The word runs through the whole of Bianco–Valente's work, on a creative journey guided by an interest that starts from the human being and from the boundary between body and mind. Everything begins with observing the perceptual mechanisms by which these give shape to images under the impulse of internal and external stimuli — first among them, language, an active agent in the construction and reconfiguration of cartographic conventions. Whether enclosed within physical borders or open to the abstract superstructure of its globalized form, language runs alongside History as it shapes it, and reveals itself in its various guises: oral, written, sonic, and in the hybrid form born of modern ways of communicating, a mix of words and images that echo the "sound" of a conversation. Whether in the foreground or in the background, in Bianco-Valente's works we find language everywhere and in all its forms.
Elena Giulia Rossi - Journey Inside the Word, a conversation with Bianco-Valente, 2016
In the spoken word, first of all, we recognize the exchange between the two artists, whom we photograph walking through the streets of their Naples; we listen to them reasoning about their works, chatting with the many guests who reach them from outside, we watch them think creatively and prepare to give shape to the extension of their dual, dialogic self into "geographic systems of an emotional nature," as the critic Antonello Tolve visualized and summarized their artistic practice in a long interview conducted in 2011 (1).
Then there is the written and the printed word, at times translated into large-scale sculptures to be crossed with a gaze aimed at the landscape. The words "write" the story of relationships that, springing from the two artists' unified energy, involve those close to them, envelop those who observe, and tune into emotional channels. Bianco-Valente, in the form they prefer — that of conversation — tell us about this adventure inside language, and retrace the most representative works of their path, held within the circle that closes art together with life, from their earliest video works, such as Altered State (2001), to their public art works, such as Towards You (2015) and Ogni dove (2015).
Their artistic practice has by now become a language of its own, not conforming to any definition that has to date tried to lump together "relational" art, spread across communities all over the world — Moroccan, American, Lebanese — involved in their projects. Bianco-Valente's account leaves great room for the sound component, a deus ex machina capable of conditioning perception so that the images take on a certain formal direction, the fruit of an important exchange between them and the composers. We realize that the overlapping of these languages, and of the personalities to whom they belong, has had a decisive impact in setting their artistic practice on its current course, without ever abandoning the path linking the human being to the universal dimension they inhabit.
Elena Giulia Rossi: Your work springs from a deep interest in the relationship between body and mind, in identifying the horizons that separate the organic body from that of consciousness. Language, a device for activating individual and collective imagination, underlies this inquiry and hovers over all your works. What was the first work in which the "word" appeared for the first time as image, as object?
Bianco-Valente: There are two works that are fundamental for us and that mark this beginning: the first is the video Altered State, from 2001, in which, against a black background, the words with which the Swiss researcher Albert Hofmann tried to describe the alterations of his perceptual system caused by taking LSD — which he himself had accidentally synthesized — flash by in an extremely fast sequence. The words scroll so quickly in the video, overlapping one another, that it is not possible to read them properly, but we meant to represent, in some way, the speed with which, in the brain, chaotic streams of thought and sensation turn into coherent verbal structures fit to be communicated. It is no accident that in the video the words appear in rapid sequence only on the right side of the screen, which is perceptually connected to the left hemisphere, the one responsible for verbalization.
The second work is titled Unità minima di senso [Minimal Unit of Meaning], from 2002, and is a very fragile paper ribbon, a centimeter and a half tall and over three kilometers long, on which we described the main experiences that shaped us as people.
The written ribbon is shown on the floor as a chaotic tangle of thoughts. Conceptually, its function is to be read by an intelligent artificial entity, so that it can acquire a first awareness of the world and begin its interaction with humans and with existence.
In both works, writing goes beyond its normal function as a vehicle for transmitting meaning and information, taking on the connotation of a visual stimulus.
EGR: The word began to appear in numerous works in different forms and scales, handwritten or printed on a variety of supports and materials. Calligraphy has taken on a central role in many of your works: in the transcription of texts by various authors, overlapped through video editing within the space of a sheet of paper (Sulla Pelle, 2010), in the construction of relational architectures (Costellazioni di Me, 2010 - 2012 - 2014), in the telling of stories you heard from the Lebanese community, transcribed on walls by the hand of a professional calligrapher (Come il vento, 2013). What does calligraphy represent in modern culture? What does it mean to you?
B-V: Calligraphy is itself a form of art, and more than once we have found ourselves fascinated watching a calligrapher reproduce by hand, with a stylus, the characters normally used in print.
But what interests us is the act of "ordinary" writing, non-standardized and not elevated into an art form — the mind and body of a person setting themselves in motion to trace conventional signs that let them spread their own thoughts, their own stories, through space and time. We are fascinated that each person has their own particular mark, more or less pronounced, more or less legible, with lines of writing that slant upward or downward — in short, that in one's own handwriting, besides a representation of one's own thought, a part of one's own attitudes is also crystallized, that it is also the expression of one's own body. That is why, in the installations where we weave together people's stories and experiences, we invite those same people to write with their own hand directly on the wall, so that one can perceive the different handwritings intertwining, symbolizing the healthy differences that enrich every social group.
