Omnipresence: A Poetry and Imagine Installation in Castiglione del Terziere, Italy

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

Art

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

Wall

The road

like the feeling

of an inquisition

that tortures the heart

warns of skids

off-course

Omnipresence: A Poetry and Imagine Installation in Castiglione del Terziere, Italy

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