Video screening of the performance by Paola Ponti
Oolalala Gallery
Paola Ponti is an artist from Mantua who for over twenty years has made the body an instrument of research and the place where personal and collective experiences take shape.
The performative action was staged on the public beach of Carovigno, in the province of Brindisi, in an everyday, non-theatrical setting, under the gaze of bathers. Sand, dust and silence are the elements through which the artist carries the themes of war, loss and suffering on her skin. Born in the first days of a new European conflict, the work does not refer to a single war: it gathers its suffering and brings it back to a physical and universal dimension. The shroud becomes an image of mourning and absence, a condition that runs through bodies and communities beyond borders.
At the centre is Ponti’s body. Sand is gradually thrown over her figure until it envelops her and restricts her breathing: dust becomes weight, impediment, matter that covers and suffocates. The body becomes a surface on which the world’s pain is, quite literally, deposited. The language is essential and primitive (movement, sound, matter, silence) and renounces any narrative representation in order to convey the perception of war through limit, effort and breath.
The presence of the spectators is decisive. They are drawn into an action unfolding in public space, with no predetermined distance between stage and audience. Those who watch do not remain outside: the transformation of the artist’s body provokes a physical and emotional response and makes each person part of the situation.
The screening carries the work from the beach at Carovigno to Turin, from the open and contingent dimension of the performance to that of its video record. A new geography of the work thus emerges, one that meets other viewers and acquires new possibilities of interpretation. Sudario30 engages with the theme of the programme not only because it speaks of conflict and territory, but because it shows how pain, memory and experience cross borders: war may be far away in space, but it is in the body that its consequences are felt. Paola Ponti shifts conflict from the geography of territories to the geography of the body, turning a performance into an experience shared across different places, people and times.
