Emilio Isgr?

La giara di Shanghai
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PRESS RELEASE
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We are pleased to announce the opening on the 14th of April 2006, at Palermo's Galleria dell'Arco, via Siracusa 9 of the personal exhibition of Emilio Isgr? (Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, 1937) entitled La giara di Shangai ('The Shanghai Pot'), curated by Sergio Troisi. La giara di Shangai is an installation created by the artist exclusively for the Galleria dell'Arco.

Conceived as metaphor of the journey and of the inextricable contamination and modification of cultures, those installations that Isgr? has created over the last few years employing the ant as distinctive sign, constitute another step toward that operation of erasing and rewriting that for four decades has made Isgro's art recognizable. From La rotta dei Catalani in 2000 ('The Catalans' Route) to the Padrenostro delle formiche in 2004 ('Holy Father of the Ants') up to the latest La giara di Shangai, the movement of insects invading the space occupied by the installation itself designs a new historical and intellectual geography. This convergence of dynamic paths recalls the curve signs of erasure with which Isgr?, in the 70s, marked the geographic maps, reconfiguring the space that they charted.

In La giara di Shangai there are two major, intertwined, references: on the one hand, the memory and the representation of Sicily, by employing, as a hypotext, a novella by Pirandello in which the erased pages peep out from the gallery's walls. On the other hand, we see the massive circulation of people and goods, distinctive of the recent history of China. Isgr?'s is an artistic operation performed on memory, on its persistence but, overall, on its relentless, unstoppable changing.

The exhibition conceived by Isgr? moves from the installation that gives the title to the whole exhibition, and drawing on fundamental aspects of the artist's historical research, like the erasures on books and geographical maps, establishes an entirely new dialogue with the classical novella by Pirandello.

As in La rotta del Catalani, in the Giara di Shanghai the theme of voyage constitutes a form of re-writing of one's identity. The large pot (vessel, cave, womb) out of which the ants crawl, is certainly employed as a symbolic device. But in Pirandello's novella other structures of meaning are organized around the giara towering in the middle of the farm yard: often they change in the course of the story and sometimes are in opposition, as in the mimic scene involving the two main characters, Zi' Dima and Don Loll?, who embody the conflict between the craftsman's skills and the patron's pride, between social conflict and social emancipation. Hence, as was the case in Isgro's previous works, the obliteration of the literary text ends up stressing the ambivalence of symbols and favoring the linguistic polysemy, otherwise pidgeonholed by conventions.
It is the consolatory idea of tradition that is unveiled and condemned or denounced as an ideological practice: the hypothesis of nostos, the possibility of a return to that which one was (or one believes to have been) cannot obscure the zigzagging trajectories that marked the directions of distancing, nor can the possibility of individuating with certainty the physical origin or that eruptive motion of the ants allow a conception of the voyage as reversible. Beyond that obscure, anonymous, compulsive movement that we immediately associate to that of ants, the two installations are two metaphors for cultures, their destiny of mutation and hybridization, and also their calling for mutation. Whether we speak of ancient Sicily or contemporary China, every single civilization grows on itself with the migrations that it fosters, circularly, and at the same time, captures in space and time other sounds, other phonemes: a mixture of accents like that which Isgr? himself orchestrated when he gave voice to Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Orestes with the translation, into Sicilian dialect, of Aeschylus' Oresteia.

The catalogue by Sergio Troisi will soon be published.

The exhibition will remain open until June 15th 2007.
Gallery hours: daily from 10 to 13 and from 16.30 to 19.30 pm; on Sunday morning hours apply; on Monday only evening hours will be observed.

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Galleria dell'Arco
Via Siracusa 9 Palermo
Tel/fax +39 091 6261234
www.dearco.it
[email protected]

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If you wish to receive high-resolution images from the exhibition, please contact [email protected]

Translated by Francesco Caruso ([email protected])