At GAM – Galleria d’Arte Maggiore, in Bologna, the valuable exhibition Trasguardi is on view until 5th February 2023. The show offers a very interesting body of new works by artist Sissi, elaborated during the two pandemic years. These works are made with the weaving of mixed materials, such as colored cotton and polyester threads that depict expressive faces. The weave of these images is supported by an opaque white ceramic frame that acts as a frame in a sort of bone construction, where the wires, stretched like tendons, allude to the muscle bands within an anatomical apparatus. This vibrant production of creativity and colors investigates social and emotional interactions, starting from an “emotional anatomy”. An introspective research that manifests itself through a series of gazes and suspended faces that wink at the walls of the gallery. Questioning or assertive gazes that interact fluidly with the observer and in which expressions that come from the unconscious and from real experiences emerge, composing a contemporary picture gallery of fifteen characters with mysterious identities. A network, or “net”, which also invites us to reflect, through the artist’s gaze, on the contrast between the speed of the digital world and the slow pace of the ancient arts of braiding and weaving. Regarding the title, Trasguardi, Sissi explains that she has created a word “that brings the plot and the gaze on the same line, a perpetual drive in being and in weaving”. The inner world is a constant interest in the artistic research that the artist manages to decline in expressive forms, which are rich in emotional suggestion, an example of this could be the important sculpture dedicated to astrophysicist Margherita Hack, a monument recently created for the Municipality of Milan in collaboration with Deloitte Foundation.
Sissi, portrait. Ph. Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy the artist and Galleria d’Arte Maggiore, Bologna
Sissi, “Trasguardi”, 2022. Opaque enamelled Gres, polyester and viscose. Ph. Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy the artist and Galleria d’Arte Maggiore, Bologna
Manuela Teatini: How did this new exhibition project born and which are its main features?
Sissi: The exhibition presents a new series of works in which I tried to unite different features of my artistic career: on the one hand the portraits that weave looks, and therefore the soft and malleable part of the yarn, on the other the harder structural part and ceramic support. In this work I put together the two characteristics and the two extremes of my work, which I have carried out alternately over the years, through these portraits that plot glances. I really like starting from words and often I play with them spontaneously creating new neologisms to transform the understanding of some term, for this I am often looking for rare vocabularies (to be seen in this regard is the small volume “Abitolario”, Il Poligrafo, Padua, 2021, a delightful vocabulary created by Sissi with images and a glossary on fashion). The starting point of these works was the game while instead I did not pass through, as I usually do, a planning phase of preparation with sketches and drawings.
Thus, did Trasguardi’s creative idea come about independently?
This is a darker work than the previous ones: it appears and arrives suggested by the introjective part, an unconscious understanding. It is a weaving which as it proceeds takes on light, creating areas of color that reveal glances. It is as if within these spots of color and these points of texture, that I perceive as pixels, I would recognize shapes and images that emerge from an unconscious understanding. It is a process of recognition of a hidden area that is within us, a “transgender”, as “multi-universal” entities, since these entities correspond to a society in constant transformation, which has multiple levels and layers of reading. While the frames are in fact not only frames, but also real windows into which these faces look out, and we too look inside of them as if they were a threshold between inside and outside.
Sissi, “Trasguardi”, 2022. Opaque enamelled Gres, polyester and viscose. Ph. Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy the artist and Galleria d’Arte Maggiore, Bologna
Gli effetti che la pandemia ha avuto sugli artisti sono stati dirompenti, ma anche creativi. Nella tua attività di docente all’Accademia di Bologna come hai affrontato il lockdown prolungato?
Premetto che nell’insegnamento mi piace molto de-contestualizzare le aspettative e rompere i codici. Da febbraio/marzo 2020 avevo iniziato a fare le lezioni online agli studenti, e nel cercare di rendere questi incontri più dinamici, oltre alla mia solita parte laboratoriale, avevo inserito una parte teorica dove illustravo alcuni lavori di determinati artisti da me selezionati. Mi sono soffermata sul lavoro di Maria Lai, e ispirata a questa sua pratica a cui io sono molto sensibile da sempre, ho proposto loro di misurarsi con la tessitura, così che anche a distanza, da casa, i ragazzi potessero trovare dei punti di forza positivi, utilizzando semplici scatole per creare telai domestici per lavorare. Spesso la linea online non funzionava e lo schermo del monitor diventava completamente buio facendo emergere sensazioni e visioni che sembrava provenissero dall’aldilà. Parlavo con gli studenti in questa oscurità, come sulla soglia di un mare profondo – l’acqua è un altro elemento importante nel mio lavoro – e in questo nero rivedevo le immagini misteriose suggerite dal mio inconscio. Questo per me era stimolante e divertente, e rappresentava per loro una visione alternativa del fare. A seguito di questo lavoro di tessitura con gli studenti, anche io mi sono affezionata a questa esercitazione e ho pensato di fare i miei telai per giocare con le parole. Volevo farmi “le mie ossa” manipolate in ceramica. Io lo chiamo motivo osseo. Per me manipolare l’argilla in questi anni è stato molto importante: l’argilla è piena di acqua ed è un materiale vivo che con la manipolazione risponde in maniera diretta, per questo è inconsciamente in relazione con il nostro cervello attraverso una combinazione neurologica che è scientificamente dimostrata. Quindi nella mia immaginazione i telai/ossa rappresentano la struttura dura che sostiene le trame e gli arazzi della tessitura, cioè la parte morbida, come i muscoli e i tendini, quindi i miei “trasguardi”. Ma tornando ai miei corsi in Accademia, per me è stato molto importante studiare anche i lavori del Bauhaus e quelli di tessitura di Anni Albers: mi è servito per capire come molta della pittura astratta e la teoria dei colori si siano ispirate alle arti manuali e tessili. Proprio per questo motivo ho voluto portare la tessitura come pratica fondamentale per i miei ragazzi durante la pandemia: per scoprire nuove opportunità da condividere con loro. Le mie lezioni sono sempre molto libere e surrealiste e il rapporto che ho con gli studenti rappresenta per me una palestra cerebrale nella mia ricerca di immaginare il futuro.
Sissi, “Trasguardi”, 2022. Opaque enamelled Gres, polyester and viscose. Ph. Ela Bialkowska, OKNO Studio, courtesy the artist and Galleria d’Arte Maggiore, Bologna
You live between Bologna and London, what comes from this alternation?
For me it represents the condition of flight: the nest is the place of protection and refuge from which we start again every time, a condition that for me is linked to my sentimental situation. My partner lives in London and this flying is a concept of migration. London for me is a city with very strong cultural resources, a great context where studying and getting to know: exhibitions and museums are my points of reference and stimulus for the discovery of other things. It is a place of reflection and maturation, which partly influences my practice.
Info:
Sissi, Trasguardi
07/10/2022 – 05/02/2022
Galleria d’Arte Maggiore
Via d’Azeglio 15, 40123 Bologna
maggioregam.com
Manuela Teatini, film maker and journalist, focuses on visual arts, in particular cinema, photography and contemporary art. She has written freelance for years with VOGUE, Uomo VOGUE, ELLE and other cinema, art and new trend magazines. She is the author and director of the docufilms “ART BACKSTAGE. La passione e lo sguardo” (2017),” MASSIMO MININI. Story of a Gallerist “(2019),” GIOVANNI BOLDINI. Il Piacere. Story of the Artist” (2021) awarded at the Terra di Siena International Film Festival 2021.
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