Marco Petroni - Being singularplural, interview with Bianco-Valente, 2011
Process, relationships, spacing, writing, places, travel, trajectories, constellations are some of the components of the language of Bianco and Valente, a couple in both art and life. I met Pino Valente and Giovanna Bianco in their Neapolitan studio. I leave behind the noise and vitality of the market in the Sanità district to climb to the fourth floor of a historic building with an open stairwell. From meeting the two artists, a world emerges that can only be partly grasped by looking at their works exhibited in museums around the world. BV's art has always been more experimental than representational, and has therefore always needed a laboratory, a space of its own in which to carry out its experimentation, without any intention, moreover, of contaminating the outside world. A high-density, high-intensity art that seeks to activate the power dozing beneath the surface of the places it encounters, and of the actions carried out with the inhabitants/spectators/actors of their installations. A continuous, incessant questioning of the restless potential energy of things. Beneath the surface of the real, there is a whole array of messages and a crowd of minimal yet intense matters that can help to de/saturate time and space. This immaterial research, this slow labour on space and suspension, produces energetic coincidences, a lateral quality of the gaze that generates an interruption, an epoché of the spirit.
An image is that in which the then and the now flash into a constellation. The relation of the then to the now is dialectical: it is not development but image, suddenly emergent. Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century (The Arcades Project)
Immersed as we are in a forgetful, benumbed present, the information, the images, the impressions we receive are a succession of "things" that nothing differentiates or organises. Bianco and Valente's art attempts to activate a vital process of discrimination, of "participated" selection of the real. A participation very far removed from the practices of relational artists (Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno, Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan) theorised by Nicolas Bourriaud in his well-known and poorly-aged Esthétique relationnelle, 2001. Collage, zapping, mixing are no longer merely artistic activities, but have become the metaphor for our very perception of life. BV's work doesn't operate on the proximity of practices, but digs in search of an open dialogue with places and stories, small or large narratives that cut across and pierce through time. It is dialectical, it is a place where the past meets the present, but meets it as if in a dream, as if purified of contingency and offered up to the simple movement of time. A healthy process of disorientation that allows one to gain in clarity and awareness. Fairly emblematic in this direction is Il Mare non bagna Napoli (an installation to be created for the Naples Stazione Marittima in the form of an illuminated sign). A work closely tied to art understood as a device, as a space for the de/functionalisation of subjectivities.
"Man must, after all, be something," Agamben writes, "but this something is not an essence, nor even a thing: it is the simple fact of one's own existence as possibility or potentiality."
Bianco-Valente, Complementare, 2010, Video, 2'40''
Marco Petroni: From Minimum Unit of Meaning (2002) - a thin ribbon of paper a kilometre long, written and drawn by both your hands like a long stream of consciousness - to the recent installation in Marrakesh, is writing a hypothesis for investigating places and cultures, a seismograph of imperceptible cognitive connections?
Bianco-Valente: The word is the medium through which every human being tends to share their own story, their own experiences and their own visions with others.
With words we're able to induce sensations, images, wellbeing (or unwellbeing) in other people; it's therefore clear that they act as an energetic conduit as well as a simple means of communication. Their magical, healing potential has also been known since antiquity - there has, in fact, always existed a figure devoted to healing people (to restoring their psychic balance) simply by using words: from the shaman to the exorcist, all the way to the psychologist.
MP: The surface of the planet no longer holds unknown lands, maps no longer contain blank spaces, everything has by now been explored. And yet, are there still places and maps to be stitched back together? The story of Jacques Jacotot, the eighteenth-century French revolutionary forced into exile by the Bourbons, in Jacques Rancière's The Ignorant Schoolmaster, made me think of your research into neural tissue and altered states of consciousness. How much of the political is there in your artistic research?
BV: Not much.
Perception and relation are the key concepts of our work - two very simple words that, however, always come up when you try to define existence, whether from a biological-evolutionary point of view or through the analysis of the complex dynamics set in motion by humanity's social and cultural superstructures: politics, economics, mass movements of opinion, and so on. The very act of perceiving already implies relating what you're experiencing to the baggage of previous experiences stored in the brain, or at least being able to assess the same phenomenon from two different points of view.
Bianco-Valente, Linea di costa, 2011, Backstage
MP: The attention to process, in your work, confronts us with the revelation of a world without defined boundaries. A kind of endless purposiveness, something similar to love: not satisfaction, satiety or entropy, but further ramifications of energy, including falls and shortcomings, suspensions and losses.
Art and life, a continuous, incessant dialogue.
Giovanna and Pino: Bianco and Valente?
BV: In fact, in recent years the creative process through which we imagine and create a work seems to have taken on almost the same importance as the work itself.
