Italian artist Virginia Zanetti’s project, The Pillars of Earth, talks about exploitation of human and natural resources. By Team Viva
Heavily influenced by her father’s description of the country, Virginia Zanetti visualised India as home to a great tradition of spirituality and culture. So sure was she that she had no second thoughts about where she wanted to go when she won a fellowship to do a project. The result was The Pillars of Earth.
Through the project, she asks people not to abstain from their role in bringing about change. “The photo installation of people holding a huge rock is about empowerment and tries to expose exploitation of natural and human resources. Human beings are seen supporting the world as pillars of the earth and hence try to trigger a collective process of generating new concepts and paths. It attempts to reverse a perspective to show that each individual can support the world. I lived in Paradsinga, a village that shares a border between Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, for a month for the project. It was done in collaboration with some Indian artists and activists,” she says.
“From the description of my father, who was in India when I was young, I had developed an idea about the country. I choose to work here both for its spirituality and its fast development during the past several years. The developmental activities have a severe environmental impact. In every place, which I visited, there was some issue or the other. Also I am interested in rural areas and the people who live there. Human beings can’t be separated from nature. I am not a journalist, an activist or a writer. As an artist my attempt was to look at the situation from a different perspective and to give a poetic view,” she says.
“I ask people to walk together for change. During the process, we may see better, we talk, exchange ideas and spontaneously create a new community.” Cutting across categories of the staged, abstraction and realism, Virginia often introduces an experiential element to her work, by creating encounters with live bodies performing along with her works by pictorial, photographic or sculptural media. Seamlessly she works across different media, as she states, “I work with ordinary people, artists, musicians, athletes, earth, water, pigments and objects, using their energy and symbolic charge.”
Her works dissolve many notions of being bound through various categories, both physically as well as metaphysical. Material and immaterial forms merge as performance turns into object, and the viewer becomes the artist as spontaneous collective forms develop. The opposites and the ‘unknown’ are turned into a creative impulse, as a desire to encounter and release “madness, tears and laughter,” to discover the edge of everything and anything, and to push it beyond itself.
The artist, who uses diverse media — photography, painting and video — says that the common features of her works stem from an attempt to understand the functioning of life and relationships that support it. “I work on non-duality, not on individuality. I always tried to be a part of all. Hence I have attempted to find the point of tangency between Western and eastern culture.”
On the idea of non-duality, she elaborates: “Through art I can feel and see better besides finding my place in the world. I can think of the world, talk to it and act on it. Our life is a web of mutually interconnected and interdependent relationships. In these years I have attempted to reveal the non-dual relationship between the self and the other. Also, my personal memories are closely connected with collective ones to transform them to discover new meanings. The artwork is an integral part of the environment where it is conceived: like a collector of human dynamics. Hence the less visible part of my work, which may seem ephemeral, is made of everlasting relationships. These aspects makes me feel safe to let go the ‘material’ part of my work and allow it to evolve on its own.”
On the use of ‘landscape’ in her works, she says, “In 2013 I started on a work cycle called Studies for the Ecstasy in the landscape, a series of works that attempt to delve into the concept of non-duality between individuals and their landscape: the fusion of the self with the other. In these works I start my performances in the classical landscape of Tuscany, all the way up to include the whole environment where our life takes place, people included.”
The artist is open to the unknown and willing to accept the possibility of error that often becomes her main source of work. “It’s the same with my limits. I try to indulge that part of myself which is not educated or civilised and to bring out madness, tears and even laughter. Then I use these in a creation of work that means the positive.”
Before moving to Paradsinga, Virginia was in Goa where she has created “some photographic works and an installation composed of drawings of people who offered their vision of a world turned upside down.” She chose to work in India both for its spirituality and its fast development in these last years. “The work in Goa has evolved through some workshops for the educational Department of MOG (Museum of Goa) and in some beaches in collaboration with the yoga master Bablu Marik,” she says.
She further adds, “The first public performance was made on a volcanic cliff in Arambol beach, as a sort of starting point for the project, having the intention of involving more and more people in several places around the world.”
It was a starting pointing for the project. Curated by Ravi Agarwal, the show is progressing at the Italian Embassy Cultural Centre. It will conclude on February 10.