Contextures
or the Hope of the Fireflies
Mona Schieren
"All I want is that you look around and take notice of the tragedy. What is the tragedy?
It’s that there are no longer any human beings;
there are only strange machines that bump up against each other."
Pier Paolo Pasolini 1
"But we should not be confined by the probable. We should discover the possibility hidden in the present.”
Franco "Bifo" Berardi 2
Fabrics can be sorted into warp and weft, but hardly into figure and foundation, structure and content, natural material and cultural technique. Indeed, all these dimensions are intertwined. The SOMA work created by the Sineumbra collective traces the social micropolitics as well as the collective and individual traumas and scars inflicted on the landscape by earthquakes and rock quarrying in the central Italian regions of Umbria, Lazio, Marche, and Abruzzo. In the process, the individual aspects, each of which interplays with the other on different levels, are medially intertwined. Various video projections, soundscapes, and textile fabrics form an environment that extends over four rooms; the exhibition as a whole can be understood as a fabric. It is a course through a fragmented yet coherent field of perception, which the viewers enter through a gate-like entrance and in which they can assume different perspectives. Each perspective opens up different approaches to the films, the hand-produced, partially transparent woven pieces and object arrangements by Luisa Eugeni, the soundscapes by Mattia Bonafini, and the performances by Gabrio Gabrielli, Anna Jäger, and Antonio Stella, forging multiple connections with one another.
In doing so, the circuit employs an ingenious dramaturgy. The curtain that marks the entrance to the first, semi-dark room has a veil-like effect; each of the braided Lurex silver cords that form this glimmering curtain is weighed down by a lead weight. The water reflections projected onto the hanging are reminiscent of Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1975 essay L’articolo delle lucciole (The Article of Fireflies). In it, the filmmaker sees the historical diversity of Italy's distinct cultural regions leveled by consumer society as well as the degeneration of people into consumer machines. 3 However, the silvery shimmering curtain, similar to a fly curtain, cannot stop the glittering firefly (water) reflections; they also buzz from the walls of the entrance to the second room.
There the woven ceiling-mounted hanging elements define a meandering course. Like the ancient idea of a labyrinth, it is a maze in which to get lost while searching for the exit. The fabric walls of the SOMA installation, however, appear light and translucent. The light from the projected video films saturates both the walls and the surfaces of the fabrics. It densifies into animated structures, while radiating into other areas and illuminating the entire environment. In turn, the partly reflective silvery Lurex fabric structure redirects the projected light; the textile weaves itself into the video image in the form of black shadows. The shadows created by the movements of the viewers become part of the installation.
This spatial composition is about physically tracing the connections between the individual elements, as well as finding the exit. As the visitors follow the dancers in the videos, they wander through rolling hills, eventually reaching a marble quarry. A quarry with veined rocks, whose shapes are picked up in the woven pieces hanging next to it. These weavings can be read as abstract, non-mimetic structures that nevertheless contain elements that remind us of a landscape, a mountain ridge, a rock formation, water, or a vein in the rock. Here conventional work boundaries are softened in favor of resonances and continuations through different media. A metaphorically conceived line in the fabric extends into a horizon line in the film, which in turn finds its echo in a vein of marble, and translates into a movement of the live performers. Performers, who wear suits knitted from plaited chains, made of the same light blue, grayish-silver material as the waterfall fabric shown in the last room. The moving bodies of the performers in the light-colored clothing become projection surfaces on which the films dance in a faceted and kaleidoscopic manner.
Christian Kravagna has argued that the traditional divisions between art genres and the "eminent hybridity phobia" of modernist art theory can be understood as an example of the characteristic "purification work" of Western modernism as described by Bruno Latour, the "categorical separation of nature and society, of the world of things and the world of people, of 'being modern' as a culture of separating these spheres from 'pre-modern' views as a blending of worlds." 4
Woven fabrics have the property of bringing weft and warp together and are infused with the interconnectedness of these elements. This is what distinguishes them. As mentioned earlier, one cannot differentiate between figure and ground, structure and content, natural material and cultural technique, in the sense of Kravagna's observations; through this characteristic of the fabric, SOMA succeeds in revealing the interconnectedness of protagonists and objects with their environment. Alternative concepts of reality appear, such as the notion of interdependence. Pulling a thread in one part of a fabric affects other parts of the fabric. They develop and shape themselves, or they tighten into knots. Moreover, the fabrics in the installation are not simply warp and weft. Plaited braids are woven into some of them, underscoring their three-dimensionality and these structures resemble veins in marble, readable as drawings. Other woven works appear as translations of landscape in a metaphoric sense. They were created looking out over the Umbrian countryside. This view disseminates the somatic perception of the landscape into the weavings.
Luisa Eugeni crafted the weavings in collaboration with members of her family. It is these hands that provide the knowledge of local and regional practices, brought together in an experimental way. The father built a basic weaving frame, equipped with all the necessary functions, from simple materials. The mother is an expert in the art of plaiting, braiding yarns into skeins of three, five or seven individual threads. Umbria and Tuscany have considerable historical expertise in braiding and weaving, so that handmade clothing has been available in larger cities such as Florence since the 19th century. In the 1950s and 1960s, Florentine fashion production, initially based on small local crafts, received increasing international attention. The ongoing process of industrialization, the rise of Milan as a fashion center in the 1970s, and globalization resulted in production being outsourced to other countries for cheaper wages. Former colleagues of the artist’s mother, who, before the decline of textile production in the region, supplied the haute couture of Florence and northern Italy, have contributed old yarn stocks for the production of the woven pieces of the exhibition. Various qualities - silk bouclé astracane from Tuscany, Lurex, cotton and linen - were woven together in the pieces. Weaving machines idle for several years were moving up again; traditional craft techniques and expertise were shared.
