Giovanna Bianco, originally from Basilicata, graduated in Naples with a degree in Film History. Pino Valente, from Naples, studied geology. They met in 1994, and from that encounter the duo Bianco-Valente was born. In this new dual identity, a love of moving images and a love of science converged, intertwined and blended, and together they emerge in a research made of sensitive matter, dialogue, and empathy, in which every element is understood as part of a complex system bringing together people, objects, accidents, and natural phenomena.

Brunella Velardi Looking from a distanced perspective at the whole of your work, the words "openness" and "roots" come to mind — words that today are often interpreted (and used) in opposition to one another. The nail piercing the folded map of Europe in Materia prima (1) — with which you began your artistic path — entering the place where you live and work, and passing through all the places it encounters in the folds of the map, abolishes this dichotomy in one stroke. One might call it a political stance that runs through your whole body of research. What is, for you, art's primary urgency today?

Bianco-Valente The project begun in 2001 on the possible connections between the planets and living beings (2), and the travel experiences that arose from it, helped us develop a more "open" approach to our work, moving away from the purely scientific observation of the world in its intangible aspects (the mind, the relationship between the natural and the artificial) that had characterized the first period of our artistic research.
Interpreting reality in a way that is no longer strictly scientific, but instead looking at the complex web of relationships that unites all living beings, led us to reconsider art and the very role of the artist. We believe it is necessary today to move away from a solipsistic kind of art, in which the creative act is generated and consumed within a closed space.
The artist should cross the boundaries of that space to address a broader public (not only experts and insiders), register their moods and translate them in an attempt to prompt reflection.



Brunella Velardi As that opening work shows, but also the more recent installation Tu sei qui [You Are Here] (3), the physical space within which the relational dynamics you activate in your work unfold often emerges with strong evidence. In particular, the positioning of the self (of the artist and of the visitor) takes on the energy of a necessary awareness. What role do places play in your research?

Bianco-Valente Every place is the keeper of a story — the one you manage to weave with the people you have met and the places you have passed through. You carry those stories inside you; they become part of your lived experience, offering you new ways of looking at the world. Places are our body and our life; they are what you are and what you will become — every place is both root and movement.



Brunella Velardi In 2013 you were in the town of Becharre, Lebanon, where you created Come il vento [Like the Wind], a site-specific intervention that emerged from dialogue with the local inhabitants, whose daily lives are heavily affected by the war in Syria, only a few kilometers away. That experience was particularly intense for you, also because of the sensitivity of the context in which it took place — about which you wrote that it "is a neuralgic hub of the whole Middle East, where the various religious confessions live together peacefully, and could continue to do so were it not for the influence of the surrounding nations, which have been at the root of the various wars that have cyclically afflicted the country" (4). The video Illimite [Limitless] (5), a close-up of a hand skillfully stitching together the edges of countries torn apart by military, cultural, and economic conflicts — joined and bridged by a red thread that leaps over the impositions of political borders and restores the possibility of passage from one territory to another — seems to me, in a way, a gesture of care toward an open wound you had seen up close, in which, even in its oxymoronic title, you already emphasize the idea of overcoming borders...

Bianco-Valente Arbitrarily drawing the borders of nations has created enormous disparities between neighboring territories and the people who inhabit them, generating hatred, revenge, and wars in the name of a cultural identity to be defended, forgetting that we are all individuals, marked by the same drives and the same feelings.
Sometimes people live together peacefully, as we saw in Becharre, Lebanon, where people of different religious faiths calmly share the same geographic space, even while suffering the influence of wars generated by neighboring nations; at other times, also in the name of a supposed religious superiority, people go so far as to dominate and suppress their fellow human beings.
From these reflections came the series of works Linea di costa [Coastline], with which we mean to suggest that the cartographic representation of territories offers a single, conventional, and approximate reading of reality, since it helps to locate places but does not convey their complexity. Through the gesture of stitching together the lines separating different territories, we want to erase the borders arbitrarily imposed, along with all the differences and problems that have resulted from them. And we add a further level of reading: one that speaks of the emotional bond each of us forms with places and with the people who inhabit them.



