Description
A pupil of Luciano Fabro at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, and one of the founders, in 1989, of the self managed cultural space at Via Lazzaro Palazzi 19 in Milan, Mario Airò belongs to a group of artists who came to prominence at the beginning of the 1990s. The use of film, music, and literature in his poetics is accompanied by the creation of multisensorial environments where the spectator is introduced to a perceptual and immersive experience. Indeed, a common feature of his practice are his collaborations with musicians, poets, and writers, where the performative aspect blends in with that of the environment, with frequent citations of works from art history, music, cinema, and literature. Conceived for a dark environment, Springadela is an installation comprising a series of slide projections onto rectangles of sand on the floor. The sequence of images of desert sand dunes, marked by faint animal tracks, alternate with fragments of the geometric drawings contained in Giordano Bruno’s Articuli adversus mathematicos (1588). An integral part of the installation is a soundtrack consisting of ancient Australian music, a man singing, and the spontaneous vocal games of the artist’s son, hence the nonsense word “Springadela.” The projection of images onto the sand, besides being a direct reference to Aboriginal desert culture, represents the link between the geography of the supersensory explored by Bruno and the geography of the earth traced by the animal tracks. Airò combines this element with the concept of memory as orientation, an idea dear to Aboriginal musical practices. As the artist explains, what both operations share “is the constitution of signs, the organization of these in a system of orientation, memory as the seat of this knowledge.”