Savina Tarsitano

Geo-Tropia: The Island you want..! by Savina Tarsitano

Galleria Augusta, Suomenlinna, Helsinki

Through my project “The island you want,” I am investigating the character, the differentia specifica of island space to develop an artistic theme. This hermeneutic operation touches upon both nature and history. Thanks to the “Odyssée programme”, a residency program for foreign artists set up by ACCR with the support of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication, I had the opportunity to stay in some islands around the world.
My stays on the island of Suomenlinna in Finland, on the island of Frioul in France, in the town of Bogliasco in Liguria (Italy) and on the Island of Martinique were times of empirical investigation and creative development. I arrived armed with a study of chaos theory. This gave me a new way to look at nature: the idea that a point of view informed by scientific theory marked an unusual space for artistic images. My work records an irreversible vision of the area between mathematics, landscape and historical monuments.
In Suomenlinna, the first island on which I stayed, I perceived nature as water. As a result, I was interested in the changing states of this substance from liquid to gas to solid, which I saw as fluid aperture through which light passed, creating spaces of chromatic tension. I discovered a balance between the nature and the historical monuments, the perfect order in a spiritual beauty. The memory of the past was perfectly integrated in the present. Art was a bridge between two worlds.
In Frioul, by contrast, I lived through emotional monuments, in part because the residence in which I stayed had been a hospital to treat those with malaria. This memory of the hospital atrophying in a lazaret has definitely avoided its own island’s identity through collective themes ( including monuments celebrating the collective spatial identity). On this island, I created strongly material works, marked by a form of “substituting” these monumental influences.
During my next stay, in Bogliasco, which isn’t an island but rather a coastal town, I felt the indelible influence of strong, chaotic forces of nature – and also of spatial memory infused into monuments. Here, I developed the “Shadow” series, photographs that synthesize the relationship between my eye, the expressive medium and the subject (nature and monuments). My hypothesis was to capture potential presence. In these works, in fact, I captured shadows of figures in a space defined by their profiles, working with the idea that places cannot be seen without projecting onto them a pre-conscious understanding.
In Martinique I investigated the expressive possibilities traceable between the rituality of the monuments and the rituals of the art. Martinique was the island of the mystery and imagination. Here, I realized my first “contemporary installation”, synthesizing the relation between the art and historical monuments. I represented the past through the contemporary art. I experimented the “beauty of the chaos” and the possibility to order the “chaos”.
Greenland is the next stop on my artistic journey. I look forward to further developing the theme of the island in these new locations, inspired not only by my surroundings but also by the insights provided by my prior experiences.