Brunella Velardi A border-place for everyone: the Mediterranean Sea, which has repeatedly served as primary material for reflection in some of your projects. I'm thinking of the Linea di costa series (6) and of the works in the exhibition Terra di Me [Land of Me] (7). Today, in the common imagination, the Mediterranean is inevitably marked by the stories of suffering that the news reports bring us. How have you related, from time to time, to this context, and how has this confrontation shaped your poetics?

Bianco-Valente In 2018 the Fondazione Sicilia asked us to create some maps from the Linea di costa series to be shown, on the occasion of an exhibition, alongside some historical maps from its collection depicting Sicily within the Mediterranean Sea. Rather than simply juxtaposing different eras, we wanted to tell the story of the Mediterranean for the importance it has held in the past and for what it represents today — from a place of economic exchange and cultural diffusion to a place of closure and separation, where invisible borders have been drawn.
To do this, we asked to organize a workshop with some young migrants living in Palermo, together with a few cultural mediators who accompanied them, in order to get to know their stories firsthand. Simply finding ourselves in front of them left us stunned; the emotions were so strong that at one point we had decided not to meet them again — we felt that our project had lost all its importance compared to the weight of the stories they carried with them. Urged to continue, we began a piece of work carried out with great delicacy and intense emotion, in which we chose not to probe their personal stories, in order to avoid causing further suffering, but instead to talk about their image of the foreign country they hoped to reach before undertaking the journey. What emerged were works recounting their expectations before departure, the loneliness of arriving in a foreign country, the discovery — for some — of the difference in their own skin color, the distance from home, and the strong bond with the loved ones left behind in their homeland.
Very often we involve people in developing new works; our approach is always gentle and takes into account their being individuals — we make ourselves available to listen and let emotions surface spontaneously. But the encounter with the migrants in Palermo suddenly made us reconsider the value of the work we were about to carry out; our very presence there as artists no longer made any sense. It was an encounter that left its mark on us, that led us to reconsider reality in a new light, giving the right weight to life's events.



Brunella Velardi Speaking of exchanges and borders, in Breviario del Mediterraneo [Mediterranean Breviary] (8) the endless shades of our sea, taken from travel magazines and assembled into a collage, recompose a space of desire tied above all to beauty and discovery. Was making this piece, during the work for the exhibition Terra di me, a way of seeking a reconciliation with a Mediterranean that today mostly evokes for us the drama of migration?

Bianco-Valente This piece arose from the impressions we gained after reading Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (9), in which Matvejević, through writing that is halfway between essay and narrative, describes the diversity of the peoples that face the Mediterranean Sea, tracing their similarities and their singularities, illustrating the variety of its architecture, the multiplicity of its languages, and the endless shades the sea takes on depending on the passing of time, the hours of the day or the seasons, the type of seabed, or the coastal landscape reflected within it.
To make it, we used travel magazines that advertise holiday destinations through the use of overflowing colors, where the sea appears deep blue or crystalline green, with the sole aim of stirring in people the desire to book a vacation.
We cut those glossy images with their surreal colors into small strips, gluing them one behind the other in the form of a collage, creating various gradations of color in an attempt to recompose our own personal vision of the Mediterranean Sea.
It was careful, patient work, lasting several weeks, carried out with the desire to celebrate the beauty and importance of that sea, in order to exorcise the image it has taken on today — a place of suffering and tragedy, of hopes too often dashed.



Brunella Velardi Cartography recurs several times in your work, in pieces such as Materia prima, Tu sei qui, and Illimite, but at the same time the map is also the graphic form traditionally used to represent relationships, and in this sense mapping also appears in Relational Domain (10) — whose aesthetic, beyond its reference to air routes, recalls an image of the celestial sphere — in the luminescent networks of Relational (11), or in The Effort to Recompose My Complexity (12). Is there, for you, a kind of continuity between physical space and mental space, between the objective dimension to which the depiction of places and their borders aspires, and the subjective dimension of experience?

