Luisa Eugeni

SOMA. Bodies Between Light and Dark

Eva Fischer-Hausdorf

In the twenty-sixth Canto of the "Inferno" from his Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy), Dante Alighieri describes a nocturnal scene in which the darkness of a summer night is broken by the flickering light of a swarm of fireflies. "As when a peasant, resting on a hillside – in the season when he who lights the world least hides his face from us, at the hour when the fly gives way to the mosquito – sees fireflies that glimmer in the valley where perhaps he harvests grapes and ploughs his fields, with just so many flames the eighth crevasse was everywhere aglow […].1" As with Dante's image of the night scene, the installation SOMA, developed in 2020 by the collective Sineumbra for the Kunsthalle Bremen, is characterized by the high-contrast and flickering play of light appearances in the dark. The overall pitch-black impression of the four rooms is punctuated by the bright light of numerous video projections. The videos and the woven works hanging from the ceilings, both created by Luisa Eugeni, interact in a multilayered dialogue with Mattia Bonafini's sound composition and the live performances by Antonio Stella, Gabrio Gabrielli and Anna Jäger. This installation is the fruit of an elaborate creative process jointly carried out by the members of the Sineumbra collective. Various contextual perspectives of the protagonists from diverse artistic and humanistic fields combine to create a comprehensive spatial experience in which the viewers are immersed and through which they wander, room by room. In this way, various materials and ideas are interwoven to form a multi-layered network. 2

SOMA explores the transformation of landscape, society and people caused by major social and political changes, such as natural disasters. This is symbolized by the devastating series of earthquakes that began in central Italy on August 24, 2016, and that continue to this day with daily aftershocks. In the spring of 2020, Luisa Eugeni and Anke Peters traveled to the severely damaged and in some cases completely destroyed villages in the border area of the regions of Lazio, Umbria and Marche, including the villages Campi, Norcia and Amatrice, which were particularly hard hit. The video material recorded here is edited on three parallel projections in the third room of the installation. Using steady, static shots and slow pans, the camera catches the dramatic destruction of houses, churches, cemeteries, squares and streets. A lopsided table and fragmented chairs in the exhibition space respond as sculptural elements to the ruins of abandoned villages shown in the videos. Just as Eugeni's slow camera shots evoke associations with the movements of tectonic plates, Bonafini's subtle sound composition conveys an underlying sense of threat. Sounds that are sometimes quiet and humming, sometimes dramatic and without warning, form a composition that deliberately plays with the idea of acoustic traumas.

Apart from the devastating destruction of the villages, the deserted scenes shown in the videos highlight another significant consequence of the earthquakes — the depopulation of the townships. Over 303 people were killed and tens of thousands displaced from their homes; some still live in temporary shelters. The SOMA installation revolves around the concepts of a shocking loss and a continually unfolding process of disappearance. In particular, it raises the question of the effects of the loss of homes, of living spaces and shelters on the people. 3 The performers Anna Jäger, Gabrio Gabrielli and Antonio Stella, who appear both in the video projections in the second room of the installation as well as live in the exhibition, paradigmatically embody various psychological states often described in people traumatized by earthquakes. For the live performance, the dancers were inspired by the accounts of individuals impacted by the 2016 natural disaster. They developed their respective characters from them. 4 Slow, tentative walking, disoriented pausing, returning to the same places over and over again, and compulsive repetitions of individual gestures are central motifs with which Gabrielli, Jäger, and Stella express states of restlessness, desperate searching, frustration, and anger.

The stories and the character of the landscapes where Eugeni filmed the performers correspond directly to the expression of their actions. With Antonio Stella, for example, the artist filmed scenes at various significant locations in Sicily, including the spectacular landscape artwork Il Grande Cretto di Gibellina (The Great Crack of Gibellina), which the artist Alberto Burri worked on from 1984 to 1989. 5 Following the former street plan, Burri covered the devastation of Gibellina, which had been completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1968, with vast quantities of white concrete, creating a monumental architectural sculpture, and making the old streets of the destroyed town once again visible and accessible. Seemingly disoriented, Stella hurries in SOMA through the maze of streets shining an unreal white in the sunlight and conveys the feeling of disorientation reported by some of the residents who survived the devastating earthquake of 1968 and were resettled in the newly founded city of Gibellina Nuova. The new, sober, modern-looking city was never accepted as home by many of the residents. Instead, many of them are still drawn back to the old township, where there is nothing left but Burri's bare cement walls.

Eugeni's images from one of the many abandoned marble quarries in Sicily correspond with the abstract aesthetic of Burri's Cretto. Here, Stella gropes his way along steep marble walls to avoid falling into the abyss, spinning on his own axis on the lowest level of the quarry as if controlled by a higher power. Associations with Sandro Botticelli's depiction of Dante's description of hell as a funnel-like ravine with corridors running around it arise. Landscape and psyche merge in these impressive images by Eugeni. While Gabrio Gabrielli slowly, almost resignedly, sinks into a calm body of water in another shot, Anna Jäger rages through a field flooded with water in a furious fit of hysteria. Stella, Gabrielli, and Jäger make the various expressions of trauma and suffering tangible as corporeal phenomena through their presence both in the videos and in the spaces themselves. This is also the aim of the installation's title. With SOMA the Sineumbra collective refers, on the one hand, to a term that goes back to a specific way to conceive the body in the ancient Greek tradition σῶμα (sõma) as opposed to the mind. On the other hand, it refers to the term commonly used in Italian for a (physical) burden or load. This idea is directly transferred to the viewers of the installation. Much like Stella, who wanders through a wide variety of landscapes in the videos, they too move from room to room as if on a journey. At the same time, they find themselves transposed into the video projections again and again. Their shadows are cast onto the projected images as they pass through a beam of light, so that they, the viewers, are integrated into the landscapes. The textile works hanging from the ceiling also appear to react when the breeze causes them to sway slightly as the viewers pass by. These textiles not only embrace the viewers with their labyrinthine character, but seem to make contact with them. Created as a collective work, the special openness of the work that includes the viewers as a matter of course is palpable here.

