Borgo Museo | Nuove Opere 2019 – 2021
* La Residenza d’Artista 2021 (seconda edizione) è un progetto a cura di CCT-SeeCity per la Pro Loco di Castagno, realizzato con il contributo della Fondazione Caript nell’ambito del bando Per la cultura #iorestoattivo 2021 e patrocinato dal Comune di Pistoia. Clicca qui per vedere foto e video.
Biography
Victoria DeBlassie is an American-born artist who lives and works in Florence. Her full name is Victoria Anne DeBlassie, but her stage name is just Victoria DeBlassie. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1987, she is not only a sculptor but a landscape and installation artist. She graduated in Sculpture and Ceramics from the University of New Mexico in 2009 and in Sculpture and Installation from California College of the Arts in 2011. Her family background laid the foundation for the art world: “Being the daughter of an artist and a psychologist, I am naturally interested in art, psychology, mental health, the meaning of dreams and other psychological concepts. Furthermore, growing up in New Mexico and being a mix of various origins including Native Americans, Mexicans, Spanish and Italians made me invest in these cultures and for this reason I chose to live in Italy because in my adult life I wanted to understand in a concrete way. one of the cultures my ancestors came from”. Her ancestors are in fact originally from Viggiano, in the province of Potenza in Basilicata. At the University of California, she met her husband Connor Robert DeMaley (Connor Maley in art), who was studying in the creative writing program. In 2012 Victoria received a Fulbright scholarship to study the importance of citrus fruits in Italian culture in Italy, which included carrying out her idea of applying tanning techniques to citrus peels, to create a new type of skin and study of how the history of citrus fruits contributes to the cultural value that is built and deconstructed. So they arrived together in Florence. Since she moved, she Victoria teaches art in various Florentine cultural institutions and, as a visual artist, she participates throughout Italy in exhibitions and residences that we are not here to list because the list would be too long! “In my artistic practice I am like an ethno-archaeologist who extracts elements from my immediate surroundings to discover material remains and debris and what they say about contemporary life, cultural values and their relationship with history. I re-contextualiSe discarded objects and materials to create art that suggests the excess of material culture, as well as change and development over time. Using the innate history, form and function of waste as a starting point, I apply various artisanal processes to reformulate the identity of the acquired matter, sometimes inviting social interactions from the reworked materials. Since pieces of contemporary culture – useful within society at a given moment – diminish in value because they become useless, discarded, abused, out of date or antiquated, it is essential to accentuate the cultural and ecological value of handmade and creative reuse of materials in the way they are currently engaged: picking up garbage, searching our increasingly massed mass to unearth and create a new kind of vitality”.
Connor Maley is a writer, teacher and translator born in 1984 and raised in various parts of Washington, DC and Baltimore, MD, in the United States. Since 2012 he has lived in Florence with his wife, the artist Victoria DeBlassie. His full name would be Connor Robert DeMaley but he signs his lyrics as Connor Maley. He graduated in 2007 from Mount Saint Mary’s University in Iberian Literature, Philosophy and Theology and in 2011 from California College of the Arts in Creative Writing. In recent years he has published, exhibited and performed his works by participating in numerous festivals and residencies and publishing in various magazines. His writings, short stories and excerpts from current novels are published in both national and international newspapers: “My writing is typically based on fictional narratives, be they short or novels, as well as poetic fragments and prose sequences, and a wide variety of thematic issues and confrontations, often concerning identity, nationality, trauma, healing, ancestral mythologies, psychological pain and suffering, a world in constant turmoil and change and how to manage a life within it, history and historical consciousness, as well as how to cultivate a life of meaning in today’s world where so often that meaning can seem increasingly endangered or in difficulty”. For years he has also been writing in Italian.
