Oases of Affection Laura Cherubini

A Few Notes on Bruna Esposito in Garrison

“Well you see, Brother Francis, we’ve convinced the hawks and now the hawks worship the Lord as hawks; and we’ve convinced even the sparrows, and for their part, even the sparrows are alright with it, they worship the Lord. But the fact is that among themselves … they fight …they kill each other, … what can I do about it Brother Francis if there’s a class of hawks and a class of sparrows that don’t get along? What can I do?”

“You’ve got to change it, change the world: this is what you don’t understand! Go and start all over in praise of the Lord!”

(Dialog in the Umbrian woods between St. Francis, Brother Ciccillo/Totò and Brother Ninetto/Ninetto Davoli in Uccellacci e uccellini by Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1966).

The first small building erected on the property of Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu in Garrison is a children’s house suspended from tall trees. It is a simple and modest structure made of pine wood, a primary and elementary material. Immersed in the woods, the tree house is not very visible and is far from the splendid residence designed for Nancy and Giorgio by Alberto Campo Baeza and from the guest house designed by Aryeh Siegel. It is the first small dwelling unit, the first architectural cell dedicated to the space and time of childhood. Like the houses in fairy tales it is initially hidden from sight.

This is precisely where Bruna Esposito decided to intervene when she was invited by Nancy and Giorgio, who continue to enrich their property with site-specific work made exclusively by Italian artists (a courageous and clear choice on their part). This was not the first time Bruna chose to put herself on the edge or the margins of a situation. In both the Italian and international contemporary art scene she is an isolated but extremely interesting presence, known for her poetic, secret and somewhat hidden installations. Bruna Esposito’s art interventions take place in internal or external environments, make use of organic or inorganic materials and also frequently incorporate immaterial “materials” such as lights, sounds and smells in a continuous polysensorial expansion. “The artist calls reality and metaphor into play to create situations of energy and environments in which reflection and emotion come to rest in equilibrium and tranquility.” (Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev) Bruna Esposito often chooses the margins of an exhibition space to present her work. For the conference-exhibition Arte Identità Confini held at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome in 1995, she presented the video installation O‘ lietto matrimoniale in various bedrooms of people affiliated with the organization of the project. Viewers witnessed a daily event that is also a ritual, a domestic ceremony enacted by the women of the artist’s family who made a double bed, spreading out the sheets and fluffing up the pillows: “Ample makes this Bed” (Emily Dickinson). Through video technology,  the artist evokes anthropological memories, as in a later work called Trittico dell’Ape (Serre di Rampolano) where the same characters prepared “struffoli”, a typical Neapolitan cake (the artist is from Naples) made mainly with honey, while reciting popular proverbs in a Neapolitan dialect. In her project for the Quadriennale (Pianto solare, 1997) the artist chose the women’s bathroom as the site for her art intervention, overturning the logic of marginalization into an ecology of existence based on a cycle of energy that resulted in not everyone being able to see the work. The performance piece she presented in the same year for Città Natura was located in the street, far from the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, at a bus stop on the sidewalk. Before that, in an almost secret performance titled La Sagrada Familia, she took a walk around the market of Piazza Vittorio (a multiethnic neighborhood), arm in arm with an African man and pushing a baby carriage in which curious onlookers could see a large fish ironically resting on a bed of ice. Even in the ’97 edition of Documenta in Kassel her piece, titled Trittico dell’Oro, was not always visible and consisted of a precious diamond bracelet fastened to a bone.

Here the artist works in a vertical dimension next to the play house, which she sees as a dwelling of love, using a dimension that already characterizes the site because of its tall trees. In an arrangement of suspended, oscillating lightness, Bruna stacks a series of birdfeeders in a column, or a necklace, for the birds who are the true beneficiaries of the work. The light transparent column hovers over a large stone, not resting on it but leaning over it, and soars into the air, sensitive to the variations of the ether. Besides the birdfeeders, the column is composed of heterogeneous elements of ordinary plastic that take on the appearance of precious crystal. Some elements placed higher up turn with the wind like a precarious monument to instability. Lower down we see the earthenware hue of a small plate provided by Beata and flower-pot saucers, along with the sparkle of cymbals. By including parts of a musical instrument the artist introduces the element of sound into the work, an element that has often inhabited the work of Bruna Esposito. Sounds, lights and scents concurred in the meditative respite titled Tre Aromi per 3 held at Villa Medici in 1998. The seated spectators, who were no longer mere observers, listened to music composed by the musician S. M. Longobardi for the three scents rising from containers placed on camp stoves on the ground. But on the lower part of this necklace that oscillates like a pendulum there is one more “pearl” to string: Henry’s ball. Animals hold an important place in the life of Garrison, many different species live on the farm, birds fly through the sky and make nests in the trees, while dogs are the family’s companions: first Molly and Tara, then Henry, who beams with joy whenever he sees Stella, and now little Oliver.