The idea of the journey that the visitors embark on in the SOMA installation is inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1964 documentary Comizi d'amore (Love Meetings). To make this film, the director traveled through Italy and conducted numerous interviews about love and sexuality. He interviewed poets, politicians, but also children and prostitutes. In his documentary the director offered a multi-faceted cross-section of Italian society. Using a similar approach, Luisa Eugeni also interviewed people from different social and personal backgrounds, including a pastor, a seismologist, but also a former drug addict and a member of the Fridays for Future movement. Their responses to Eugeni's questions about the causes and consequences of the earthquakes, as well as other relevant social issues, appear as video projections in the third room of the installation. As in the work of Pasolini, they serve to highlight different voices in society, while at the same time their statements can be linked together on an associative level like a continuous chain. Eugeni arranged the images projected onto a free-floating surface as part of the sculptural table. She placed the video image of the interview partners at the head of the demolished table, seemingly in the midst of a house destroyed by the earthquake, thus referring to her perception of Italian society as a shattered structure.

This idea ties in with another of Pasolini's works that, along with the film Love Meetings, was also inspirational for SOMA: the text La Scomparsa delle Lucciole (On the Disappearance of the Fireflies), published more than 10 years later in Corriere della Sera. Here, the poet and filmmaker addresses the profound changes in Italian society and landscape since the 1960s, making critical remarks about the political situation of his time. The reference to this Pasolini reading appears at the very beginning of the SOMA installation. The abstract-looking images of sunlight reflected on a water surface that Eugeni captured in Venice are projected onto a light curtain made of metallic threads. Accompanied by Bonafini's sounds that suggest the flickering of flying beetles, the light reflections evoke fireflies on a summer night. In the Inferno scene quoted at the beginning of this essay Dante used fireflies as a conciliatory analogy as he gazed upon the damned souls wrapped in flames in the eighth pit of Hell. The souls burning cruelly in eternal fire are equated with the peaceful scene of a peasant looking at the fireflies after his work is done. This image softens the horror of Hell. Pasolini, whose in-depth knowledge of Dante is documented, described in his essay the disappearance of the fireflies, which is a dramatic consequence of the ever-increasing use of pesticides as well as the climate change that continues to this day. It served him as a metaphor for the loss of compassion he observed in the consumer culture that was developing in his time. 6

The motifs of light and dark, water and movement, which are present at the beginning of the installation, are answered in the fourth and last room by images of the Cascata delle Marmore, the highest man-made waterfall near the city of Terni. Two projections, each in three parts and arranged like a triptych, show different takes of the impressive waterfall, which Eugeni shot in the spring of 2020. Depending on the season, the floodgates are opened at different times of the day, and masses of water tumble down in a monumental spectacle. Eugeni's images projected into the room are also visible on the woven works hanging from the ceilings, intensifying the impression of continuously flowing water. The sound of rushing water, bells ringing in the distance and birds chirping, together with the seemingly never-ending flowing movement, evoke an almost meditative mood. The flowing water here conveys purification, lightness and tranquility after the oppressive and unsettling moods of the previous rooms. The impression is one that the mind and body can disconnect from each other, just as the weavings in this room seem to unravel. As in a catharsis, the bodily burdens and loads fall away. At the same time, however, this reconciliatory impression is subtly undermined by the fact that the Cascata delle Marmore is precisely not a natural, but a man-made spectacle. The feeling of the sublime is artificially created in this tourist attraction, elaborately integrated into nature, as comparable to a carefully composed romantic landscape painting that awakens a sublime shiver in the presence of nature's grandeur.

SOMA is a multilayered reflection of the complex interrelationship of landscape, society, and man. In this decidedly performative installation, static elements combine with ephemeral performances, moving video images with live movement in space, the auditory with the visual, the represented art with the sensations of the viewer. The physical-sensory experience continues with the contributions in this catalog by authors from the fields of art, philosophy, literature, political activism, and queer theory. With their complex installation that addresses all the senses and their multifaceted exploration of social and political geographies, Sineumbra is at the intersection of history, politics, and art.

1. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Robert Hollander (New York 2002), Inferno, Canto XXVI, Lines 25–31.
2. The motif of interweaving that is central to SOMA is given special attention by Mona Schieren in her essay in this catalog (pp.##-##).
3. Ernest Ah addresses the question in this catalog with regard to the eviction of the occupied building in Liebigstraße in Berlin-Friedrichshain in October 2020 (p. ##-##).
4. Giulia Scandolara has collected these reports and analyzes the multiple consequences of earthquakes for people in her essay in this catalog (pp. ##-##).
5. Due to financial difficulties, the monumental project could only be completed posthumously in 2015. Cf. Natalie P. Koerner, "Il Grande Cretto and the shifting ground: temporalities of the geological mode," in Emotion, Space and Society 33 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2019.100619 (last accessed Jan. 11, 2021).
6. See Georges Didi-Huberman, Survival of the Fireflies, transl. Lia Swope Mitchell (Minneapolis 2018), p. 1.