The interaction between psyche and phenomenal world; vision, the perceptual universe and their interconnection with the natural environment and urban architecture; the relationship between nature and artifice, the mind-body dualism, the new frontiers of globalized communication, the invisible — even virtual — networks that bind individuals and places. These are just some of the wide-ranging themes addressed by Bianco-Valente, the well-known artistic partnership of Giovanna Bianco and Pino Valente who, with their site-specific works scattered across numerous historic centers of Italian and international cities, and with their land art creations in some of the planet's most distinctive territories, have continued for over twenty years to astonish the collective imagination. "Il mare non bagna Napoli" [The Sea Doesn't Wash Naples], a permanent installation at the Madre museum in Naples, or "Tu sei qui” [You Are Here], another site-specific installation exhibited in the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, or again "Land Code”, a project born from a workshop held for the Academy of Fine Arts of Foggia and realized in the Foggia area for Daunia Land Art, are just a few examples of the countless brilliant interventions bearing the Bianco-Valente signature. Much sought after in Italy and abroad, the Neapolitan pair of artists — interviewed by Lobodilattice — locate their research in the interactions between the mental images projected by the human psyche and the energies generated by the magnetic fields of places. The "immaterial part° that underlies phenomenal reality is thus the main thematic core of the artistic path signed Bianco-Valente. United both in life and in art, they are constantly engaged in a range of different, cross-cutting artistic projects, such as the Caveau project, curated by artist Serena Fineschi, opening in the coming days in Siena, or the very recent intervention "il posto dove vivo" [The Place Where I Live], in which the artists, walking through the city of Naples together with a group of people, showed their own personal view of it, from a sociological, political and architectural point of view.

Cecilia Pavone: How did your artistic partnership come about?

Bianco-Valente: We met in Naples toward the end of 1993: we were a young graduate in languages and a geology student, and love, together with the new life we shared in a beautiful (and crumbling) house in the Quartieri Spagnoli that we shared with other students and which had a truly memorable terrace, was the mix of energies that set the Bianco-Valente project in motion — a project that then also became our life's project.
One of the first decisions we made was to keep living in Naples, the place that had shaped us and that, for better or worse, has never stopped stimulating us. In the mid-1990s that was by no means an obvious choice — quite the opposite.


CP: In your work, characterized by artistic interventions on urban architecture and the landscape, the relationship between space and perception, and the different perspectives of the inner and outer gaze, appear central. What reaction do you intend to provoke in the viewer's consciousness?

B-V: It depends on the type of installation, on the place where it is set up, on its history and on the way the people who live there tend to live together, because we prefer to work on site-specific projects, creating each time an environmental installation that arises from interaction with the community that hosts us, or from our own reflection on the peculiarities of that territory.
Sometimes we insert a painted iron inscription (a line of meaning) that comes between the landscape and the person looking at it, inevitably changing the way that landscape is perceived.


CP: Through your installations you have investigated some very particular themes, launching a study of "relational aesthetics" and experimenting with the invisible relational networks that form between individuals and places — both physical and virtual — between the geographic and astronomical coordinates of travel destinations in relation to the astral influences acting on the human psyche..

B-V: For works like Relational or Costellazione di me [Constellation of Me], our intention is to bring out the connections that bind people (and events) to one another, making them visible. This web of bonds, seemingly very tenuous, cannot be seen, and yet it decisively influences the flow of our existences. One must therefore be aware that any gesture of ours has repercussions in space and time, going on to affect the lives of those to whom we are bound.
We often use the written word, the interweaving of stories told to us by the people who live in a place, so that what one normally tends to keep hidden within oneself is made public, and serves to remind the whole community of the meaning of living together, sharing spaces and experiences — something that is often taken for granted.
We should point out, however, that these works do not spring from Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics, but from our own studies, begun in the mid-1990s, on processes of interaction and evolution of life forms in ecosystems, and on the particular perceptual structure of our brain. Caterina Sinigaglia has explained these aspects well in her book Bianco-Valente, il libro delle parole, published by Postmedia Books.


CP: What is your conception of the spiritual relationship established between man and environment?

B-V: We like to think that every place is characterized by its own "energy" that gives specific qualities to the people and communities who settle there. This energy might be determined by the climate, by the presence of the sea or a volcano, by strong winds, by the composition of the subsoil, by forests or by wide, open horizons, etc.
It should also be said that we are immersed in natural energy fields that are constantly changing, and to which, for about a hundred years now, the electromagnetic fields generated by humans have been added — fields capable of propagating for thousands of kilometers from their point of origin.
As living beings, then, we are the direct expression of the places we live in and the people who surround us, but also of what we eat and of the energy fields that continue to pass through us.


