Lettera a Shangai
a cura di Cecilia Freschini
http://www.lab-yit.com/sito/?p=1908&lang=en
April 2015
The artist tells about his experience, emotions and discoveries made during his period of residence in Shanghai …
…. It is very difficult to put together the pieces. Surely it was one of the most important and complex experiences that I have ever had.
My first time in China. Probably one of the most vibrant places today to live in the world. It is said that six months lived here count as six years lived in Europe.
In a period, wich is so long, apparently it feels like that, you realize to live in an incredible state of shock. But it’s all very fast. Once you are there, you are ready to go back again and leave the country. For here the time takes on another dimension. There are much more stimuli than any other European city, and here you are first of all forced to learn to live in a new social system. To learn again how to understand completely new mechanisms will exhaust all your energy.
Apparently, when you arrive at Pudong Airport all seems very similar to Western society. But the shock comes from the fact that behind the appearance, such as behind the lively and Tourism Nanjing Road, the reality is often quite different. The facade shows the internationality, like when you are looking at the Pudong, the beautiful buildings, beautiful shops of ostentatious wealth, but then you just turn the corner and the reality is simply there before your eyes, completely different.
So, like when you have to approach people, to ask questions or to buy something, the communication becomes a real challenge. You meet people who feel strongly embarrassed and sometimes even hide behind the desk of the store.
I spent much of my initial time to figure out where I was, how to orientate, where to find the shops to buy food, materials for work, paper, wood, metal, etc ..
It has been interesting to feel my loneliness in all this time in a place so far away and different from home: how to feel my emotions, my inner life, compared to an outer world so noisy, different, difficult to understand.
Lost in Translation.
After a period spent to orient myself, I tried to get as much as possible out of my experience.
So I started to visit many art spaces, making contact with people there. I was also very interested in historical culture and current artistic and social situation. Obviously a lifetime would not be enough to understand all this, but in six months you can always catch something. I realized I had to plan to waste as little time as possible.
I visited all I could, walking a lot and getting the most diverse neighborhoods, using the camera as a “small” laboratory to record the facts and the things I saw on the street: the old quarters of Shanghai which are disappearing, where sometimes people live almost in the rubble. I was recovering wreckage, objects, fragments of a reality adrift. I photographed also showcases of luxurious shops. Precious materials, or old monuments, small windows that reveal intimate inner lives, hidden passages, cracked walls or electrical cables strangely knotted. Traces from the past constructions and modern architectural styles that combine Eastern and Western. But I also enjoyed observing the exhibitions in the museums, and ancient objects displayed there, such as vases, delicate calligraphy, geometry in the details of ancient Mongolian clothes. Chinese boxes and small metal animals in antique markets.
There are so many things.
After three weeks of residence I was tired of looking at my empty studio and then, after a moment of disorientation I began to buy material here and that experience was even more interesting and completely different.
To go in search of the right material, to be able to communicate with the shopkeeper to ask for something, it was a great effort and a great satisfaction to bring even a little thing in the studio.
What I find fascinating: Fuzhou Road, the long way of the paper, where myriads of stationeries face the street to sell all possible types of paper. Or Beijing Road with the hardware.
Thus, already in the first month, I had made some models with thin laths of wood. Small and precarious structures as if they were cages, small rooms to protect an interior from an exterior. Three-dimensional drawings.
One day I was struck by the sophistication of some seals or certain calligraphies, of incomprehensible beauty.Here it was this incomprehensibility. This difficulty which was always present, as in Chinese boxes. Like in the communication with people. Like when you exceed a barrier and then reach another one, or like when I was in the Forbidden City in Beijing, behind a door, after an internal courtyard, I reached another door, and so on until, I came to a small, very beautiful and evocative garden.But just as in the armor, or in antique jewelry or antique architecture, I see an idea of maze, the infinite, a detail that immediately conceals suffered another one in its interior: it is impossible to decipher its meaning. The multitude means that there isn’t a preferential point. This thing is so different from our “renaissance” culture that instead prefers a point in space to which a whole hierarchy of values refers.I happened to find myself in many temples, where I observed this character of multiplicity.Thus, the models that I made, contain all these impressions: precarious fragile, essential but at the same time complex.From here, I then started the construction of the installations.