Bianco-Valente Places are not only a physical space or a simple representation on a map; they are experiences, landscapes traveled through, people met, emotions felt.
Our works are an attempt to represent places differently — new maps that sometimes expand into space in a kind of emotional geography; they speak of us, of our bond with territories, and tell the story of the people we have known, a story interwoven with our own.



Brunella Velardi The dimension of conflict — real, as in the case of Come il vento, but also figurative, between memory and the metamorphoses of the present, in Costellazione di me [Constellation of Me] (13), to give just two examples — has entered your work more than once. And it has often been accompanied, once again, by an effort of individual repositioning, as happens in the later video Costellazione di me (14). The exercise of self-awareness, the cultivating of an individual and collective memory, then take on an almost curative value. With the project A Cielo Aperto [Under the Open Sky] (15) you recover the identity of an inland area, that of the town of Latronico, through contemporary art. Is there a common thread linking these experiences?

Bianco-Valente The New York experience arose from the intention to highlight the profound transformations the Chelsea neighborhood had undergone — from an industrial, working-class area to a luxury neighborhood crowded with restaurants, banks, and art galleries, with all the social implications this had brought about. The recovery of the memory of these places came about through work carried out together with some elderly residents who had lived, and continue to live, in that neighborhood as holders of rent-controlled housing. It was deep and delicate work that brought out strong emotions, together with the awareness that some of those places, which had been part of their lived experience, were no longer physically visible but could only be reconstructed in their own memories.
In Latronico, by contrast, the places are marked by the passage of time; they speak of abandonment and solitude. It is emptiness that marks the difference from the past — the desolation following heavy emigration, the breaking of emotional ties, the lack of any future prospects for the new generations.
With A Cielo Aperto, an attempt was made to increase residents' awareness of the place where they live, of the richness of their material and immaterial heritage; through the gaze of the invited artists, an attempt was made to suggest that it is possible to imagine new ways of living in a territory, rather than continuing to see it as a place to be abandoned.



Brunella Velardi A Cielo Aperto indeed places emphasis on the need to restore vitality to inland areas through the activation of artist residencies. This year the experience arrived in Venice as a collateral event of Resilient Communities, the exhibition of the Italian Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, with the program Per fare un tavolo. Arte e territorio [To Make a Table. Art and Territory] (16). What role does public art play within your research? And how can it connect cultural and collective memories with the urgencies of the present?

Bianco-Valente A Cielo Aperto, which we curate together with Pasquale Campanella and which is supported by the Associazione Vincenzo De Luca, began thirteen years ago, at a time when reflection on inland areas was not yet as central or widespread as it is today. With this project we have experimented with and put into practice new ways of making art, through the active participation of citizens in the artistic process, with the aim of re-establishing a deeper bond with the territory. From this perspective, the production of the object itself loses importance, while what becomes central is the relationship that the invited artists manage to establish with the place and with the community.
Thanks to the experience of A Cielo Aperto, and to the theory we have been exploring since 2001 concerning journeys and astral influences, we came to understand how important it is for the artist to create bonds with places and people, at times to involve citizens in the artistic process, and finally to place the work in a public, shared, and barrier-free space, so that residents and occasional passersby alike can encounter it in their daily lives. This is a practice we have increasingly adopted in our work, sometimes involving people in developing the piece, sometimes engaging with places, history, and architecture by inserting into the landscape phrases that prompt the observer to reflect.
The same is true of the project Per fare un tavolo. Arte e territorio, which came about this year following an invitation from Alessandro Melis to take part in Comunità Resilienti [Resilient Communities], the Italian Pavilion of the Architecture Biennale. We involved numerous figures from different disciplinary fields — sociologists, architects, urban planners, artists, curators, geographers. Each contributed their own vision of inland areas and of a possible emancipation of these territories, resulting in a public art intervention with 34 posters displayed in the historic center of Latronico, and the publication of a book by Postmedia Books.
In the book, alongside theoretical reflection on inland areas, focus is placed on fieldwork carried out by various professionals who chose to explore new artistic and design approaches in territories far from major urban centers, relating them to the difficulties but also to the resources these places possess. New ways of working and looking, also suggested by the exhibition of posters affixed to the walls of houses in Latronico's historic center — silent presences in the half-deserted alleyways, yet capable of sparking reflection and new imaginaries in those who live there or who happen upon them by chance.



