Help ... Help me! These are words that do not always come to light.

   Give itself one, get itself one: we don't realize it often, it is also a dream and it is not modulated in evidence, he engraves selflessly in our expressions. In life in fragments that we live, the perception of our experiences is more complex, feeling ourselves as one means to cross a dense tangle of elements in constant motion.

   And now I proceed from a thought that I had mentioned in a small note in the 2009 Colloquy. There it was an initial reflection, now I connect other beginnings, it is something that I feel important and it’s fit hardly to be said.

   We call for help if only we make ourselves aware of it thanks to a lack, to a void in our experience of life.

   I believe that call for help and give help is essential. Calling for help to other artists, to who is nearer and, at times, to who we rarely meet or for the first time. We are relational persons interacting each others. I call for help through this conversation to understand with you this thing that isn’t only what happens when you work together.

   It’s giving life each other, giving ourselves for the one who need help. And I believe that for an artist is easier to give each other cause an artist is mad about the sensorial elaboration.

   It often happens that listening, looking, feeling, touching others (others?) it’s just the opposite: you are watched, heard, felt and touched by the others. Being passive, typical of the artist, is the unicum of the art. What we do is a rite that transfigure symbols and purifies them giving us reality. And this aesthetic restlessness is able to drawing a very interesting intra-beauty that belongs us when we slow down a kind of normality.   

   I would give value to this relationship of help in the artistic experience.

   To be in the space already constitutes a place, from a person to two, three, the characteristics transform, and this thing can be underlined in the interrelation that happens in community that the artists have formed and form in auto identifications or external identifications today.

   Everybody knows Der Blaue Reiter, Cobra, and yellow House, the abstract expressionists. There are also present groups formed by artists, virtual community, lists of activism hacker, UVUO, From an art to the outré, and I also interpret the search of one art critic, Carla Lonzi, as a relationship of help that has dissolved, with her practice, the conformism that surrenders to the incommunicability. And the Forfest that involves so many artists? And these Colloquy?

   All of this is just an indication to underline that the help can be glimpse in something known, to which we didn't pay attention, which is familiar. Moving the point of view, different not-said appear as relationships of help.

   This relationship, borrowed by the psychosocial sciences, transversally crosses various theme (medicine, philosophical counseling, psychological therapies, psychoanalysis, teaching, relationships among friends, brothers, various types of group etc.) and I try to draw it as a out figure of the Makom, D-o  as place in ancient Jew, concept to which the American abstract expressionists referred, above all with the contribution of Robert Motherwell.

   I continually experiment with calling for help, it seems to me that every word of mine is it. This way, it’s easy for me recognize someone that calls for help to me in other voices and, vice versa, who continually calls for help it’s not easy to be approached.

     One colour, the indigo, has helped me in these years, a variegated indigo that has given me the courage to go on, to live.

   I don't want to try to say the mainstream but a dream or a sound.

   I continue.

   Makom and Maqam (a modal structure of the Arabic music, the place where it develops the musical idea) are words that fascinate me.

   Both are born from the same root and they have some m, one of the mother letters

of the Jewish alphabet, both in opening and in closing, collaboration and unknown to continue.

   I want to say that this Makom, between (of us), among (to us) it is a sketch in empty that makes us be to that place and to that place that we are in a continuous generation.

   We are delimited by professions, theories, the ours reference area erode our sensibility, don't they make us be human, who worries for us about this?

   Makom-between-among makes our intellectual elaborations, materials, reports, sensitive more and more, a start for a relationship of relationships because from this interlacement they were born when it is not warned it or it recognizes and the contribution is intensely individual.

   Words grow on words of others as personal words grow on the proper lived.

Every line, colour, sound has a relationship of knowledge; it is delivered to immediate preceding roots. When we recognize that we continually born, instant for instant, the over comings don't have the opportunity to feed and Makom is delineated as in between, among and from this empty figure, among and from this space, manifesting a relationship before and conclusive among two positions meeting each other.

   It is a perceptive space, a place out measures that degree, gives coordinates for the sensorial spaces with which is built, is formed (it also builds us, it forms us) and, out of the law of the hybrids that condemns us to the non creative repetition, it establishes a substantial liberty.

   In the work Maria Zambrano Station presented at the Forfest, it was created with Eva Geraci and Lelio Giannetto a place: - e l t -, and between us: e-l-t.

   Eva Geraci tells me: A thread inside of me, but also a thread of discourse-dialogue with Lelio. Is it, perhaps, that "Place", of which you speak, this relationship that I also felt with you even if you were not with us physically? And how would have been this Place-Time if you were with us? Surely different! But a Place is created also in the relationship with himself?

   The particle among (or between) consults some fundamental appeals of being and doing: I live in the lines, in the point, in the place and, if I live in, I transform it.

   It is a lunge. Walking, speaking, making the actions most daily fund an among, a between that calls, that form and draws, that opens with nostalgia and hope.

   It is a between, among people, things, and tensions, being with intensity, concreteness in the concept that is expressed: inside out, far-near, tall-low, being ourselves space and transfiguring these oppositions that become apparent or momentary.

    Standing it’s ours making us space to the space, place to the place and, in this, what comes in relief it is background (or setting or field).

   This being between the others, standing between ours similar and dissimilar, between the things, the places, the animals, gives us a cellular awareness of the importance, of the exploitation, of the setting and it is an overturn in comparison to the importance of the sign or the form to which we have accustomed.

   It’s important the earth with her mass - there is -, the movements of waters are important, the intensity of the tides, the physicality of our relationships - there are -.

Doing things, acting daily, the rhythm that springs from completely routine movements: person care, the care of environments where we live and their organization, looks with or without direction, all performances that have the sacred value of the rites.

   To converse, to stay, to dream.

   This awareness of to be rooted of between, of among, means to give the ideas, the actions to a flow. Used to move objects and confinements, it comes us difficult to move ideas and particles. Yet, also these, in their concepto are concrete.

   Between, among as subject - matrix, expression and becoming, as first created point, that, according to the tradition of the Kabbalah, it is Hochmah - Wisdom that extends her, becomes the Chora of the Timeo of Plato, receptacle, river bed and imprint of what that borns.

   This way we live; we live the lines, the points, the colours of that we do, act.  We live the subject with whom we work; we live the screens, the mirrors because the life of the things doesn't force us.

   Between is preposition, particle, prefiguration of name and verbal connection, of their interaction.

   Among two people or more the form is important some, but I finds a more vital form the space that is created between them, the distance that he/she is adopted when speaks, graze ourselves, touches ourselves or other. The densities that we

present when we feel the design in vacuum, sinks, withdraws or the empty is in the embrace, if when we are sitting the position is inside or outside.

   This living is also disorientation, is feeling in exile in the city and in the time when you was born and it is really this among that builds new spaces, city, delineates territories, this among that it is not seen and it puts together micro relations, who doesn't have - it is space drawing the necessary freedom.

   We transmit between human beings when we speak, we eat, we walk, we converse, we remember, we think and so much other.

 

   This among, between, the platonic chora, sustains what becomes home, room, object, connection, movement. Every space derives from this quivering place from which has origin something that we feel like art.

   This way, at this point of the way, the relationship of help is perhaps something that appears us known and ignored at the same time, a background of instants that emerge and hack not prefigured in a delicate cognitive position.

   A known way for all of this that each of us establishes in to connect the thoughts suggested here and also unknown for the intensity that everyone gives and that he/she lives in an intimacy whose thought makes me finish here, thanking you.

 

 

 

 

    Palermo, 20 5 2011                                                             Tommasina Squadrito