Poems by LORIS JACOPO BOLLINI and art by ANDREA POGGIPOLLINI, with an introduction by MARTHA COOLEY
Andrea Poggipollini is a Bologna-based artist who works in multiple media. His summer-long installation “Omnipresence” in the medieval borgo (walled village) of Castiglione del Terziere in Lunigiana, Tuscany, featured sculpture, photography, video, and excerpts from poems by Loris Jacopo Bononi. Bononi, an Italian writer (earlier in his career, a doctor), writes poetry and prose; his work has been lauded by Pier Paolo Pasolini, among others. He is the author of Trilogia (Diario postumo, Miserere dei, and Il poeta muore), Libri e Destini, and other texts.
Viewers walked through the borgo to encounter Poggipollini’s and Bononi’s collaboration in unexpected places: on placards on walls high and low, windows, on the ground, and in cellars. Among the installation’s elements were life-sized sculptures of human figures in black or white—kneeling, standing, sitting—which materialized as unexpectedly as phantoms on stone walls, in a bell-tower, and on the balcony of the village’s once-grandest house, now abandoned. In a passageway between two buildings were photographs by Poggipollini of sculptures he’d previously made, to which Bononi’s poetry-excerpts are an implicit response.
The photographs of Poggipollini’s work are echoes of echoes of echoes, one might say.
Translations and photographs by Martha Cooley and Antonio Romani
Two excerpts from poems by Loris Jacopo Bononi
Accade in città
Da una vetrina viene a me
il mio ritratto
e si legge
la fretta di fare andare
ma si vede anche stanco
It happens in the city
From a window my own portrait
comes to me
and the rush of making things happen
is legible there
but visible too how tired
La strada
simile al sentimento
di un’inquisizione
che tortura il cuore
prospetta sbandamenti
fuori corsia
The road
like the feeling
of an inquisition
that tortures the heart
warns of skids
off-course
