Davide Dormino
The Artist role in the world, since the ancient age, has been to tell his/her own time to make it better and, especially, to show a new vision linked to the human being and its needs.
Art, in all its ways, is so when it makes us wondering on our existence showing us new possible directions.
Art should be able to work as a staminal cell rigenerating all the things around it.
The story of Anything to say? A Public Art Project for Freedom that began in 2013 after I met Charles Glass, an american journalist and writer, who’s always fought to defend the press freedom. Since a long time I’ve been feeling the inner desire to sculpt a subject which could have a meaning for the community.
Anything to say? is a homage to the courage, to the freedom of thought and speech.
So the sculpted group, made in bronze and born in this kind of context, represents Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, in actual size. Three communication’s heroes. Men whose figures have been object of controversial, men who have chosen to fight against power in the name of freedom and who are now paying for the consequences.
Three figures standing still on three chairs; another chair next to them is empty: the sculpture can be completed only with the audience involvement. In that way it can get a meaning and become an instrument of communication, a media.
Everyone can stand up on the chair. Probably, everyone should do it, even if it’s just to dissent.
I’ve chosen the language of sculpture, a little nineteenth-century, to represent this three contemporary heroes who are changing the course of History like many poets, voyagers, revolutionaries did before and, are now represented through sculptures in the squares all over the world. Making the work in bronze is a choice to reinforce the idea of a timeless message; an ancient tecnique which recalls to a volcano explosion, an alloy made with copper and tin used by ancient civilizations to make weapons since 3300 a.C.
Anything to say? wants to be a viral sculpture.
I’ve always believed in action. Anything to say? celebrates a simple act: to stand up on a chair.
The chair is an everyday comfortable object and we know that we won’t evolve ourselves till we feel “comfortable”. The action makes us grow up. We can enrich ourselves only by changing our perspective, our point of view.If we get the courage to search for the truth, looking further. The secret is getting out of our own comfort zone.
This is a philosophy of life.
I figure out that people could wonder why the three figures stand up on those chairs with a proud attitude, dressed with tracksuite and boots. But the real question will be about the empty chair, the invitation to get on it, to move, to expose, to take the responsability, even if just to take a picture.
This is what I’m looking for; I hope people will understand that it represents the freedom of wanting to know the truth. This message is a living matter especially after the latest events in Paris: not only for the brutality itself, those events have focused on the universal value: the freedom of expression that should be essential for each Country in the world and which is, too many times, the matter of dramatic bloody facts.
Repeating the famous sentence “Je suis Charlie” is not enough to clear our conscience. We have to do more, a lot more.
This sculpture can be ambassador of this thought. It’s a work made for people and it will get a meaning thanks to people. It will tour the main squares of Europe from Spring 2015.
Since the beginning, the project has been supported by many figures coming from extra-artistic context who take part in the team work: Clara Tosi Pamphili, Laure Boulay, Marco Benagli, Jean-Michel Boissier, Alfredo Accatino. Also many personalities from the international cultural field are supporting the project: Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Vaughan Smith, Reporters sans Frontieres, Roberto Saviano, to name some of them.
First step of Anything to say?‘s European tour will be on 1st May 2015 at Alexanderplatz, Berlin.
www.anythingtosay.com
photo credits: Leonardo Aquilino
