Cenere

+Selci (IT)+

Absence guide me even as a kid, from birth.
Soon I met death, questions that its mistery generates, fear of forget and being forgotten.
No wonder I started painting compulsively during those years, driven by an instinctive, deep need.
I started preserving life through creation, shaping that unimaginable abscence by talking with it.
At certain times, I felt like I had to answer to those questions with the word “end”, I saw life as a path, a line that is roughly interrupted at some point. That line became circle over time, friend of mine and enemy.

T h e C h a p e l

I did not hesitate as Elena Nicolini and Carlo Vignapiano asked me to intervene in the chapel of a cemetery, moved by the desire to measure myself against such a meaningful space, universal and close to me. I would have been acting in the place where absence “lays down” and makes room for memory.
I’ve always been attracted to cemeteries, I know it sounds weird but they arouse a sense of stillness in me. I try to recover myself and to understand what is around me in the silence of their walls.
A cemetery is full of informations that say a lot of the culture of a place.
Contrary to big cities, in small villages like Selci cemeteries are lived everyday by the community, death is not something to be removed, to avoid in order to move on with your own chaotic life, actually it is an integral part of that life.
Funeral masses in catholic ceremonies are said in Selci’s chapel, I personally do not believe that the miracle of existence can be enclosed in a God, built and controlled by a human Institution. “Cenere”(“Ash”) has nothing to do with religion but with man, its own limits and the ancestral wish to understand them.
Once I started working some difficulties have appeared. I tried out solutions erased thereafter. “Be present” with art in such an intimate passing moment for the people was a very delicate assignament to me.
I understood the responsability that I took every day more, I’ve been trying to find the right way to fulfill it.
It took almost two years to finish my intervention, other people’s feeling was my priority and I tried to balance it with my work. Two years during which I established a close dialogue with that place to come to understand that now my brush strokes
were expected to define silence. The work itself was not conceived to be contemplated, the same silence has to be contemplated and honoured.
I understood we were flow. Flow cannot be interrupted. We are rivers: as we are born we strongly go down, we meet other rivers who flow inexorably just like us. We mutually influence our flow, conditioning fate and existence. We disperse, we find one another (not always) but merging each other, into the dark immensity of the sea we belong to, from which everything began: we are one.
“Cenere” is the interaction between two antipodal concepts, it’s like lighting a candle in a cemetery and then choose to put it down in an empty recess waiting for the becoming.

The beginning the end is, the beginning the end is, the beginning..

Gonzalo Borondo Cenere
Gonzalo Borondo Cenere
T h e T r i p

The funeral chapel of the Selci cemetery (RI) has been opened to the public for just two days to present “Cenere”, the intervention made by the Spanish artist Gonzalo Borondo during the art residency Pubblica. Borondo requested to keep open the cemetery at night to bring people to experience an unusual experience. The venue was secret to the public. A bus set up ad hoc brought the spectators on a journey to the unknown destination. Once in Selci, the gates of the cemetery opened, people were free to get lost inside, and the arrive to the chapel that hosts the artist’s permanent intervention.

Gonzalo Borondo Cenere
Gonzalo Borondo Cenere
Gonzalo Borondo Cenere
Gonzalo Borondo Cenere
Gonzalo Borondo Cenere
Gonzalo Borondo Cenere
Gonzalo Borondo Cenere
T h e O b j e c t

The objet d’art has been presented during the inauguration. It contains the material, visual and textual memory of the project; a wrought-iron box, realised by the same hands that built the chapel door, where to store splendours, images and materials that articulate the complexity of the chapel.

Gonzalo Borondo Cenere
Gonzalo Borondo Cenere
Gonzalo Borondo Cenere
Gonzalo Borondo Cenere

Photo Cenere by Blind Eye Factory
Photo trip by Martina Scorcucchi & Vito Calabrese