Materiality Baby!

The last week has been an absolute whirlwind of information and travel. I will warn you that this blog may be a little longer as I will give a brief review of my trips to Cinque Terre, Rome and Siena while trying to reflect on any observations or realizations that may have come to me along the way.

So Cinque Terre, if you ever have the opportunity to visit this wonderful section of the coastline, pretend you are training for a marathon when it comes to attire and hydration. The day was spent climbing, descending and exploring with very little direction, but the vistas are breathtaking regardless of rain or sun. Of course all of the cool landmarks, like the quaint little chiesas (churches) and forts are always at the top of the cliffs. A a little pre-emptive research into the importance of the various sites might be a wise idea. If you are offered the option of lunch included during your tour, don’t take it! There are so many great cafes to choose from at each town. Other than the wonderfully coloured houses on the hilltop, it was really interesting to see the mountains of white Carrera marble on the way to the coast. They made me think about materiality and the countries use of local resources during the Renaissance.

Rome is big in every way! Beyond the big piazzas, huge architecture, gigantic monuments, extensive parks and monumental amount of historic sites, it was also the first time I felt fashionably under dressed. Fashion is huge here and I wanted in! It was also here that I began to really comprehend how intertwined and layered culture is. Etruscan ruins neighboured buildings commissioned by the fascist regime and roman marble sculptures were echoed in graffiti on windows. The one thing I regret not squeezing in is a full day in the Forum. I wanted to get in there and document every little shadow of these unbelievable artefacts.

After two days trouncing around the big city, Siena felt like a lovely escape to the country despite its very own feats of engineering and cultural artefacts. The winding streets up the hill to the Duomo provided many wonderful geometric shadows and the Campo Piazza really captured the closeness of the community. The Museo Civico also provided some delightful symbolic surprises at the end of the day, making the wait for my yoghurt gelato bearable. What I found inspiring and relevant in Siena was their recognition of good and evil within their symbolism. Indicative of both their dark and glorious past, Siena’s crest is black and white and the mythical Shewolf suckling the twins Remus and Romulus (good and evil), serves as their animal emblem. Their intricate mosaic floors with Escher like patterning also spoke to the balance of these two forces as visualized through the dark and the light marble, with each needing the other for their existence or recognition. While reviewing the Allegories of Good and Bad in the museum, I reflected with Martha Ladly about there only being 6 virtues and 7 sins. I wondered if this is why our world seems to be in constant strife. Do we need to discover, identify or perhaps just embrace one more virtue to balance the playing field?

With regards to all this travelling and my photographs exploring light and dark, I would like to start by clarifying that my interest in shadows is not my primary topic of my research, but is rather the method in which I aim to visualize my research. My intent is to create an illusionary minimal aesthetic using all white materials that appear peaceful and beautiful in their simplicity of colour and form, letting the shadows point to the underbellies of the visual facades presented to us.

Up until now I have been throwing around the words agency, interconnectivity, interdependency and rhizome to speak to the global landscape we live upon. In that all of these topics are infinite, I will eventually need to narrow my focus in order to master my understanding of the information I will present for my defense. There are many ways I could work to shrink my investigation, but I am toying with choosing one material that would work to communicate how the world’s economies and therefore ecologies are extremely interwoven. I actually came up with a word today to speak to this network that often binds or connects us to environmental and / or ethical concerns. ECONOMOLOGIES!

There are two materials I have been exploring to date. The first material I started to play with was plastic in that we have been living in the Anthropocene era as the industrial revolution developed new materials for mass production. This means that the geological makeup of our earth now consists of a dense layer of metals and plastics. The amount of packaging and molded plastic one sees in a simple drugstore is sickening and exponential. This really hit home for me when I went to buy some razors before my trip. You would’ve thought I was buying an electronic device the way my five blade, flexible head and rubber gripped, pink razor was all sealed up. As we all know plastic is a global concern, however I don’t really see a connection between the history of Florence, Italy and the history of plastic.

Cotton, on the other hand, has a rich history within these parts. Although Italy stopped producing cotton in 1991, “Italy was the first Christian nation to understand the significance of cotton, and began marketing it from the 12th century onwards.” http://costumedabbler.ca/cotton Able to clothe the general population while keeping production costs low, The Popolo Minuto, Florence’s poor during the Renaissance, “obtained employment in the area’s cloth industry and went hungry when, as frequently happened, the shops closed down in times of war, plague or business depression.” (Brucker, 213) Able to still see the textile industry on the market streets surrounding every Italian piazza, the larger textile industry that caters to the masses, not only continues to enslave workers around the world, it also wreaks havoc on the environment due to the amount of water consumed during its production. Additionally, “All major processing stages along the cotton value chain such as dyeing, bleaching and finishing use large amounts of chemicals of various toxicity and hazardousness.“ http://www.organiccotton.org/oc/Cotton-general/Impact-of-cotton/Risk-of-cotton-processing.php What I find interesting is that Canada does not grow cotton and yet it is our main textile of consumption. We do grow linen and hemp! Environmentally it would make a lot more sense if we were to embrace our local fibres and decrease the environmental and ethical shadows of the textile industry.

Feel free to share your ideas or impressions about plastic or cotton in the comment section of my blog.

Finding shadows in unexpected places!

