I am One with the Water – a work of collective self-awareness

A WORK OF COLLECTIVE SELF-AWARENESS – Artist’s Manifesto – Lifelong Learning – 40 participants

Water Festival, Saturday 10 July 2010

The regional Public Water coordination organised the Water Festival in Potenza on Saturday 10 July 2010.

All the movements, associations, committees, parties and unions that had joined the signature campaign, and the municipalities whose councils had voted for public water, wished to take part.

At the invitation of the coordination – as an artist outside the usual schemes, and with the aim of activating, through the special language of art, a renewed consciousness towards the Earth – I took part in the Water Festival with the Symbolic Action

I AM ONE WITH THE WATER, which I had already been carrying out individually for some time with the fivefold installation in the city of Potenza.

From April onwards, the giant image of the artist with the words I AM ONE WITH THE WATER could be seen in the following outdoor places: Viale Dante opposite the escalator exit, Parco Europa Unita, Piazza Prefettura, Piazza XVIII Agosto, via Appia railway bridge.

For the Festival of 10 July, I AM ONE WITH THE WATER became A WORK OF COLLECTIVE SELF-AWARENESS: several people offered or were invited – and were photographed by me personally – to carry the message to the community, displaying themselves publicly with their printed image and the words I AM ONE WITH THE WATER, for a total of 40 “witnesses”.

Nationally, several people joined via the web, also instantly becoming co-protagonists of the collective work…

A work of Participatory Art

Since the 1990s Teri Volini has theorised and promoted Participatory Art, encouraging active, playful participation in the creation of the Work of Art, so that the public is not merely a spectator and consumer, but a collaborator and co-protagonist. Outside purely commercial logic, an artist is not necessarily someone who sells works, or is renowned for them.

On the contrary: compared with pure consumption, with prevailing homologation, with existing only because one sells or buys, is sold or bought, the Artist can be above all this – better still, in antithesis to deadening massification.

Through Art we can choose to realise a utopia: to refuse the norms that exploit us with impunity, rediscovering the pleasure, freedom and generosity of making.

In that case Art can be a song that involves us, and the Artist a person who gives magnificent gifts – first of all, that of helping to improve the way we live, announcing and fostering change through the acquisition of new awareness.

A work of Body Art

Using one’s own body as an expressive tool, creating a living and engaging Work of art.

In body art the Artist’s physical body becomes a creative event in itself. The Artist’s physical body is the work of art itself.

In this way an Action takes place in which the revolutionary force of art is especially visible since, by deliberately exaggerating certain behaviours and so “emphasising” reality, it sets off processes capable of bringing about personal and social awareness.