Saturday 13 August 2022 at 5.00 pm, at the Grenada National Pavilion, at the 59th Venice Art Biennale, a conversation will be hosted with Arkeo, a well-known internationally renowned artist, who will talk about his research in front of an audience of experts.
With the opera Golden Motherhood the artist offers a model of primordial female divinity that transcends territories and ethnic groups to weave fertile relationships not of extraneousness but of sonship with peoples, thus referring to the philosopher’s “Poetics of Relationship” Édouard Glissant from which the entire review starts. The appointment, with free admission, is at the White Garden Art Space in via G. Garibaldi 1814, Castello area (Venice).
We had the opportunity to interview him to understand how the exhibition of the National Pavilion was the subject of reflection and encounter with his peculiar production.
His poetics is based on the creation of anthropomorphic works consisting of the assembly of different materials of the past, given a new life. Where did you get this expressive language and what is the underlying meaning of each composition?
The inspiration comes mainly from short moments of dreamlike ecstasy, short films in sleep … as if I lived spiritual, shamanic visions. Images of primordial worlds appear where figures without well-defined facial connotations are interpreters of simple daily actions but with a strong meaning (for example the love of the mother for the child or the Being who feels imprisoned), as if they were archetypes of deeds and feelings of primitive sacredness.
The title of the exhibition is An unknown that does not terrifyin this perspective, how does the “Golden Motherhood” fit into a perspective of integration and multi-ethnicity?
Maternity Aurea is an anthropomorphic Mother, made up of metal objects from the past, but she is always a Mother! She can represent the past and maybe the future. A mother not only multiethnic but possibly multiplanetary. A mother adoring her child, no matter how unknown, she can never be scary.
Golden Motherhood is the work that is the subject of conversation at the meeting at the Grenada Pavilion. And motherhood inevitably recalls the concept of sonship. On the contrary, the migrant – the subject of attention of the Martinique intellectual Édouard Glissant – is often traced back to the position of the wanderer. Can the production of him, in the more properly oracular and divinatory aspects, become a liberating and therapeutic path to the cultural shock brought about by wandering?
Sonship is intrinsic in the mixture of ethnic groups where in the Caribbean area the migrant integrates with the mestizo and probably he himself is mestizo. Without wishing to venture into Glissant’s “creolarization”, in Golden Motherhood, as in other works, what emerges strongly and which makes it a powerful viaticum to face the sacrifice journey of the wanderer is Love. Love that rules and breaks barriers. Love that unites and encourages mixing. Quoting a great writer of the last century: “It is love, not reason, which is stronger than death.”
According to the curators of the Pavilion, his art is “animist” and “shamanic”, characterized by a strong spirituality derived from the Light, an indispensable constitutive element of every work. In your investigation what meaning is connected to it?
The passion, since childhood, in collecting lamps from the first half of the last century, the expressive language of the changing artistic-architectural movements, has undoubtedly influenced the attraction towards Light. Always present light. Light which, as you duly pointed out, represents the spiritual part of my works; what makes them vital, essential, ethereal. Light is the soul of the work.
Arkeo, with which he signs himself, seems to clearly refer to the past, to an ancient, sacred beauty. However, the entire production reveals extremely modern characters, such as to make each creation also a design object and furnishing accessory in an industrial style. How do you manage to make these two apparently divergent souls coexist?
ARKEO is the story of a universe of the past, which makes me see and experience archetypal forms of man, bordering on the tribal. The man who was or the man who will be. The man or the anthropomorphic figure limits the dystonia between Art and Design, but the real element of coexistence is the Light … luminous soul.
Interview by Erminia Iori
Biographical notes
Tools and machinery of the past are the objets trouvés with which Arkeo of Identity Collective gives life to his humanoids. Whether it is reminiscent of tribal myths – shamanic or, futuristically, a avenger/ hero of dreams, the “figure with the mask” at the base of his poetics becomes the sole interpreter of the various messages that the author wishes to convey: the final result are suggestive dreamlike apparitions to which the observer is fatally attracted. Strengthened by his knowledge of industrial archeology and the history of design, the Maestro made his debut in the exhibition field starting from 2015, the date from which important events follow one another in Italy and abroad. Strengthened by the appreciation and recognition received, in 2019 Arkeo establishes its own in Bologna headquarter: the Arkeo Small Gallery, in via Val D’Aposa. They hosted his personal cultural centers such as: “Pintura Mural de Alarcon” Art Center, Cuenca (Spain); Palazzo Hercolani Bonora, Bologna; Exhibition Hall “Center Antoni Tur Gabrielet”, Formentera (Spain); the deconsecrated church “Madonna della Neve”, Bologna. Among the most important group exhibitions that make up his curriculum, we should mention, among others, the one at Palazzo Ivancich, Venice; at the Espace Charte Blanche, Marseille (France) and at the Maco Museum in Veroli (FR).