemed particularly meaningful to us to exhibit this work in a holiday destination that comes exceptionally alive only for a brief period of the year.
_
Taken from the book Porto d'arte contemporanea, tre anni di PAC 2015/16/17,
edited by Massimo Sgroi, Multistampa srl, October 2017

leggi in italiano »

back to index