An installation for “LAND ART LUPANICA”, a land art international annual festival in Italy.
It works on surfaces of trees as natural sculptures.
According with traditional “patois” that I talk with my family, “pacioc” means “mud”: a special kind of mud, with a secret formula, it is used to make decorations over more than twenty trees that are growing in a part of a very very ancient forest that survive between Italy and Slovenia. In the formula, there is a bit of soil of the place. Different soil with different compositions make different colors of paint, according to “genius loci”, i.e. the spirit of that place.
According to curators of festival, “wood is an open wall”, so it is ready to receive any kind of message. Mud shows an ephemeral way (the real essece of environmental art), a transient way (and so also a sort of pessimistic symbol of era that we live in) to express myself as man and as artist. No messages, only symbolic decorations. This is also connected to idea of “to leave a sign”, a trace on this earth.
The mud applied to the trunks, then, is part of me, of my story, of my family and of the activity that we always do in agriculture. It's a traditional remedy we still use today to help a tree to repair wounds or diseases of the trunk and bark. Sublimating this gesture through an ephemeral artistic installation that decontextualizes it from its practical purpose and deconstructs it by reinventing it… here this seems to me one of the things that comes closer to my concept of art. http://www.lupanica.it/
