COVERED BY SKY is a long-term research project centered on the relationships between landscape and art, experience and poetic discourse with the goal of developing a critical collaboration platform with other artists for a future interactive live exhibition.
The project is driven by the curiosity in how landscape and its inhabitation intersect in art, by exploring how the artistic discourses, as well as its component elements, are sometimes directly linked to environments mainly familiar, close by and local.
In Thomas Moore’s Utopia, a very experienced sailorman in his discovery of the world tells about a distant territory he has come to know, called Utopia. There was where civilization had apparently reached its most optimal and fair state. Though this work has become a reference to think about ideals of social contract and ways of living together, utopia is still a word marked by a fantasy-like character. Utopia is thought of as imaginary, nonexistent, an unreachable place, a cliché of a territory that will never be real.
Refreshing the concept of utopia seems to me to be linked to the capacity of fantasizing and manipulating poetically the notion of real. It is in our imagination that lays its strength and its power. Just like in Grandes Sertões Vereda of Brazilian writer Guimarães Rosa, in which the landscape becomes a sensorial experience through the language invented by the author which divines the wild, the relief, the shape and the singularity of the Brazilian and remote interior landscape.
Covered by sky is meant to be a journey meeting artists and places, collecting their different perspectives on landscape and sharing their ways of being mirrors of the world, between sensing and perceiving. I am attracted in this project by the possibility of acting as a kind of Hermes, the messenger of the Gods (that ambiguous figure that translates worlds) in this dialogue between artists and their reference habitats. A phony Hermes that is, aware of the precariousness of his translations, but full in his bets. I’m interested in building up convivial places, imagined spaces and update them every time they are experienced and completed by the visitor-spectator-participant. In an immersive installation exhibition, the audience is invited to perform the place, in which, they’ll be both witness and actor. In the same way we take someone for a walk, experiencing the path, the obstacles of the ground, these kinetic dioramas of fruition shall make the experience of the visitors get assembled with the invited artists’ sensibilia and, hopefully, rendered anew and re-appropriated creating an ongoing mise-en-abîme.