Water Through
Cast mold of a street fountain in Venice.
Saint Mark+Flying Lion=Water
There are three elements connected in the street fountains of Venice. The “flying lion” symbolizes St Mark and his Gospel, which begins with the words about the voice of John the Baptist proclaiming the coming of Jesus and baptizing with water and words that were "the voice of one crying in the wilderness." These words have been likened to the roar of a lion, symbolizing strength and authority and his version of the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The sacredness of the baptism with water next to John the Baptist's words, narrated by St. Mark in his Gospel, makes every water fountain in Venice an urban and religious place.
St. Mark, water, and the lion are the three-in-one symbols of Venice, and the hundred drinking water fountains embody the memory of Venice through water.
The Gaze of the Water
The term “The Gaze of the Water" is purely poetic here. It refers to the concept of the observer effect. The observer effect is a disturbance or alteration of an observed system caused by the act of observation itself. The idea is taken from quantum mechanics, where measuring or observing a particle can affect its behavior or properties. The behavior of matter changes depending on whether they are observed or not. When unobserved, matter particles exhibit water-like behavior and can interfere with each other. However, particles behave individually when observed and do not exhibit interference patterns. I believe that the observer effect is not limited to physics and can also be observed in art and social science. The presence of an observer influences the behavior or responses of the subjects being observed, leading to potential biases or altered outcomes.
Magnet Memory Recall
Water memory is shaped by personal experiences, perceptions, and interpretations rather than solely based on objective facts or accuracy. Reading water memory is also subjective. It develops less from recalled episodes of forgetting and more from the individual experience of the place and time.
liquid heart
tu potresti incorniciare
una macchia sul muro
e la rete di un ragno
che cattura la rugiada e la pioggia
tu vorresti incorniciare
una nuvola
un intero lago
una montagna d'acqua
un cuore liquido che pulsa poesia
parole trasparenti
invisibili
impregnate della memoria del mondo
ma è il tuo battito
che stai incorniciando
il battito di un istante eterno
Lorenzo Mullon
August 11. 2024
Venetic Water traps
Rain on Paper
…
Calle Del Forno
Water flows everywhere in Venice: on canals, under squares and houses, inside walls, and with people. As Michal says, water climbs buildings from bottom to top. The moisture is on the walls as scars. One #waterscar was homaged today on the Calle Del Forno in the Judish Quarter.
Ghetto Vecchio Day
Organizing a studio and finding things last minute in Venice is complicated without an experienced professional agent. Not knowing how to cross the canals means 14,064 steps. The works exhibited were made in the past two weeks with water from the Greek Macedonian lake Kastoria and the village Zagorichani (Vasiliada), where Bucev’s family lived till 1905. The Venetian poet Lorenzo Millon and the Venetian artist and gallerist Michal Meron visited the studio.
Marocchino Essiccante
The art piece Marocchino Essiccante is about the interconnectivity of all elements of Earth, including the long-term effects of human acts on nature and climate. It is part of a series of small-sized art pieces related to drying the Po River in Northern Italy.
Title: Marocchino Essiccante
Medium: African iron tree wood, raw cocoa seeds, glass, rainwater, red seal wax.
Size. 12”X18”X1/2”
The art piece Marocchino Essiccante is about the interconnectivity of all elements of Earth, including the long-term effects of human acts on nature and climate. In 2023, the artist created a series of small-sized art pieces related to the drying of the Po River in Northern Italy. The choice of such a piece is based on the fact that it presents a vision to observe and analyze elements like color, material, textures, and composition, as well as a global meaning outside the visual form. The viewer can experience the pleasure of seeing the warm, earthy colors and soft velvet texture and teleport to the origin of the objects composed in the artwork. Still, the complete aesthetic pleasure will come after understanding the story behind the piece.
A thick piece of wood in rectangular form, approximately the size of a human face, with wood grain unusually compressed and lacking distance between the growth rings. The texture of the wood piece suggests a tropical wood kind, and the color speaks about a significantly tall tree. The artwork label mentions that the artist used a piece of wood from an African iron tree. About twenty cocoa seeds appear from the ironwood in a symmetrical pyramidal composition. The top center of the work is taken by a half-inch glass bubble filled with rainwater according to the medium description.
The overall look of the artwork is primitive and primal. It connects the viewer to a sense of African wooden sculpture in a postmodern mix of other materials. The style of the piece also blends contemporary Natural or Environmental Art. The artist's proposition involves natural materials, emphasizing essential qualities and textures. The piece has formal characteristics similar to those of the work of Andy Goldsworthy, Nils Udo, Agnes Dene, and Robert Smithson, among many others. However, this work differs because natural materials and organic forms are used for a conceptual message. Next to the esthetic pleasure of the materials stays the text with the deciphered code of each object of the composition. The pure, formal reading of Dodavia's work could mislead. The meaning of the iron tree wood, seeds, glass, and rainwater are the codes that explain why the Po River is drying up. The function of which visual element is presented inside the artwork's textual part. Each object has a role and is a character of the piece. The artist invented the name Marocchino Essiccante in Italian as a coffee drink he created with cacao and crystals of Mediterranean salt that is supposed to lead the person who drinks it to the concept of the drying Po River.
In the text with the work, the viewer learns that Italians and tourists consume about 80 thousand tonnes of cocoa annually. It means 400 million trees in the African rainforest were cut down to plant cocoa plantations. Each rainforest tree transpirate (bringing backwater into the atmosphere) around 6000 gallons. The artist concludes that nearly 700 million m3 of water is not sent back to the atmosphere over African and European continents with rain every year. Dodavia compared it to 250 thousand Olympic pools filled with water. According to the artist, this is one of the reasons why rivers like Po in Europe dry and disappear.
Marocchino Essiccante points out how pleasure drinks in the developed world that are not even essential for the body's nutrition participate in the imbalance of the environment and climate. The artist states that the Italian rivers disappear because of the destroyed water precipitation cycle. Deforestation through cocoa production is imbalancing water and energy distribution in the Italian soil, plants, and air. This produces irregular precipitations, fast evaporation, overheating, and the greenhouse effect. The main point of Neri Dodavia's artwork is that rivers like Po dry because trees in West, Central, and East Africa are cut and replaced with cocoa plantations. The text on the work says, "Every cup of Marocchino dries out another meter of the Po River."
flowing
Water constantly dilutes subjects and objects. It mixes content and forms with everything else in the world, and memories of the world from then and now flow everywhere.
Hydro
Thales dreamt that hydro was the building element of the world, and the reality is that hydrogen and helium are the two main elements of the known universe.
was there…
When light separated dark and the sky from earth, it was there. Water witnessed and recorded the world’s creation.
