“Mare nostrum piangere, amplexibus” arrives in Somma Vesuviana, Mario Acanfora’s solo exhibition at the Teatro Summarte in via Roma 15. Vernissage Sunday 5 January 2020 at 17 pm.
Acanfora's is an artistic tale whose plot is based precisely on the "movement" of man and its consequences, as a necessary action that derives from the wandering instinct of our ancestors.
“Migrating – according to the artist from Safat – is not a biological fact but an existential and political act, whose right (Ius migrandi) has yet to be recognized.
The title of the solo exhibition, “Mare nostrum piangere, amplexibus”, was born from reading Erri De Luca’s poems from “Solo andata” (a tragic poem that tells the dramatic journey of a group of illegal immigrants) and from the need to share an urgent and dutiful project that has the ambition to tell the present, contemporary history, the odyssey of migrants and the individual and collective stories of the journeys of the new damned of the Earth.
The work unfolds through two themes: the journey and the arrival, tears and hugs. Tears, shed for those who left, left and never arrived, lost or drowned during the journey. Hugs, for those who made it: arrived in the hope of a new and better future, but who did not find it. The tear is a metaphor for pain, abandonment, loneliness; hugs, a tender, common gesture, represented by the hand bending of iron elements that with force, find harmony in a forced torsion. And precisely in this material, in this practice, that hug becomes something difficult, rare, tiring but at the same time - once the gesture is done - insoluble and eternal.
In this cycle of works Acanfora makes an artistic effort that goes beyond the representation of the themes treated. The artist makes “creation” a practice of reflection, he “gets his hands dirty” and “touches” those tears while he creates them, assembles them, and only when his fingers are wet, he finds the fulfillment of his artistic activity. The visual narration of the Scafatese Acanfora is composed of twenty-one works which, through a mixed technique, intend to awaken consciences and accompany them in the understanding of events that are now daily that erroneously, anachronistically, are defined as phenomena. Tears and hugs, daily and natural gestures full of emotion, external reflections of one's state of mind, of one's feelings.
This way of understanding and operating echoes in all the components of Acanfora's works. The veils of blue and light blue that overlap and merge in his representation of the sea are not water and not geography, but history lived over the centuries. His brush strokes are pages written in time that often tell tragic events and it is for this reason that the sea is not represented but "created", savoring everything that conceptually the sea wants to tell us.
A certain “beauty” that can be admired in this work is nothing other than saltiness left by the waves on the rocks. The true beauty of this artistic “journey” lies at the bottom of that sea, in the storms, in the shipwrecks that are like the porthole of a submarine that gives us the possibility of overturning the poetics with which we are used to “looking”, making us observe – with new eyes – the reality of the facts. Mario Acanfora interprets and represents those pages of history like a fisherman empties his large nets early in the morning, “vomiting” everything that the sea carries in its belly. And if the horizon of the works seems infinite to us, it is because there at the bottom there is hope, the strength to move forward, to commit to a better world. Mario Acanfora with his work shows us the way with the experience of an old captain who has been able to fix with strokes of color and wire the emotions and feelings, the reactions and reasoning of an ancestral desire such as that of the “movement”.
EDITORIAL TEAM
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