Graphite 2024 - in progress
This series of new works is called Graphite after the experimental technique with which they are made. The project is an investigation of the places and people encountered while collecting sounds and images, environmental sensations, with the aim of creating woodcut installations and immersive settings. The project stems from the iconographic exploration that I started in 2020 with the project Petrolio, and which is still ongoing.
Graphite
Incipit
This series of new works is called Graphite after the experimental technique with which they are made. The project stems from an iconographic exploration that I started in 2020 with the Petrolio project, and which is still ongoing. The motivation that drove me to start this journey was an environmental investigation that had as its main starting point and reflection the largest oil field in Europe, which is in Basilicata and is causing environmental and social disasters that are not easily measured and rarely explained, just a few years after its opening. I approached the work broadly, as an iconographic investigation in places. I started from the heavily populated urban areas of London and Rome, their city centres and their suburbs, to continue in the industrial and commercial areas and reach the rural areas, pushing on to the splendid landscapes of the Lucanian mountains, now devastated by oil extraction.
Iconographic collection
The tool of investigation is xiloreportage, a neologism I coined a few years ago that merges the terms woodcut and photoreportage. It is a working method necessary to carry out iconographic and social investigations by documenting, photographing, drawing and carving woodcuts directly in the places investigated. The rigorous methodology underlying the practice of environmental investigation is closely linked to the equally severe logic of the research, observation, collection and analysis journey. Following this principle, I have created so far, about sixty woodcuts in a small format, a travel format, which are the starting point for a new path of investigation that intends to translate these iconographies into environmental constructions.
Sound harvesting
The second step of my investigation led me to cross those same places and new spaces by collecting the information of their soundscapes. I go and record in the field the noises, the voices, the passers-by. It is an analogue process of immersion, of listening and dialogue with the places and the people who live there. This has also led me to make a radical choice on how to move around, which, in these sessions, can literally only rely on my legs. I call it sound harvesting, to emphasise an approach that is like the harvesting of grain. The idea is to access the sound experience with the same respect, attention and dialogue that is required in front of an artistic experience.
Environmental works
One of the main thoughts behind printmaking I believe is the possibility of working on perceptive, emotional and narrative levels that are given simultaneously. The same as listening to a soundscape that can have a unique and linear narrative presence. At the same time, it may require attention to be directed to dwell on the presences of the very foreground to the distant whispers.For this project, I have started to conceive large-scale works, which will come in environmental dimensions, starting from the same concept of overlapping iconographic layers. The sounds and iconographies collected suggest the directions to take for the visual constructions I am going to make. I carve woodcuts on rough ply boards, which do not hide a robust narrative in the grain of the wood. The woods are inked as monotypes with graphite and lacquer, and are printed on semi-transparent Japanese paper (Washi Gampi 12 g) which, superimposed and glued, reconstruct visual and sound experiences, with the aim of suggesting tactile depths.