CP: What artistic models shaped your inspiration?

B-V: Our stimuli have always come from very heterogeneous fields; we're certainly inspired by travels around the world to places far from the usual tourist destinations, by stories read in books and seen in films, by architecture, by design, and then there's the place where we live, which is a formidable "shaker" loaded with wonders and horrors, energy, fears, paradise and hell, fate, poetry, nature, traffic and trafficking, tenderness, violence, music, the sea, people popping up from every direction.
Here, every time you set foot on the street, a new story begins.


CP: How does the relationship between nature and artifice change in the age of Baudrillardian "hyperreality"? And how, in Bianco-Valente's view, are communication and language being transformed in the age of absolute individualism?

B-V: Our interaction with external reality happens by referring to the mental image of what exists that we keep active in our brain and update moment by moment through every new experience we have. Even the phenomenon of vision occurs solely through the continuous comparison between the raw data of what we perceive and our previous experiences.
Seen from this perspective, the question of interacting directly with the real or with a virtual simulacrum of it loses importance; after all, our imaginative activity and dreaming, too, are moments in which the brain has no contact with "objective" reality, and these are ancient phenomena that have accompanied our entire evolution.
As for the word, what interests us greatly is the magical and healing power that humankind has always attributed to it, through rites, mantras and prayers, but also the fact that in human communities there has always existed a figure who tried to heal others using only words — from shamans to today's psychologists. Sharing and exchanging one's personal experiences is the glue that holds communities together far more than flags or perimeter walls; our brain seems to have evolved to receive information from the outside in the form of stories, and it seems none of us can do without them, from the fairy tales parents read to their children, to cartoons, to novels, to television and cinema. Now new means of communication have been added, allowing us to learn and spread our stories through the internet and "social media," which enable new ways of sharing and coming together — but ultimately this too is an ancient need that has accompanied our entire history as human beings.


CP: How important is sound in relation to the human perceptual system in your work?

B-V: Sound is a decisive component for an environmental installation, but silence can be just as decisive, which is why we sometimes choose not to use any sound at all.
In the case of a video installation, sound has the ability to give a third dimension to the projected scenes, saturating the entire exhibition space, whereas in the case of silence it is the viewer who mentally tends to expand themselves into the environment.
Beyond the frequencies perceptible through the sense of hearing (nominally from 20 to 20,000 Hertz), there are infrasounds (frequencies lower than 20 Hertz) that are perceived directly by the body in the form of vibrations or sensations that are not clearly definable.
On several occasions we have used concert subwoofers to activate this range of infrasonic frequencies — for example, on the occasion of an exhibition set up at the Museo della Musica in Bologna in 2010, curated by Lelio Aiello, where we presented a sound installation with a computer that, via the internet, detected in real time the speed and direction of winds blowing in places very far apart from one another and translated this data into sound frequencies broadcast in the room; or in the recent installation Frequenza fondamentale [Fundamental Frequency], set up in 2015 in the large underground exhibition hall of the Tenuta dello Scompiglio in Vorno, developed entirely around the continuous variation of sound and light frequencies linked to the movement of the solar system's celestial bodies across the sky.


CP: What is the relationship between psyche and astronomy for Bianco-Valente?

B-V: If only we knew! Astrology is a form of knowledge that humanity has been developing for at least 5,000 years, trying to relate the portions of sky occupied by the bodies of the solar system to what happens to living beings here on Earth, and it is still not clear whether the relationship between the celestial bodies and events is energetic or symbolic in nature.
Be that as it may, having deepened our knowledge of this discipline has allowed us to develop a greater awareness of our limits and our strengths; it has helped us understand why life often repeats the same patterns, even years apart, and it has given us the open-mindedness to recognize, in certain symbolisms, meaningful coincidences where other people would see only obscure, unrelated chance occurrences. Obviously we are not referring here to newspaper horoscopes or the ones broadcast on TV, which are only the worst side of astrology.

CP: What are your future projects?

B-V: For the upcoming Rio de Janeiro Olympics we are preparing an environmental installation to be set up on the access bridge to Casa Italia, commissioned by CONI; we are also curating a book that will document the 10 years of activity of the Associazione Culturale Vincenzo De Luca of Latronico, with whom we have been collaborating since 2007 on the realization of the "A Cielo Aperto" museum, entirely grassroots-funded and without any public money. There are also other projects we are working on that should come to fruition in the coming months.
As for our project involving travel linked to astral influences, we are currently organizing our next trip, which will take us to Mozambique at the end of the month.
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May 2016

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