Philosophy
Victoria DeBlassie is a multidisciplinary installation artist who recontextualises waste objects and materials to suggest the excess of material culture and the human impact on the environment. Her personal passions and interests intertwine well with her profession and her art in general. Having grown up in New Mexico, she was heavily influenced by the culture of the desert southwest and for this reason, her artworks have often revolved around conservation through thermal processes, the use of natural materials and have often been inspired above all from the Native American beliefs about respect for the earth, through a wise use of materials, without waste. Another important aspect of New Mexico culture is Curanderism, which is a way of healing through ritual and the use of natural materials, namely herbs. This notion and practice has therefore influenced his work, as the artist believes that art can provide a form of healing and for this reason he tends to use natural materials in his work or materials that once came from nature and were then elaborated to question humanity’s relationship with the natural world, in an attempt to heal and recognise humanity’s role in the contemporary environmental crisis: “My process in the creation of my art is linked to Curanderism as there is a sense of ritual through the collection of materials, which often involves a daily ritual collection of materials from my local community, be it fruit peels, stories, umbrellas or coffee grounds”. She also had the opportunity to team up with husband Connor. It all started naturally with participating in their second artistic residency together with De Liceiras 18 in Porto, Portugal in 2014. On this occasion they noticed that there was a connection between what she was doing visually and what he was doing. he was writing and this sparked inquiries into the intersection of their respective artistic practices. Together they have participated in various residences and recently also in small towns such as Messejana, in Portugal in 2019 and Castelbottaccio, in Italy in 2020: “Here we have noticed that our bond with people and the land is much stronger in a rural environment than urban and consequently our work of art produced in that period is the result of the environments rich in creativity and our emotional connection with people. These positive experiences have inspired both Maley and I to get closer to our respective arts in a more experiential way that leads to lasting friendships and deep bonds with the city in which we are hosted”.
Connor Maley is the writing in person: it’s impossible to meet him without his pen and paper, it’s very likely to see him bent over his notebook. The narratives in his writings tend to take non-traditional formats and not follow typical traditional rules of plot or development, but rather operate in a way that seeks to blend together the temporalities of past, present and future, in order to give voice to more points of view, as well as “the socio-linguistic ways of delivering that narrative and the psychic state of the people who tell the story or stories”. His passions and interests are in philosophy, fiction, theology and psychology, themes that provide a basis for everything: “I am mainly interested in people and their stories, the stories of their families, the stories where we come from and what it formed us, what we carry and what we share, including pain and joys. I am a person who has always grown up and lived in the city, I like to bridge the urban-rural gap and celebrate the rural areas of our world and give them as much importance and essentiality as we tend to give to cities so easily, believing that there is. a symbiotic relationship between the two aspects that the urban world often ignores. Food culture is a factor of enormous importance to me, local traditions, local folklore, socio-political rivalries within neighborhoods or cities, and in short every microscopic and macroscopic element of a society, the culture of a country, a region, a city, a place that makes that place what it is”. Connor’s aspiration also in his work in collaboration with his wife is to establish true and binding connections with the people who are part of the community and to listen first of all, by being together, hearing stories and exchanging experiences. This is the fundamental aspect of the entire creative process: to use that mutual bond and exchange as a sort of framework from which to take a leap forward and create a sort of work that seeks not simply to reflect, exactly, those experiences, but rather to tie those experiences together with the local history of the city and culture, to create something that transcends time or specificity, but which also feels rooted in time and specificity at the same time; something that would be impossible without creating authentic friendships and connections within the city and its environment. Stories, cultures, cities and their populations are, in the eyes of the artist, all extremely fragile aspects, and his approach is always to protect and take care of these things as primary concerns and with the utmost respect and care. , encouraging and seeking the involvement and contribution of the community, making sure to represent the realities of the past, present and desired future of the specific location: “Much of our approach derives from recent similar experiences in Castelbottaccio in Molise and in Messejana, in Alentejo region of Portugal, both extremely intimate small villages in rural areas of the country where community engagement and involvement was not only the goal but nearly impossible to avoid, and I would say this has really transformed our approach to certain types of residences, as the human bond with the people who live there and the development of authentic and lasting relationships has incredibly fundamental for the overall permanence of the residence as well as for the works themselves. It is something that transcends the notions of “residence” or even “art” but becomes something deeply and compellingly human and lasting”.