More and more often we involve friends and the people we form relationships with in the making of our installations, and everyone seems very happy to be able to contribute to giving form to the original idea. As if it were one and the same story that each person tells in their own voice and their own way. This openness is probably due to the fact that we've always worked together and are used to sharing ideas and visions.
Our recent exhibition at the Voice Gallery in Marrakech (preceded by about a month's residency in the red city) is a clear example of this: we arrived in Morocco carrying travel snapshots taken all over the world, and we asked some of the people we met during our stay to describe one of these photographs in a text.
Once we had these texts, we went to the workshops of the painters of the medina, who normally produce paintings for tourists, and asked them whether they were willing to create a commissioned painting for us: to read one of these texts, thereby recreating an image in their own mind, and then to turn it into a painting.
So it's a work on perception and vision, in which the photographs, tied to one of our particular travel experiences, were translated into writing by people who inevitably added new layers of meaning, based on their own life experience. The painters, in turn, translating the text into a new image, had to relate to the imagery they use daily in producing their canvases. How much was each of them able to distance themselves from their own experience in order to define the image or the text in an "aseptic" way?
The final result of the installation was to place, side by side, a large-format print of the original photograph, the related text (transcribed directly onto the wall), and, alongside that in turn, the painting created by the painter.
In some cases, the painting was incredibly close to the original image; other times, completely far removed from it - but in either case, the fascination of watching the transformations tied to each passage remained unchanged.
MP: Aria is a work inspired by the verses of Alda Merini, made for a well-known telephone brand. How does poetry square with the everyday consumption of relationships?
BV: "We would all like to be transparent, but we want no one to know us." These were the verses by Alda Merini we engaged with in creating the video.
A few, extremely dense words that say a great deal about the way we attract others by making our exterior shine, while at the same time using this screen of light to hide from others what we truly are (or aren't).
The scene of a moth drawn to the glow of a lightbulb, beginning to dance around it, only to stop short each time it makes contact with the glass, seemed to us the best way to bring out the meaning of Alda Merini's words.
MP: Besides being passionate listeners of electronic music, you always give great importance to the sonic dimension in your work. Does art have a "voice"?
BV: In environmental installations and in videos, sound has the ability to add a further dimension to the work, which thereby gains the ability to expand into space, saturating it if need be.
In other cases, it seems instead to be precisely silence that strengthens the flow of the images, allowing for a more fluid exchange with the viewer's inner self.
In this sense, art can have a voice, but this isn't a univocal condition.
Bianco-Valente, Frequenza Fondamentale, 2011, Steel, electroluminescent cable, computer, sound, 4.40×14 metres, permanent installation in the park of Villa Mascolo, Portici
MP: This column tells the story of the South as a mental and inclusive territory. You live in Naples, and for some years now you've been running a widespread project in the historic centre of Latronico, a small town in the province of Potenza. Could you tell us about this experience in Giovanna's home town, and offer a broader reflection on living in the South?
BV: A Cielo Aperto is the project that, together with Pasquale Campanella/Wurmkos, we've been curating for about three years for the Associazione Culturale Vincenzo De Luca of Latronico.
Every year, around Christmas time, we invite one or two artists for a short residency and for a talk in which we introduce the artist to the Latronico community. In a second phase, the artists produce a work to be permanently installed in the streets of the old town, so as to build up, over the years, an open-air museum of contemporary art, where people can enjoy the works without having to enter a designated venue that would alter their context. In addition, every year we run free workshops to introduce young people from Latronico to various forms of artistic expression.
Under its statute, the association cannot accept public funding, so everything has to be produced with around 3,000 euros a year, pooled together by the members through self-taxation.
At the moment A Cielo Aperto includes works by: Stefano Boccalini, Michele Giangrande, Elisa Laraia, Giuseppe Teofilo, Eugenio Tibaldi, to which one of our own installations and one by Pasquale Campanella will soon be added. They are all site-specific works, born out of a relationship with the inhabitants and the territory of Latronico.
We're happy to spend our lives in Naples, the place that saw us grow up and that shaped us. Of course, it helps to be aware that we live in one of the most stimulating places in the world (and the more we travel, the more we realise it), but it still takes an enormous expenditure of energy to carry any project forward.
You have to be in resonance with this city and vibrate along with it, otherwise it's capable of destroying you very quickly.
MP: Now four movements to be declined: To Travel, To Cross, To Meet, To Listen?
BV: According to Euclidean geometry, through four points there can pass one and only one straight line, but these four points are the reference through which pass the infinite paths that lead to each individual's personal growth (clearly, open-mindedness doesn't proceed in a straight line). Let's see: in order to grow, one must travel, but by crossing through territories, so as to meet people and listen to their stories.
Obviously something has to be left in exchange, and what better than one's own stories, one's own ideas and one's own visions?
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Taken from Abitare Web