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Giorgio Andreotta Calò’s work is characterised by certain recurrent themes which are recomposed in different ways, in accordance with complex projects that bear the mark of a long and continuous reflection at the technical, imaginative and semantic level.
One is architecture, rethought in Gordon Matta-Clark’s deconstruction: opening up walls, creating crossings between fullness and emptiness, recomposing relationships in a search for viewpoints from which to rethink the sense of the building, its stability and instability. We see this from his first research, as in Sunset Boulevard (2004-2006), to his experience in the Fondazione Ratti course with Marjetrica Potrč in 2006, held in a building close to demolition;[1] and from the bivouac to the symbolisation of architecture through light and sound installations, in Naples in 2005, for the Young Artists’ Bienniale, or in Sarajevo in 2006, through an iconic and powerful image of the destroyed Parliament, lit from within by a red light, dawn and dusk.
The questioning of viewpoints is another recurrent theme, as in the mezzanine built between 2006 and 2007 in the Ateliers of the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, used by Calò as a work and design space. Taking up a higher position meant increasing the space available to the human eye. Also worth mentioning is the flight by boat with a crane over Lambrate in the 2008 video Volver, or the reflected space of the large truss in the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2017). Then there is his installation at MAXXI (winner of the Premio Italia Arte Contemporanea 2012), the product of the desire to bring into this space a panoramic viewpoint over the Flaminio district, visible from the museum’s windows.
Another recurrent theme is the darkening of space — darkness as a natural camera obscura to immerse oneself within oneself and feed into the work. Lonely lights like torches, headlights, fires pierce this space. This was the mood in which the night walk with Luca Lo Pinto emerged — an in-depth interview, indispensable for getting to know the artist, and accompanied by frames of the streets of Rome.[2] Calò descends into the darkness with the Sulcis miners and films them walking at night toward the sea; the buildings seem to catch fire as in Bologna, in 2010’s Monumento ai caduti…
These three points feed on actions which move physically across space, History, and memory. Then there is the walk in the southern lagoon in 2007, a Herzogian image, a homage to Venice and the generating force of water; the drift in Sarajevo from East to West following the sun; or that in Limpias in Spain, after the 2007 discovery of a print of the Christ of the same name, in search of this image’s origin. The action produces tension and leads toward a vision that embraces the space which is occupied between birth and death. The processes which Calò activates aspire to a form of epic monumentality. The artist’s energy in these phases is individual: one walks alone.
The act of walking as an artistic practice can surely count a long series of protagonists. With Marina Abramović and Ulay in The Great Wall Walk (1988) it became a tension between bodies; in Richard Long, sculpture and photography; in Vito Acconci, Sophie Calle, and Mona Hatoum, discovery of the other, encounter, a public statement; in Hamish Fulton, whose vision is perhaps more conceptual, the act cannot be re-presented.[3]
Calò himself seems aware of this difficulty: we can produce Polaroids, notes, diaries…. Then we need time, waiting. We can think back to his work at the 2011 Venice Biennale, the journey on foot from Amsterdam to Venice; an entry, Ritorno. That work stimulated a little debate. We know that the work was supposed to be more complex, flooding the Scarpa garden to create an image “that would overturn the architecture and the sky”, but this operation did not receive permission. Or the crossing of the streets of Los Angeles, in 2010, inside the boot of a car, producing direct impressions of urban space through a pinhole, in search of peripheral images. Was the goal achieved — or was this an exercise in preparation for a more mature work?
Another challenge: the move to the collective walk. Here, we are talking about the walk from Genoa to Ventimiglia, and back to Genoa again, which took place in summer 2013. This was born in memory of the G8, which the artist experienced first-hand on 20 July 2001; the walk returned to the city on the night of 21 July, twelve years on. Did the symbolic journey the artist had imagined play out in the bodies and minds of the participants? There is no unanimity. Of that crossing there remains a choral publication with the participants’ materials produced in three copies.
A point of comparison: in 1999, at the Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Hamish Fulton led a workshop, accompanying a group of young artists on a long and daring itinerary, repeated several times, that put the participants to the test. What remained of this collective movement? The bodies of the individuals. Fulton himself insists that “An object cannot compete with an experience”; commenting on this line Angela Vettese concludes that life is lived “on its own”, even if it is led in company. Your body governs your mind, which clings to the body in order not to succumb.[4] We must accept that that experience will remain in the treasure chest of the psychophysical memory of the artist and the participants. Yet, with the more recent Gloria project,[5] the heroic — we might even say, monumental — incommunicability of the walker seems to become something else.
“We are Lines”, writes Tim Ingold, in a fine book of his.[6] Walking is an ideal condition for orienting body and world, mind and breath towards an “atmospheric” vision of design, of form, of seeing and being seen. With Gloria — a journey to L’Aquila carried out in the opposite direction to the seismic waves of the earthquake that struck the area in 2016 — he leaves the Promethean dimension to meet nature where it acts as a History-changing force, along a fault line that is a sign of superhuman and apocalyptic events. Action produces meaning in the organic lines of symbiotic relationships and tensions. It is no coincidence that there is a line etching the cover and marking the skin of the written pages like a scar. On the roads we trace drawings in the form of a vortex, says Ingold, which envelop us. The diary, almost a breviary for a solitary liturgy, is the image that takes us back to the fragility and normality of the journey: humble participation in the inescapable and poetic remoteness of lived time.
[1] Various authors, Fragmented Book, Corso Superiore di Arti Visive, Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Nero, 2006.
[2] G Andreotta Calò, Prima che sia notte, Archive Books, 2014.
[3] R. Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Penguin, 2001.
[4] Hamish Fulton, Keep Moving, Charta, 2005.
[5] G. Andreotta Calò, Gloria, Humboldt Books, 2021.
[6] T. Ingold, The Life of Lines, Routledge, 2015.