Artwork in Castagno
Victoria DeBlassie has worked together with Connor Maley on the project Il risveglio dei sentieri (The awakening of the paths in English), a story of words and visual art that enhances the paths that connect Castagno to the neighbouring villages: “A way for both my husband and me to push to the limit the creative potential of our respective artistic practices, which for me involves the creation and permanent display of works of art that belong outside the confines of a gallery and for my husband a way of making his writings more experiential”. Specifically, Victoria has made two installations on the local paths chosen together with Connor that respond to his stories, creating pseudo-stones structured with a wire mesh and filled with dry leaves collected along the paths explored together with Connor, combining the interest in hiking and local stories learned from the locals. The intent is to comment on the change over time, referring simultaneously to the stone walls and ruins found in the narratives on how the village of Castagno di Piteccio was built, using the stones of the castle to create a new town. In search of an everyday life and a link not found between the surrounding villages and Castagno, the network chosen by Victoria is deliberately fluctuating. The stones are as light as dry leaves that drag themselves from place to place and the leaves will change deliberately over time, creating a new reality and reflection on history and the stones of stories made with stones not stones. The sites chosen were inspired by the network of paths that cut through the territory of Castagno, creating a visual intervention on the various signs of the pre-existing hiking trails, through the creation of laser-cut wooden signs with poetic sequences. Victoria was responsible for creating the structure and graphics of the signage, while Maley for the text, although obviously both were directly involved in developing the mutual part of the collaboration: “In this way, narrative and experiential literature become an experience. full-body art that is interactive, unlike the normal physically passive way of receiving a narration”. The idea is also to connect Castagno to different parts, arteries and neighbouring villages, to encourage more people to cross their borders and explore the paths more frequently and with a different sensory approach: “Connecting past and present, myth and history, time and place, the local community and ourselves outsider artists, our signage installation will simultaneously stimulate an international community exchange while also challenging traditional ways of experiencing literature and questioning traditional ways of seeing art in a gallery or a museum launching those experiences in the wilderness and its hills”. The initial idea of the installation was to concern local oral legends and base contemporary stories on them, letting the narration unfold on the poles of the hiking trails along the paths. However, after talking to the locals and discovering the absence of codified myth, Connor instead used local interpretations of contested and gap-filled historical origin stories mixed with everyday life to create meta-stories. As the trails were not delimited as securely as hoped, the two most important hiking entrances on opposite sides of the city were chosen as the location of the work, installing various signs with narrative fragments positioned in the direction of the place where the genesis of the stories is derived from the village.
Connor Maley, in conjunction with his wife Victoria DeBlassie, has created The awakening of the paths, tracing a path around Castagno made of stories suggested in some way by the territory, its places and its people, in the direction of the neighboring countries: Signorino, Piteccio and San Mommè. With seven wooden signs of stories placed in two opposite “border” areas, on one side at the Castagno station in the direction of Signorino and on the other at the crossroads which, following Via Valle e Vigna, and past Casa Paloscia, leads precisely in La Vigna – a castagnola hamlet – and then continuing on to the other two villages, Piteccio or San Mommè. The initial idea of the installation was to concern local oral legends and base contemporary stories on them, letting the narration unfold on the poles of the hiking trails along the paths. However, after talking to the locals and discovering the absence of codified myth, Connor instead used local interpretations of contested and gap-filled historical origin stories mixed with everyday life to create meta-stories. Since the paths were not delimited as securely as hoped, the two most important hiking entrances on opposite sides of the village were chosen as the site of the work, installing various signs with fragments of narratives, positioned in the direction of the place where the genesis of the stories is derived and from the country. Connor has selected 7 poetic sequences taken from the 12 written stories, inspired by local stories as well as the legends referring to the castle from which Castagno and his legendary queen Ansa originated or to particular episodes such as the one on the boots at the station, an anecdote by Michela and Riccardo, inhabitants of the village. It is possible to read both the 7 extracts, laser printed on the wooden signs, and the 12 stories in full version on the Castagno website – www.castagnodipiteccio.it (see below) – both in Italian and in English. Soon, it will also be possible to listen to the podcast extracts made by the artist himself who intends to develop the Castagnolo project, recording his voice while he interprets the stories that he himself wrote and that Castagno inspired him. The idea is to build a complete vision using incomplete or broken threads, in much the same way that Castagno was built with the destroyed ruins of the previous castle. Victoria DeBlassie oversaw the structure and graphics of the signage: “In this way, narrative and experiential literature become a full-body artistic experience that is interactive, unlike the usual physically passive way of receiving a narrative”.