Stone Document – Initiation, Calabria

Installation – Symbolic Action in Participatory Art. Capo Vaticano, Calabria, 11–30 September 2001

A work of Participatory Art, a Symbolic Action which – in the burning topicality of ever more dramatic world events – focuses on the importance and urgency of a different order of values, based on Life and not on Death.

By building, with the involvement of the people, a stone structure/sculpture, the Artist sets out to counter, by highlighting it, that normalisation of horror which leads human beings to indifference towards the pain and evil of the world.

The Symbolic Action makes it possible to see the absurdity of this “drama within the drama”: the chronic persistence of a tragic way of life based on violence, oppression, destruction…

Art can do a great deal, awakening awareness in each of us, making us feel part of a whole on which we depend and in which we must act to bring about change.

Art can help us regain the lost or dulled sense of a shared responsibility, and understand how insensitivity, indifference, omission… amount to precise complicity with the perpetrators of every crime.

Art, by awakening consciences, can show how carelessness, misinformation and/or well-cultivated ignorance, laziness, denial… can help perpetuate deadly ways instead of developing ways based on life, love, respect and civil coexistence, peace.

The coincidence of the performance-installation with the events of 11 September 2001 – which dramatically underline the fragility of world peace – in highlighting the urgency of a change of course, also brings out the premonitory power of art…

The artist and performer Teri Volini had in fact created the installation – Symbolic Action in Participatory Art “Stone Document” in early September; the performance was inaugurated on 11 September,

the third Stone Document after the one in Sicily in November 2000 (Stone Document – Experiment-action) and the second in Basilicata in January 2001 (Stone Document – Basilicata).

A mountain of granite boulders, piled up on the Tyrrhenian coast of the “Cape of Prophecies” near Tropea, symbolising the heaviness and hardness of the deadly mode now prevailing; underneath it, crushed by the boulders, the Red Ribbon, a metaphor of vital energy compressed, mortified or dangerously in the balance…

Protagonists of the symbolic action, in participatory art, besides the artist and her collaborators, were the local people invited to take part and many tourists who came over out of curiosity.

Among them were many foreigners – from France, Denmark, Germany: all wanted to place a stone on the “Monument” as a sign of participation, good wishes and a will for peace. Besides the fateful coincidence with dramatic world events…

My emotion and that of the participants was certainly heightened by a disturbing presence: that of the prophetess Manto, whose incredible profile is naturally carved on the promontory named after her, Capo Vaticano, the cape of prophecies…

This Sibyl, to whom I had previously dedicated a performance and an installation – The Caress of the Goddess and Mantèion – took part in the symbolic action,

and never as this time did she seem to me to express so fully the tragic sense of existence – she who seems to carry the whole weight of the world on her shoulders as she sinks into the sea (or was she chained there???).

A work in synergy with the poems published in the book UNIVERSI.

Some of Teri’s poems act as a counterpoint to her paintings or performances. Heightening feeling and vision nonetheless leaves the different modes of expression independent of one another: the poems are not meant to describe the other works, nor are the latter meant to illustrate the former. What matters is the balance, the happy union that is created, the synergy that arises, in that attempt to achieve the harmony and beauty at the heart of all Teri’s research.