Once again, June 6th in Florence provided us with great food, architecture and plenty of information. We began our morning by back tracking to the library designed by Michelangelo that is attached to the San Lorenzo Basilica. Passing by a charming orange tree in the middle of a highly manicured courtyard, one enters into a dark and revered lobby occupied by a three part staircase intended to lift you to enlightenment. As you look up at the walls you notice that all the square niches are left empty, not only as a nod to Brunelleschi, my new hero of design, but also to invite each user of the bibliotheca to fill their own empty page with knowledge. It would seem that I am loving this challenge.

Once inside, the desks are wonderfully upright, which seemed very smart to me in that one would not be able to put their head down and fall asleep. Lightly coloured stained glass window align with each row of desks on either side of the hall so that there is ample lighting from dusk to dawn. What was really neat was that each desk was affixed with books of different learning. A reader would need to move from desk to desk to read up on different subjects, with the books chained to the sturdy wood shelves beneath the tilted work surfaces. Past the study hall was what I thought was going to be a boring exhibition of important bound illuminated manuscripts adorned with columns of beautiful hand written script and impressive illustration. Surprised, what I discovered were more interpretations of the shadow and how it relates to text, the page, or the book. I began by trying to document the shadow beneath the open covers of the book, but the Plexiglas

covers hindered capturing the dark space atop of red velvet. Then I began to recognize within the pages themselves. Stains, fading, wrinkles and writing within the margins worked to obliterate what and how we saw the original text. Examining the exquisite shapes of the Latin calligraphy, I then began to see each dark letter as a shadow of the negative space around it. Additionally, I started to reflect on how writing is architecture and that each work or letter that comes before the next serves to cast a shadow of knowledge or provides context of understanding onto the reading of the next. This notion could also ring true with the approach of the reader, for every new reader becomes a new interpreter or translator for the text and hence a new author through the reading of the work. Hmm…this sounds familiar. (Death of an Author by Roland Barthes)

We also visited the Orsanmichele which the city’s grainery constructed on the site of the kitchen garden of the monastery of San Michele in 1337. It began its conversion to a church in 1380. Over the years “guilds were charged by the city to commission statues of their patron saints to embellish the facades of the church.” Now replicas, they surround the church carefully perched within their perspective niches. You can still recognize many of these guilds still present in the streets of Florence today through the selling of textiles, baked goods, roses, stone work, leather goods (Way too many dead cows in the form of leather here!), shoemakers ( more leather) and butchers (more cows). The inside is hauntingly beautiful and as Geoff said, “impressive and oppressive simultaneously”. This duplicity of nature lurks in the shadows of each one of us and for those of you who told me to read Jung, thank you.

Upon entering the upper levels of the church, now the museo for the original sculptures I started to think about the word niche and how they physically cast shadows or hide aspects of that which they contain. I also thought about niche in relation to focused realms of study and how perhaps those who reside within these niches continue to exist within Plato’s Cave of knowledge in that they are isolated from other forms of culture and their audiences. I spoke this to my professor and she suggested that there is comfort to be found in the niches as we can’t ever begin to know or understand everything.

So this brings me to copies or adaptations. It would seem that both are shadows of an original work and depending on the audience, medium, cost or context, they may reach further or wider than their predecessor. So how did I arrive at this? The majority of sculptures you see in Florence in public spheres are copies of originals which now lie inside museums. Each of the copies would have been cast from the originals just as shadows are cast from original forms. The only difference is the medium used in this creative process. So this begs to be asked, am I simply copying if my work is to be derived from shadows?

I will let you fill the rest of the page with your answer.

When the Inside doesn't match the Outside

Yesterday morning was interesting in that I started off waiting at the wrong church for our morning history lesson. It turns out there are 5 churches within 3 blocks of where I am staying. Once at Basilica San Lorenzo, a very modest building from the outside, we headed into the museum in its basement. Although dark, there were many fascinating things to be found including the grave of Donatello, the family tree of the Medici's and a large pillar serving as the Tomb of Cosimo the Elder. One of the big guys of the Medici family, who's legacy is apparently strong enough to hold up the entire church.

The significance of the Medici's is found everywhere you look from the tomb monuments to the commissioned architecture and the elaborate décor, all done in marble of course. As you walk by the elaborate works of artists such as Michelangelo, Donatello, Vasari and Brunelleschi you begin to think of the works as shadows themselves, in that they serve as traces of the great minds that once occupied the space you are in. Think in this way would imply that our shadows are our legacies.

Back then it would seem that people wanted their shadows to be grand, but in a time where we need to reduce our consumption of resources, is it ethical to design such opulent legacies / shadows? Does this mean that today's artists and designers will always live in the shadows of such Masters in that they were of a time where economic responsibility and the depletion of resources were of little concern?

As we walked through the baptistery we learned that some of the marble can no longer be found as it was used all up during those times. I also learned that when we are able to see an artist's corrections within a drawing it is referred to as "penti menti", sort of translated as visual regrets. Again, this idea sort of related to shadows for me as we can see traces of the artists process or movement within the work.

After our tour we went to a lovely patio for lunch where I had the most exquisite mussels. Here we learned more about one another's personal shadows over bread, water and wine.

From there I headed to the market to get some fresh basil for the tomatoes I bought yesterday and then packed up some things to take to the studio before heading to the train station to meet Geoff.

After walking around the Duomo to share in its magnificence, we enjoyed sharing fresh stone oven pizza, wine and gelato before retreating to the apartment for some much need sleep. Of course I woke up at midnight and began to think / reflect / critique the project I had started, and so began my four hours of lying awake listening to the sounds of Florence at night while pondering my thesis. I wonder what revelations today will bring?