EGR: Let's move on to works of public art where the writings take on a monumental scale, often placed at panoramic points of the cities that host them, to be crossed by a gaze aimed at the landscape, to be "overwritten" with the images the word evokes. I'm thinking of Il mare non bagna Napoli, now part of the permanent collection of the Madre Museum, of the writing Towards You (2015), which overlays the view from the belvedere of the island of Capri, of Ogni dove, which since 2015 has been an integral part of the landscape of Latronico as a permanent installation. How do you relate to the "word" at this scale of works (and values)?
B-V: In the case of these environmental installations, made of painted iron, our intent is to insert a line of meaning that alters people's normal perception of that landscape or that context. We offer our own key to reading that scenery, inviting people to reflect with us on the complexity and multiplicity hidden behind every postcard-like view of places.
These works, too, are part of our research into the very close link that binds word to image, into how the reading (or hearing) of the same text is able to generate vivid images in the mind of every human being, even though these images differ for each individual, precisely because they are based on one's own lived experience, on the store of one's own experiences.
EGR: Sound is another form of language, an equally effective agent on the perceptual unity that guides the brain in forming images. Music and sound are vital in many of your works, as is your dialogue with composers and musicians such as Mario Masullo and Andrea Gabriele, with whom you created important works (Ogni dove is dedicated to them). Can you tell us about your collaboration with them, and what each of your roles is in orchestrating a visual-sonic discourse?
B-V: With Andrea and Mario, a very deep relationship developed right from the start; we felt almost like brothers, and what held us together was our shared practice of making art, each with his own different view of life, which naturally and powerfully poured into the work. Andrea was lightness and music made person; his way of working was similar to the flight of a butterfly, which seems to proceed uncertainly, trying every direction, but which actually knows perfectly well where it wants to go. Mario was impulsive, quick-tempered but very sweet, and his music dense, physical, extremely deep. They both worked a great deal, and luckily for us, before they left, they left us so much wonderful music. So we are left with the feeling of having two special friends who keep sending us signs from an unknown territory.
EGR: Also in the work Sulla pelle (2010), which we touched on when speaking about the role of handwriting, Andrea Gabriele's sound contribution played a decisive role — particularly interesting, in this conversation of ours, for the way it relates written and oral culture…
B-V: Sulla pelle stages the way we see Naples, the place that shaped us and where our project and our life together were born. We learned to love it by walking daily through its old center on foot, reading the architectural stratifications visible on every building, square, cavity, monument that still mark the urban structure laid out by Greek colonists two thousand five hundred years ago.
Over time there has also been a formidable social and cultural evolution that has defined very complex and daring structures of coexistence based on tolerance, the fruit of the historical necessity of being forced to live together in ever more cramped spaces. Tolerance has given way to violence, which in turn has opened the door to unconditional goodness. All these forces are still fighting today over the stage of this open-air theater, and the social situation is far more complex than the stereotypes the media love to keep proposing. Writers and intellectuals, who over the centuries have grappled with the city, know this well, continuing to affirm in their writings the love, the wonder, the fears felt for a society that is always far from anything linear, ordinary, predictable.
So we imagined transcribing their stories into a notebook, never turning the page, until the words, layering on top of one another, completely saturated the surface of the sheet.
For the soundtrack, Andrea too worked on the idea of stratification, using samples of sounds recorded in the city, voices of people reading on the phone some of the passages being transcribed, blending it all with his music, which seems to evoke the sudden bursts of fireworks that, in Naples, tear through the air from mid-November until early January, almost as if wanting to represent the social situation of a city that seems on the verge of exploding at any moment.
EGR: The relationship between image and word returns in yet another, different formula in one of your more recent works. A photograph is sewn together with a blank sheet of paper that hides it from view. Words describe its content. The red thread, which we have seen appear in many works in which you embroider the borders of maps, returns here to bind image and imagination together. This creates an interstitial space where the content of the image takes shape from the magical power of words and is rescued from the obsolescence of the photographic object. Can you tell us how this work came about?
B-V: Most life forms have the ability to perceive external reality through the sense of sight, but we are the only species to have such a complex and articulate form of language. Human beings are fully aware of this specificity, and in fact have always attributed a thaumaturgic power to the word, capable of healing, but also of inducing the formation of images and "scenes" in the minds of our listeners.
Recent studies seem to show that the human brain evolved by placing great importance on the information that can be gained by listening to other people's experiences, and that this would have determined the success of storytelling and the instinctive need we all have to be told stories (2). From the fairy tale we ask our parents for as children before going to sleep, to the cartoons watched on TV, from books to stories seen at the cinema, and so on, moving from one story to another.
Thanks to the endorphins our brain produces, we feel a particular pleasure in discovering "how it ends," especially when, through inference, we imagine the missing parts of a story that are not shown — such as an open ending, or narrative leaps that are not explicitly described.
This work is set within these mental dynamics: an old photograph, taken by others and not belonging to us in any way, is present there but cannot be seen, because it is sewn together with a blank sheet of paper that conceals it from view. This page, however, carries our own written description of the photograph. We were the last people to have seen this image, and until the stitching is torn (a gesture that would mark the destruction of the work), the only way to have any knowledge of it will be through the experience we had of it and the words we used to describe it.
Notes:
1. Antonello Tolve, Bianco-Valente. Geografia delle emozioni, MMMAC Edizioni, Salerno, 2011.
2. Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Stories, Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2009.