OBLIO / Channo
Exhibition of Muna Mussie
Curated by Claudio Zecchi
With Muna Mussie the first year of senior residences of the “Ogni Casa è Un Villaggio” project ends. OBLIO/Channo, the title of the work that Mussie created for his residence, is also the result of a precise intention: that of widening the mesh of a center of cultural production, Kora, ideally embracing the entire country through the the display of works from the collection, or new productions as in this case, both in public spaces and in places not directly related to the world of art.
On this occasion Mussie gives life to a new stage of the Oblio project started in 2021 in Turin and dedicated to a reflection on the concept of the voids and repressed spaces of collective and personal historical memory.
The project consists of a semi-transparent fabric (shading cloth) on which a word is embroidered with golden thread, the result of the artist’s research on the territory and his comparison with the local people. In this case Francesco Vantaggiato, scholar of literature and new speaker of the Griko Salentino dialect. The word is Channo which means I lose.
Oblio/Channo is a temporary anti-monument resulting from a collective performance that takes place over the course of a day and accompanied by a sound created by sound designer Massimo Carozzi. For the occasion, Carozzi developed a score featuring vocal recordings of words read in Griko by Francesco Aventaggiato, on a sound background created starting from the elaboration/transformation of the Canti di Passione.
The performance and the sound, together, design an act that finds its synthesis, as the artist says, in the meditative ritual of embroidery. A slow ritual far from the efficiency of the present. Here a group of amateur performers, in addition to the artist herself, embroider the designated word over the course of a day, transforming an intimate gesture into a collective gesture of cohesion and empathy. A gesture of reactivation and re-emergence of history and collective memory. A ritual that finds its manifestation in the visible-invisible dichotomy: the performers, in fact, can only be glimpsed as they act behind the transparency of the fabric, producing a gesture which, by its very nature, brings to light a sign and an image that are between visible, invisible and tactile (Jacopo De Blasio). Oblivion, in general, is a project that << […] starts from Donna Haraway’s reflections on the skein game: creating wire figures, ultimately, means passing and receiving, bringing closer and moving away, making and undoing, so that it is possible to trace a plot in the dark, to tell other stories>>.
What remains at the end of the performance is an installation that undermines some of the concepts underlying the classic definition of monument: it is the result of a collective action, it is not dedicated to someone particularly important or to a significant episode in history, it is not it is made of a durable material, “drops” from the pedestal, uses a lightweight material and is intended to be removed over time.
In the specific case of Castrignano de’ Greci, first the performance, and then the work, take place and reveal themselves under the portico of the former Don Gnocchi School.
Channo means I lose and has multiple potential references. The one linked to the local context and the loss of the Grika language: the school is, in fact, an institution that on the one hand has contributed to unifying the Italian language and on the other has destined the dialects to a slow disappearance; the broader one of escaping, as the artist says, the current narrative that imposes warlike, hyper-productive policies that deliver us to perpetual oblivion and that, finally, of demonstrating a stance or resistance. Losing is not just an act of subtraction, a denial, it is at the same time an affirmation outside of a hegemonic position which takes on even more strength if it becomes, as in this case, a gesture in public space. It is therefore the first potential act for the construction of a new community and the body of a new social space based on empathy, or on those affects that generate encounters, whether pleasant or unpleasant (Bifo), but it is also, and still , a warning whose predicate shows the impossibility of doing so within the framework of the conditions imposed by the rules of the current economy.
Channo is therefore, in its formal expression, an installation that modifies public space by acting as a sort of backdrop in which, as citizens, we are all temporarily, some more consciously and some less, involved.