The Whales Song

Says Matteo:

Death brings us closer to one another. Looking separation in the eyes. Finding that although we are very far apart, we can still recognise each other. We are infinitely close to each other in separation.
This work anticipated this time of pandemic and silence. Losing sight, going into other dimensions. The space is not that which we inhabit.

Says Giulia:

What will we do? Where will we be?
Now that life is someplace else, perhaps no longer here. Maybe we don’t see it anymore. As we look in the eye of separation.
We find that we are very far apart, but we can still recognise one another. Infinitely close to each other in separation.

Whales can make the sound of their call travel for many kilometres. Through oxygen and water, through night and day.
They answer, on a precise frequency, each message they receive or think to receive. They measure distances with devoted intelligence.
At the end of the collective experience, each one of us can see their Whales or come, together with the others, a cetacean whose enormous body is the carrier of dreamlike matter and love, and life, and death. Losing ourselves in the ocean to see each other.
The Whales Song is Chiara’s most radical, indefinable and revolutionary work.

Says Valeria:

The spectacular colour tones of day and night chase one another all above us, around us. Time seems to have stopped, but I don’t think it is so. Has Nature then stopped? All we need is to take our time to watch; watch the change transform everything in its own time, experimenting within ourselves the living element of the colour flowing, the soul of Nature. Colours are different every day, they move us without letting us choose to.

We can look at them or ignore them but we cannot avoid change, and should not overlook the human ability to think, which can make our resurfacing conscious. We can decide when to resurface as cetaceans do. Cetaceans can resurface at any time throughout the day, although the shaving light of early morning and late evening often creates the ideal conditions. But how does the choice to resurface arise in me? It is the ability to think, more than the lack of boundaries, that matters the most when it comes to freedom.

To me, The Whales Song is the artist’s invitation to look “beyond” the surface of things, very much like in Bleu De Ciel (Light Blue Sky) by Vassily Kandinsky, 1940.
In this painting, Kandinsky shows us an unknown world. His eyes penetrate the matter of invisible life and return to us a pristine view that reaches further than what the eyes can see. Biomorphic painting is – as in all of Kandinsky’s works – a means of revealing another reality. Not merely as an imaginary and dreamlike vision of the painter’s world, but also requiring complete involvement from part of the viewers, who using their senses are projected into another reality. Images vibrate and organisms appear to be crawling before the eyes of the viewer. Beings twirl around in a blue sky that seems to be made of fog. They are not limited in their flying; they are free of all geometric boundaries.

I thought it appropriate to write this aside because I believe there to be a strong analogy between Whaless and the painting Bleu De Ciel.
Sometimes I think you have made Kandinsky’s painting into a “performance” by adopting another language.

Says Fra:

I saw The Whales Song for the first time on its second performance in Gent, the day after its debut.
Before then it had not been really clear to me where we were going, or which direction was Matteo taking. Then I watched Matteo, at “the end” of the performance, return to his starting point: a seat like any other among the audience.
I watched him put his coat back on, and then go out and engage in conversation with the last remaining members of the audience.
It was then that I started to see something. After that, however, this vision was first interrupted, then forbidden. When I met Matteo again it was after months of separation and absence, rooted and warped by time. And at that moment, I saw that the work had survived and that its form was clearer, no longer doubtful – I feel like using the word “surpassed”, meaning gone beyond its former self. It was no longer a shape but a living organism, nourished by its surroundings, hungry but patient, slight, or unexpected as a cut.
When I forget about the sound, because it has become a part of my body, I know I am in it. When the sound becomes the environment and not the story, I feel that there is room enough to live in it.