By Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
Starting from an anthropological approach, Ciacciofera’s research revolves around the universe of the Mediterranean, focusing on themes attributable to its places of origin – Sardinia and Sicily in particular – which the artist rereads in their historical, cultural, political and social, through the use of different artistic media ranging from painting to sculpture, from drawing to installation and sound.
The project created for the MAN Museum has as its underlying theme the social and cultural, historical and current dimension of the Mediterranean macrocosm. A sea whose people have always woven relationships of all kinds, giving life to an amalgam of ethnic groups, languages, flavours, legends and traditions. Cradle of millenary civilizations, place of transit, of commercial and cultural exchanges, but also of wars and conflicts, as well as today of migrations and shipwrecks, the Mediterranean becomes, in the artist’s vision, a metaphor of a new humanism for the creation of alternative social, political and cultural values.
In particular Southern Hemispheres it is the synthesis of two projects Janas code And The Density of the Transparent Wind , recently presented at the 57th Venice Biennale and at dOCUMENTA 14 in Kassel and Athens. The first, in which the dimension of the archaic and the contemporary find a meeting point, is the result of research on the Domus de Janas, caves from the Neolithic era made legendary in the Sardinian popular and literary tradition, which the artist conceptually synthesizes and reinterprets.
The second, the sound installation created on the occasion of dOCUMENTA 14, refers instead to the activity of fishermen in Sicily, to their relationship with nature and above all to the dimension of solidarity that characterizes their lives also with respect to the great critical issues of the contemporary world and Mediterranean in particular. The reflections on the sea and on the human activities related to it are analyzed in this work through an anthropological prism, through recordings of voices, noises and sounds which, digitally and rhythmically manipulated, give rise to an abstract composition capable of narrating the complex experience of the sea and coexistence through work.
For the exhibition at MAN Ciacciofera will present two new installations that are part of the aforementioned projects which synthesize and convey the two different researches onto a single level of interpretation, with the aim of opening up to an overall reflection on the history of the Mediterranean and its borders.
These two works will be accompanied by a third installation, entitled Life Swing , conceived specifically for the exhibition Southern Hemispheres and in particular for the vertical space which, through the stairs, separates the floors of the museum. The swing, on which the book swings The Sardinian question by Antonio Gramsci, represents a metaphor of the oscillation in time and space of human thought, a magical game that contemplates the relationship between life and death, between the origin, the present and the future.
Michele Ciacciofera (Nuoro, 1969) lives and works in Paris. After training in political science, anthropology and sociology in Palermo he attended the studio of Giovanni Antonio Sulas in Nuoro. He has participated in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad, both collective and personal, including, in recent times, the 57th Venice Art Biennale, Long live Living Art , Venice 2017, doCUMENTA 14, Learning from Athens , Kassel/Athens 2017, Enchanted Nature, Revisited, CAFA Museum, Beijing 2016 , In the Middle of the Middle, Rice Museum, Palermo 2015, What we call love – from Surrealism to now , IMMA Museum, Dublin 2015, I hate the indifferent , Summerhall, Edinburgh 2014, I hate the indifferent , Palazzo Montalto, Syracuse 2014.