Brunella Velardi Returning to the latest "edition" of Costellazione di me (2018), here the geographic space frays together with the individual identity of the young migrants with whom you developed the project, whose lived experience was torn apart by distance from home and loved ones, and by an arrival marked by a bureaucracy that is often hostile and alienating. The resulting video, in which each person involved repeatedly utters a name, seems to reconstruct the space of the self — first in a more intimate dimension (through the repetition of one's own first and last name), and then in the broader dimension of family and emotional bonds (each person says the name of someone dear to them, wherever in the world they may be). It seems to me that the original idea of Costellazione di me has transformed over time, according to the relationships that the idea itself has woven with the different contexts you have encountered along the way. What role, then, does the "me" of the title now play, given that in the 2010 project it coincided with the "me" of the Bianco-Valente couple?

Bianco-Valente Our position in the world is shaped by the network of relationships in which we are immersed — intimate bonds and acquaintances, people far away and people close by. This network creates a bond not only between us and other individuals but also between us and places.
The various versions of Costellazione di me, from 2010 to 2014, weave together visions and experiences — ours and those of the other people involved in the work — weaving stories tied to places, tending to recover a collective memory and one's own identity.
In the video Costellazione di me that we made in Palermo, the migrants, framed only from the lower part of their faces, say their own name and then the names of the people to whom they are most closely bound — the loved ones and the community they left behind — together with the names of the people closest to them whom they met in their country of arrival. They repeat these names as if reciting a mantra, to forcefully affirm the solidity of those bonds. Saying all those names serves to reposition oneself in the world, to reconstruct the constellation of people one is bound to, so as not to lose one's bearings, to reclaim an identity that is lost upon arrival in a foreign country, where some are no longer seen as individuals but merely as a problem to be solved.



Brunella Velardi The theme of relationality takes on very different forms in your work. Is there, for you, a connection between your experiments on human/nature–machine interaction — I'm thinking, for instance, of works such as Breathless (17), in which a computer reads one of your poems aloud in its own "voice"; Volatile (18), whose projection of luminous points, through a few basic commands, simulates the movement of flocks of birds; and Convergenza evolutiva [Evolutionary Convergence] (19), created for MAXXI, which reproduces the mathematical growth model of certain tree species simulated in parallel within a webpage — and your work on introspection and self-awareness in coming to terms with external reality — I'm referring here to Unità minima di senso [Minimum Unit of Meaning] (20), hidden memories traced onto a thin, delicate paper ribbon a kilometer and a half long; to Relational Domain, in which what looks like a neural network becomes intertwined with the paths of air routes referenced in the names given to the intersection points of the lines; or to The Effort to Recompose My Complexity, in which the lines drawn on the gallery walls, intersecting and joining images of organic branching structures also reminiscent of brain cells, represent precisely the effort to give back an image of the self from an interior perspective — and the participatory practices carried out with the projects Costellazione di me, Come il vento, Il libro delle immagini [The Book of Images] (21), and A Cielo Aperto?

Bianco-Valente There is a common thread running through all of these works. At first we sought to investigate the connections between mind and brain and between external reality and interiority; then the possible connections between the cerebral functioning of an individual and that of a machine, since we were interested in exploring the ethical implications of the existence of intelligent machines, whose creation various scientists of the time were announcing. If, in this phase of our artistic path, we were focused on carrying out laboratory-style research, at a certain point — also as a result of the experimentation linked to the project on journeys and astral influences — an opening occurred: Unità minima di senso (a thin paper ribbon onto which we transcribed our personal experiences for a machine to read and absorb) unfolded across the entire gallery space, becoming The Effort to Recompose My Complexity, then Relational on the walls of buildings, and subsequently Costellazione di me, in which the thoughts, points of view, and visions of the many individuals included in the installation are interwoven.
Establishing connections has become an increasingly frequent practice, alongside reconsidering the role of the artist and of the space linked to the work — private space or public space, a work intended for a few specialists and insiders, or for a much wider audience.