The production of the fabrics for the exhibition rekindled the networking between the women who practiced different crafts. Other family members and friends joined in the weaving. Their hands tell [a story]; in the words of anthropologist Tim Ingold, "The hand can also tell the stories of the world […] in the manipulation of threads as in weaving, lacemaking and embroidery." 5 The material of these stories, as well as of the fabrics, is the memory of communal textile production and diverse cultural skills closely linked to the region. These are the social structures that Pasolini believed were dying.
In other places, too, SOMA presents itself as a collective work that incorporates the perspectives of different actors. At the head of a demolished table where people used to meet for dinner, interviews with, among others, an architect and urban planner, a priest, a local politician, a geologist, the staff of a women's shelter, and an activist from Fridays for Future are assembled on a video screen, with only the hands and gestures of the interviewees visible. Their statements are mute and must be made out from the subtitles. Physical, psychological, and geological traumas connect in the narratives.
The projections surrounding the table scene include cinematic reconnaissance of the localities buried by the 2016 central Italian earthquake. The images reveal destroyed churches, damaged frescoes and sculptures, cemeteries, and residential and communal buildings. The perusal of abandoned villages like Norcia or Campi lay open the traces of their former inhabitants, forced to leave their homes in haste. Open newspapers from the day of the disaster, August 11, 2016, on broken kitchen tables testify to the passing of time that has come to a standstill. Like the layers of rock cinematically scanned and shifted against each other, causing cracks in the houses, the fabrics in this exhibition space also reveal different compressions and stretchings in the courses of the threads. A collapse in the rock or a shift in tension forces impacts all the other layers of the interconnected and interlocked fabric in the exhibition space. In addition, wads of threads spill out of the flat woven pieces tumbling out the way the broken stones spew from a destroyed house wall in the video. The chairs in the table scene in the museum are shadows that join the rows of chairs from makeshift open-air gathering places shown in the film.
In the interview, the architect speaks of interdependencies between places and events, between places and emotions. She explains that buildings can be in trouble just like people and that such crises affect the inhabitants. The "existents" in the sense of Elizabeth Povinelli, understood as lives, things, organisms or beings, 6 resonate with each other and with the events of a place. The nurse, in turn, talks about the relativity of her self-perception as a subject, which she experienced under the effect of mind-expanding substances. The geologist speaks of the time dimensions of the earth's history and draws awareness to a perception that flows from these cycles.
The light reflections of the first room are echoed in the fourth room, and the fireflies are reflected through projections of a waterfall. The water of the man-made Cascata delle Marmore flows in loops, as moving stills on the museum wall show slow changes of light, reminiscent of Romantic landscape painting. The fabrics hanging in the center of the room also appear as shadows in these images. They evoke the supporting scaffolding from the videos in the previous room and can be interpreted as a reference to the construction of the natural spectacle simulated here. At the same time, the bulging textile elements that well out from the fabric like fountains, seem animated by the flowing waterfall images partially projected onto them and, together with the sound, activate bodily perception.
Neither a striving back to a "genealogical society", which aligns itself with the "good old", nor to the "autological subject", 7 which merely projects all hope onto the future, points a way out of the crises of the present. In his reading of Pasolini, Georges Didi-Huberman asks, in defiance of televisual neo-capitalism 8 , whether all the fireflies have really disappeared. In his opinion, no; because that would mean, "[t]o act defeated: to be convinced that the machine is finishing its work without rest or resistance. To see only the whole. And thus not to see the space—though it may be interstitial, intermittent, nomadic, improbably located—of openings, of possibilities, of flashes, in spite of all." 9 In this sense, it is not a matter of repairing the social textile that has fallen apart and reinserting it into fixed fabric structures. On the contrary, the open ends can form links with other threads. Some of the woven works lay out these open ends. The weavings are evidence of a potentiality, because individual threads of diverse fibers become chains, which in turn form aesthetic structures together as a fabric. The warps and holes can open up possibilities for new connections, as in a ruin.
1. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “We’re All in Danger,” in Jack Hirschman, ed., In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology (San Francisco 2010) [ital. orig. 1975], pp. 233–242, here p. 235.
2. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Beyond the Breakdown. Three Meditations on a Possible Aftermath,” transversal.at, 03/2020: https://transversal.at/transversal/0420/berardi/en (last accessed November 20, 2020).
3. Cf. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “L’articolo delle lucciole,” in id., Scritti corsari (Milan 1975), pp. 156–164 [first published as “Il vuoto del potere in Italia,” in Corriere della Sera, February 1st, 1975]. English translation published in the blog Città Pasolini in 2016: http://cittapasolini.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-vacuum-of-power-il-vuoto-del-potere.html (last accessed February 7, 2021).
4. Christian Kravagna, „Reinheit der Kunst in Zeiten der Transkulturalität. Modernistische Kunsttheorie und die Kultur der Migration,“ in Burcu Dogramaci, ed., Migration und künstlerische Produktion. Aktuelle Perspektiven (Bielefeld 2013), pp. 43–64, here p. 47. Cf. there the reference to Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. Attempt to Create a Symmetrical Anthropology (Cambridge 1993), pp. 10–12.
5. Tim Ingold, Making. Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (London/New York 2013), p. 112.
6. Cf. Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies. A Requiem to Late Liberalism (Durham/London 2016), p. 5.
7. Cf. id., p. 172.
8. Cf. Georges Didi-Huberman, Survival of the Fireflies, transl. Lia Swope Mitchell (Minneapolis, 2018), p. 14.
9. ibid., p. 18.