Hanging or suspended among the objects, like a diaphanous alembic, are common bird feathers and a long peacock feather with its typical eye-shaped motif. This characteristic is what makes the peacock into a symbol of an all-seeing God, or an emblem of immortality and resurrection in the Christian faith while much earlier, in Greek mythology, the animal was sacred to Juno. The feather element is repeated in the contents of a domestic vase resting on the platform that functions as a landing to the house. On the other hand, a copper wire leading to the children’s house like a kind of umbilical chord underscores the connection between the house and the work. Thus an analogy is established in some way between the children and the birds that receive food and nutrition from Garrison. “Of Being is a Bird/The likest to the Dawn/An Easy Breeze do put afloat/The General Heavens – upon” wrote Emily Dickinson who in another poem called birds “My little Posts”.

For this parade of materials, from the rock on the ground, to the bronze cymbals, to the plastic of the seed containers, the artist took into consideration the succession of historical ages from stone, to copper, to bronze, to iron, to steel and to the present-day age of plastic.

At Garrison the vegetable and animal world cohabit in harmony, nourished by the care of man. Birds are animals in motion, not sedentary, but free, nomadic and migratory. The unprecedented main character of the movie Uccellacci uccellini by Pier Paolo Pasolini is a crow who speaks with the voice of Francesco Leonetti. The crow offers us glimpses of ironic criticism aimed at left wing intellectuals, but it is also an autobiographical reference to Pasolini himself. A major part of the movie is taken up by the macro episode of Assisi where St. Francis invites Brother Ciccillo (Totò) and Brother Ninetto (Ninetto Davoli) to preach the gospel to the birds. In the screenplay this episode begins as follows: “There is a tree, a great big immobile tree, chock-full of birds. There are birds of all species and all colors sitting still in the branches, seven, eight, ten, twenty per branch: there are sparrows, larks, thrushes, quails, finches, siskins, robins, nightingales, wood pigeons; engrossed, concentrating and barely moving their wings or their mysterious heads from time to time”. St. Francis “ looks like a little bird himself” and invites the birds to thank the Lord for having given them “such a noble element as a dwelling” and wings “ to flee with wherever they want”. In the screenplay of Mamma Roma Pasolini had already spoken of “Christ [as] the little sparrow”.

The title of Bruna Esposito’s work is the idiomatic expression Out Of the Blue which alludes to something that has fallen from the sky, rained down from the heavens above. In the movie Accattone by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Franco Citti sings a song that says “…there is nothing left for us to do but wait for manna from heaven…”. According to the Torah, manna is the food the Jews ate in the long forty years they traveled in the desert after fleeing from Egypt. Thanks to Moses, manna began falling from the sky when the Jews approached Sinai to receive the Torah. In the sacred texts manna is compared to a crystal stone and it was said that precious stones also descended from the sky. The children of Israel gathered as much as they needed and it had a different taste for every person, the taste each desired. Also called “the bread of angels”, it is a spiritual food produced by God with the help of angels using heavenly mills. At the end of the movie, as Accattone is being chased after an attempted theft and falls to the ground dying, he looks up to the sky and says: “Ahhhh, now I’m ok!” The only salvation that Accattone finds is death. He seems to welcome it because he greets it. Death frees him from a life of struggles, of living by his wits and of marginalization. Even in the episode titled Che cosa sono le nuvole? (in Capriccio all’italiana, 1968) Pasolini seems to give us a final image of heaven: after the two puppets Otello and Jago, interpreted by Ninetto Davoli and Totò respectively, are torn apart by a public in revolt and thrown into a landfill by singer Domenico Modugno they can look up and see the clouds for the first time in their lives. Beyond the space of fiction of the puppet theater (with Francesco Leonetti as the puppeteer and Pasolini’s alter ego) the sky appears as a mirage, as the ultimate horizon.

In another famous movie finale from Miracolo a Milano (shot in 1951 by Vittorio De Sica, and based on Totò il buono by Cesare Zavattini, a social fairy tale on the “poor and crazy angels” from the outskirts of Milan) the heroes of the time, the poor homeless bums from the city of the industrial miracle, “ascend” to heaven on flying broomsticks, as is worthy of a magical tale. In the Wizard of Oz, the most typical American fairy tale, shot in 1939 by Victor Fleming, Dorothy (played by Judy Garland) is deposited in the land of Oz by a tornado and is welcomed by the Munchkins with a song that describes her as The Girl Who Fell from the Sky. That which comes from the sky comes as a gift.

Even Paesaggio which was presented at MAXXI in 2012 was a gift given to us spectators. On this occasion Bruna and the poet Paola d’Agnese were both blindfolded like the goddess Fortuna. Paola murmured beautiful poems into the ears of visitors, the one she whispered in my ear talked about oases of affection. Meanwhile people were given small poems and paper flowers to hold in their hands. Finally, after a choral episode, all that remained in the museum was an Ape three-wheeler covered with flowers, like those used by street vendors which Bruna calls her “heroes of beauty”. Now this piece comes down to us amid the trees and onto the land of Garrison like a gift from the sky. A gift that reciprocates Nancy and Giorgio for the care they took in preserving the harmony of the site and a gift for us as well. But it is most of all a gift for the birds of all the united Americas, the real heroes of beauty to whom Bruna has dedicated her work.