Another important aspect is that I put in my suitcase is definitely the notion of “emptiness”. This is so far from our Western view, which is more focused on the concept of the full and the matter.The vacuum is just another dimension. The Tea, the empty cup. The wait. The landscape in the history of Chinese art. The architecture in connection with nature. The concept of “open”. The Guqin. The music. The sound made up of silences, where the silence becomes an integral material molded in the artwork at par of the sound.But these are all elements of the ancient culture of China. Sure, if I think of the current society is another story. So, is this, plus other things.The society has undergone changes so vast and when I think of such a transformation so hectic, I wonder what will bring such this kind of shock. Or: when will this happen? What would be the reaction?Chinese society has changed very quickly. Has a very different story from our European. Twenty years ago it was totally different. But it’s too hard for me to understand it. Should ask historians, sociologists, psychologists, scholars of contemporary Chinese society.I can draw some interesting observations to another type of discussion.
I lost my mother a short time before leaving for Shanghai.
It was all so suddenly difficult and extremely complex, being in a place so different and so far away.
I was able to see me, as reflected in a mirror. I have pondered on our essence of being human and the concept of precariousness as we are, so tied to the dimensions of time and space, always precariously and passengers.
I felt the inner world upset, and in a sense I wanted to protect my “thing” intimate, inner, and / or still felt the need to reflect on it and protect this “thing”, from an outside world just so tumultuous, fast, dynamic, external and little delicate.
So, I lived this strong energy and I organized to not disperse it. Was Very Hard.
It was a solo trip, of deep loneliness, even though I was immersed in a “community” of various people inside the Swatch Art Peace Hotel.
Probably and unknowingly in this new installation, titled “Protection”, made in my studio during the almost six months of residence, I mixed elements from my research bifore Shanghai instead totally new elements, found by absorbing new experiences.
Surely if I had not come to China, I would never have be able to create it.
In “Protection” there are elements that recall the perspective: the idea of interior room or inner relations between finite and infinite, unity and multiplicity. The concept of fractal dimension.
In recent years, then I’m facing this concept of the board, the “outset” space, “threshold” between the size of the finite and infinite. The space of the waiting.
This residency in Shanghai was an opportunity to go deeper into all of these aspects.
But what is Protection? A cage? A secret and inimate room? A concentrated space, a sort of concentrated energy? A maze? A mantra? Is it a hug? Is it a network of links related to each other? Is it a seal? A strong meditation?
Probably all of this.
Protection is an explosion (or implosion). Protection is a door, a passage, a space of the boundary between an exterior and an interior.
With my surprise, a few days ago, someone told me that my name “Paolo”, translated in Chinese means “Protection”.
Paolo Cavinato was born in 1975 in the province of Mantova. He participated in the Istanbul Biennale in 2005. In 2008 he won the 3rd Prize of the Arnaldo Pomodoro Foundation in Milan. He was a member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors of London and has recently been in residence at the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai.
His installations have been exhibited in numerous public and private spaces including: Royal British Society of Sculptors in London, the Palace of Arts in Naples, the Egmont Park in Brussels, Galleria Civica in Modena, Volta in New York, the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai, Carrousel du Louvre in Paris, Istanbul Biennale, Volta Basel and Scope in Miami.
Paolo Cavinato participated at The Swatch Art Peace Hotel Artist Residency from May 18th to November 4th 2014.
At the residence in Shanghai, Paolo Cavinato created the installation “Protection”, which then had developmen with Protection # 2, proposed at the gallery The Flat, Milan.
This new project, “Resonator", remains on display until 26th June 2015.