Notes

1. Bianco-Valente, Materia prima, folded geographic map and 10 cm nail, 1994
2. Twice a year, on the occasion of their birthdays, Giovanna Bianco and Pino Valente travel to different places around the world, exploring the possibility of thereby influencing the course of their own lives. The project draws on the theory of Targeted Solar Returns developed in the early 1970s by Ciro Discepolo; see Ciro Discepolo, Transiti e rivoluzioni solari, Milan, Armenia, 2004, and Daria Filardo in conversation with Bianco-Valente, in Daria Filardo, Pietro Gaglianò, Angel Moya Garcia (eds.), I Can Reach You, exhibition catalogue, Lucca, Tenuta dello Scompiglio, Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio, 2016
3. Bianco-Valente, Tu sei qui, mirrored wall, 2014. Florence, Courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi, 2014
4. Bianco-Valente, in: https://www.bianco-valente.com/prj/come_il_vento_becharre_lebanon/come_il_vento_lebanon.htm (accessed September 18, 2021)
5. Bianco-Valente, Illimite, video, 2'49", music by Andrea Gabriele, 2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9UNarsDFlE (accessed September 18, 2021)
6. Bianco-Valente, Linea di costa, nautical chart and red cotton thread, 2014
7. Bianco-Valente, Terra di me, curated by Agata Polizzi, collateral event of "Manifesta 12," Palermo, Palazzo Branciforte, June 23 – September 30, 2018. Cf. Bianco-Valente. Terra di me, exhibition catalogue, Cinisello Balsamo, Silvana Editoriale, 2018
8. Bianco-Valente, Breviario del Mediterraneo, collage of strips cut from travel catalogue photographs, 2018
9. Predrag Matvejević, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape [Italian ed.: Breviario Mediterraneo], Milan, Garzanti, 2004
10. Bianco-Valente, Relational Domain, 2-channel video installation, 2005
11. Bianco-Valente, Relational, electroluminescent cables, 2009–2018
12. Bianco-Valente, The Effort to Recompose My Complexity, installation, digital drawings and charcoal on wall, Naples, Galleria Alfonso Artiaco, 2008
13. Bianco-Valente, Costellazione di me (Constellation of Me), exhibition as part of Common Spaces, curated by Maria Teresa Annarumma, Molly Everett, Joo Yun Lee, and Kristine Jærn Pilgaard, New York, ISP, Whitney Museum @ The Kitchen, May 23 – June 14, 2014
14. Bianco-Valente, Costellazione di me / Constellation of Me, video, endless loop, 2018
15. A Cielo Aperto is the public art project that Bianco-Valente has curated since 2008 in Latronico (PZ) together with Pasquale Campanella, promoted by the Associazione culturale Vincenzo De Luca. See "A Cielo Aperto": http://www.associazionevincenzodeluca.com/A_Cielo_Aperto.htm (accessed September 17, 2021)
16. Cf. Per fare un tavolo. Arte e territorio, curated by Bianco-Valente and Pasquale Campanella, Milan, Postmedia Books, 2021.
17. Bianco-Valente, Breathless, installation with electronic boards, CPU, software, synthetic voice, 2000
18. Bianco-Valente, Volatile, computer-based installation, software, video projector, 2001
19. Bianco-Valente, Convergenza evolutiva, white wax crayon on glass and Net Art work, 2010
20. Bianco-Valente, Unità minima di senso, ballpoint pen on paper strip, 2002–2003
21. Bianco-Valente, Il libro delle immagini, Milan, Postmedia Books, 2020

Dialogue published on October 20, 2021, in issue 32 of www.unclosed.eu, arte e oltre / art and beyond, quarterly magazine of contemporary art.

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