Contemporary Walk: the San Gimignano you don't expect
Amidst the majestic towers and medieval palaces with historic charm, San Gimignano retains an entirely contemporary soul: in fact, in the streets and squares one can encounter public artworks created by great world-renowned artists who, over the years, have taken part in numerous projects promoted by the city and its associations. The first project to be realized was Affinity, promoted by the City Council and curated by Giuliano Briganti and Luisa Laureati in 1994, and involved works that would appear unexpectedly throughout San Gimignano. The aim was to create a more "active" experience for the city, strongly anchored in its centuries-old heritage.
In Affinity, art takes the form of contemporary "infiltrations" (R. Fuchs) into public spaces. Eschewing the monumental, the works-signed by five Italian artists-are intended to reinvigorate peripheral or decaying parts of the city, or to revitalize the cultural and aesthetic value of certain sites, legitimizing the value of art as a tool for renewal and redevelopment. Subsequently, the historic center of San Gimignano once again opened its doors to initiatives dedicated to contemporary art, hosting the project Art to Art., promoted by the Associazione Arte Continua, which permanently left works by Joseph Kosuth, Anish Kapoor, Luisa Rabbia and Kiki Smith.
In addition to these projects of national and international significance, the historic center of San Gimignano is home to numerous installations by artists from the city that fit throughout the center. These include works by Franco Balducci, Silvia Beghè and Maurizio Masini. The San Gimignano Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art houses a section devoted to these projects and can be an excellent starting point for embarking on the environmental art itinerary.
"My intervention was born of contrast: to the vertical sculptures, the towers, to the medieval severity, I wanted to counterpose a lightness suggested by the old wall that seemed to be waiting to welcome this work of mine, a predestined place, escaping from the fortress toward the emptiness of the valley and accentuating the precarious sense of vertigo of this installation of mine."
(Cit. taken from Eliseo Mattiacci, Affinity. Five Artists for San Gimignano, exhibition curated by G. Briganti and L. Laureati, Florence, Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1995).
Crowning this very special astral design is the presence of the phrase "Tout se tient," which impeccably follows the entire concentric course of the drawing, beginning and ending with the same letter "T." The inscription also recalls the image of a sundial because it almost redundantly contains the letters marking the four cardinal points: "O"(West), "S"(South), "E"(East), "N"(North).
The French locution "Tout se tient," dating back to Ferdinand de Saussure (first appearing in a 1989 text), represents a great whole in which all parts are coherent and interrelated, just as the same motif of planetary orbits evokes the perfectly balanced and autonomous system of celestial iconography: an image of a harmony in itself well-defined and accomplished.
"...The work is as tall as the church of San Jacopo, it resembles a bell tower, with the difference that it has the haunted bell that doesn't move and can be seen not to move... I would like the iron with which it is drawn to be seen in the afternoon, because the silhouette at that hour is written between the back wall and the sky, and with its iron canopy it resembles the country crucifixions, made of iron, or the crosses at the ends of towers, or the gratings of abandoned houses. What matters to me is that it is not considered a sculpture, but a handwriting on the wall marked by time."
(Taken from Jannis Kounellis, Affinity. Five Artists for San Gimignano, exhibition curated by G. Briganti and L. Laureati, Florence, Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1995)
On the one hand, there is the clear message of a country at auction, selling itself to the highest bidder, and it is no coincidence that it was chosen for the city of San Gimignano, a unique jewel of history that for years has been the object of mass, hit-and-run tourism, which makes the city appear as a commercial commodity; on the other hand, there is the literal construction of a country at auction, that is, the material reproduction of a country with a boot-like profile, skewered by a pole and put there, on display.
(taken from: Nunzio, Affinity. Five artists for San Gimignano, exhibition curated by G. Briganti and L. Laureati, Florence, Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1994)
(Images of the City, W. Benjamin)
Joseph Kosuth's work for the city of San Gimignano, created for the Arte all'Arte project, is thus shown, the frame to a seat, a 35-meter carving in pietra serena that through the words of Walter Benjamin accompanies and recalls a now past tradition: that of sitting in front of the doorway. A tradition that is typically Italian and of the small villages, of those small towns, as San Gimignano has been. Through the use of one of the area's most common materials and the words of one of the most famous theorists of the early twentieth century, Kosuth thus succeeded in creating a dialogue between antiquity and contemporaneity, bringing to light a tradition that, perhaps, looking closely, has not yet completely faded from the memory and cultural roots of every San Gimignano resident.
The first intervention saw Kosuth's work placed inside the Loggia del Podestà of San Gimignano, the symbolic place of city power for several centuries, but it was later moved to the garden of the Bagolaro, in front of a center that offers services and spaces for the elderly population. After all, what better location for the work than near those who embody the very image that Walter Benjamin sought to evoke in "Images of Cities"?
The main subject of the sculpture, made of mosaic and ceramic, is the two-dimensional and illusory figure of an old man, Time, positioned among the waters, moss and humidity of the place. Wrapped in a heavy blanket, which appears almost useless because of the climatic conditions of the place, he shows the viewer his hands, one of his two feet and his face, made of ceramic to bring out the tears that, like the moments of an entire life, slowly slide down his face, the face of Time.
Luisa Rabbia often works on the theme of sleep, on a state of wakefulness that barely deviates from the unconscious and that at the same time is also the gateway to a dimension in which each of us continues to learn something about ourselves. In fact, the final and overall image of the sculpture, calls to mind that of a modern Ophelia, surrounded by nature and accompanied by the waters of a river on a journey with an unknown destination, in a suspended atmosphere between past and present, life and death, dream and reality.
The work is currently under restoration and not on view.
Kiki Smith brought three of these maidens to populate the arches of UMoCA, Cai Guo-Quiang's "museum" made under the arches of the San Francesco Bridge in Colle di Val d'Elsa. Blown crystal bulbs with incredibly subtle and refined reflections were added to the three maidens, dressed in red, yellow and blue; when the project was completed, the artist identified as many symbolic places in the area, including the Rocca di San Gimignano, to permanently house the works.
Kiki Smith's maidens represent the concept of the idea, of the moment in which the famous spark is set off, which comes when least expected, in a second of momentary confrontation and dialogue with the space around us, as if in it the invisible link between us and the universe is made tangible and explicit.
"The young woman sits in nature, within nature and is not separated from it, so her ideas are the ideas of the world..."
(quoting Kiki Smith)