The Opening of the Heart

A work by the artist Teri Volini for the fourth edition of Pietrarte 2003
Livigno, Campaciol, 12–19 July 2003
Title of the work: “Heart”
Material: local stone
Size: about 60 square metres

A large installation in Livigno. See also MUDRA

The work “Heart” is a Land Art work that draws its fascination from entering the flow of energy of Mother Earth, highlighting its power and beauty, arousing renewed interest and spreading awareness of the neglected values of our habitat…

Considering the earth a living body that nourishes and hosts us, I wish to make works in which the suggestions, the inspiration and the materials come directly from her.

The overflowing grief at the destruction wrought by human beings on nature is written directly on the body of the Mountain with a part of its own body, creating an installation in total harmony with nature.

So the action as a whole takes on a dramatic value, equivalent to a cry… and also makes it possible to see the absurdity of the chronic persistence of a tragic way of life based on violence, oppression, destruction…

I am convinced that 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.

The barbarous Heart

The work combines aesthetic value with communicative value, carrying a message that comes directly from Mother Earth.

This message brings us back to the need for change, towards respect and preservation; it reminds us of the urgency of this new consciousness, rooted in a vision of the world centred on reverence for life and all its manifestations.

The tragedy of human beings’ failure to listen, and of their ever more marked insensitivity, is expressed and made visible by this enormous petrified Heart: that of the alienated human being who has lost deep contact with himself and with nature – a human being who perceives Nature as other than himself, feeling superior to it and claiming the right to use it as he pleases, with the results we know.

In this work I draw on one of the most powerful archetypal symbols, perhaps the oldest and most universal.

It is one of those ancestral media that have the power to evoke and convey – without the need for words – the ideas, emotions and sensations belonging to what Jung calls the collective unconscious, which belong both to the individual and to all humanity, and can therefore carry strong messages in an immediate and engaging way…

Wonder, poetry, de-banalisation

The communicative effectiveness of the work is inseparable from its poetic force.

Since the symbol is so universal, there is a risk of abusing and so trivialising it: but this risk is avoided thanks to the awareness of the Action and to the way the work is made – the large scale, the emphasis on the medium, the use of the symbol in its opposite meaning.

The grandeur of the work does not answer a need for self-glorification, but is strictly functional to its communicative purpose.

Its imposing size favours visibility and, through wonder, focuses attention and prompts a search for the meanings it carries.

So the emphasis on the medium – not born of the artist’s narcissism, nor answering to sensationalism for its own sake – becomes a privileged vehicle for living stimuli, indispensable for changing automatic attitudes.

Using the symbol in its opposite meaning

The Heart usually means Love. By using the symbol in its opposite sense (lovelessness, hardness of heart, indifference, insensitivity), the observer’s attention becomes even keener, because a characteristic normal for stone – hardness – is arbitrarily given a negative meaning.

In fact, the stubborn hardening of soul and mind, accompanied by arrogance, obtuse indifference, insensitivity and countless other such “virtues”, belongs in reality to human beings.

At the same time, as a land artist, born myself in a place of stone, I fulfil the desire and the pleasure of creating a Work in harmony with nature, moving from the Enchanted Mountain of Castelmezzano (the cockscomb-crested Lucanian mountain) to the volcanic mountain of Etna (the Monti Sartorius during the great eruption of 1999), to create this other great work in Livigno.

Finally, this work too, though completely new and original, is part of a real and metaphorical path I am following with “The Dance of the Rope”.

The stage of the path relating to the “heart” symbol includes different places and ways of realisation, among them a photographic exhibition, a series of installations, an exhibition of sculptures, writings, participatory art actions and so on.

So the apparent simplicity is in reality the concentrate of a myriad of events which, beginning in April, will develop over time.

Teri Volini