Bisser

smart drowning

Vera Bugatti (IT)

<div>The piece is inspired a 1997 documentary called “Partigiani” by D. Chiesa, precisely the short interview with Iva Montermini, a partisan woman relay who lived in Correggio. The photographic cut and the lighting prevented me from reading her face precisely, but I still tried to portray her as a tribute. Iva, in a monumental version, while she evokes the three partisan brothers and the fact that once captured she had not spoken to protect them.&nbsp;</div><div>I was very impressed by her words, when she remembers that after a night of interrogation and torture she was released and returned home across the fields: “it seemed to me that the sky was who knows where” – “The fields seemed to me all upside down”. A harrowing and poetic epiphany: it was so upset inside that even the outside world had completely turned upside down. Those fields were impossible for me to paint, any pictorial attempt (with my language) would have been less powerful than his words. But I had her to occupy that wall. So I represented her thoughtful, moved, while showing a photograph from when she was young. Below is a clear silhouette of a bicycle. The bicycle is no longer there but something remains to evoke it. I thought about Plato. The luminous outline is not the shadow of the bicycle (its memory) but the very idea of ​​the bicycle and the fundamental role it played for the Resistance. Palpable, on the other hand, is the story of Iva as an elderly woman, the precious role of the conservation and dissemination of ‘memory’. For this reason, in the upper left corner I painted a child of today crouching, to represent the new generations, while listening to the story of a distant time.&nbsp;</div><div><br><br></div>

I CAMPI CAPOVOLTI (The inverted fields)

<div>The artwork is dedicated to the fascinating history of the underground printing press of the Resistance, set up in 1944 at the Podere Piave in Cànolo by Pinotti brothers with the printer Gino Patroncini, a Communist who the fascist state had inscribed in the lists of special supervised. He coordinated for 11 months the activity of a small printing house, a secret and very dangerous job, and they haven’t been discovered till the end of the war.&nbsp;</div><div>Through my work I have tried to evoke Patroncini’s experience as a recluse, the cramped environment, the light that illuminates half a face, experiencing only one pupil, the ear tense to perceive the external danger, the tired aspect of whole days of incessant activity, the fear of getting caught. Yet this surreal nocturnal is tinged with blue and is a light that comes not only from the candle (around which only darkness would be perceived) but also from the flying characters and from the character himself. An unreal and magical light that is the power of the word, of the struggle through ideas. The title Clam refers to the Latin adverb which means “secretly, without the knowledge of” (The etymology of the word clandestine is in fact due to the Latin clamdestinus: clam = secretly + dies = day. He who hides himself from day, it conceals itself, it conceals itself) but also at the same term which in English means “mollusk”, recalling the idea of ​​the bivalve mollusk that hides something precious (and symbolic, like truth) inside.</div>

Artworks in Reggio Emilia