Massimo Barzagli
SAVE OUR FLOWERS
Save our flowers is the site-specific installation that Massimo Barzagli has created for the Stazione Leopolda. Perception and information, colour and gesture, geometry and the word are translated in a multi-sensory composition that makes the impulses arriving from different sources intelligible.
The project is created around the historic architecture of the Leopolda and the more recent structures surrounding the original building.
The external space of the Stazione Leopolda will house three large (400 x 700) PVC banners, printed with a multi-coloured list of cities and dates. Read in succession, they offer a key to the historic geography of Europe and the Mediterranean basin. The majestic and wretched stories that have made up history interweave, from Saint Petersburg to Istanbul, from London to Madrid, from Vienna to Rome, from Cordoba to Marrakech. These geographically distant cities are connected by dates that knit single events together in a plot of encounters, invasions, conquests, discoveries and alliances: from the rise of empires to their decay, from the birth of national identities to their reclamation, from the foundation of cities to their destruction and reconstruction.
A fourth sheet, installed like the others on the wall delimiting the northern extremity of the Leopolda's external space, will be the canvas on which Masimo Barzagli will enact his own creative gesture. An artwork fostered by both 'presentness' and memory, immediate action and mystic imperturbability.
The same pictorial sign will also 'blossom' on eleven varnished discs dotting the interior of the Stazione Leopolda. Ten medallions will contain a vase of fresh flowers at their centre. On the eleventh, Luisa Cortesi will present Il braccio nella manica, a performance intended as a figurative story of the body. Cortesi's performance is integrated with Barzagli's artistic project. The two creative perspectives originate in a single design that provides a new richness to gesture and vision articulated in sequence, narrative and non-narrative, which from the particular strive towards the absolute.
