Carlos Garaicoa - "Ellos no quieren verme más"
Seventh contemporary artwork at Castello di Ama
Seven artists and seven installations.
This is precisely the goal now achieved by “Castello di Ama per l’Arte Contemporanea” (Castello di Ama for Contemporary Art), thanks to the contribution of Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa. A young artist with an already wide reputation, Garaicoa chose to make his mark en pleine air, near one of the two 18th-century villas on the winery estate, thus taking full advantage of the magnificent backdrop formed by the intricate web of vineyards, woods, and olive groves. “Ellos no quieren verme más” (They wish to see me no longer) tells a story of refusals, of deprivation of freedom.
A labyrinth of low, scable walls built of various materials (from stone, to cement and iron) faithfully reproduces nine of the walls that once cut off, or continue to do so, one segment of humanity from another. After the Berlin Wall, for example, one confronts the Great Wall of China, then the security wall of Ramallah, and the bleak wall dividing the two Koreas, but always enjoying the possibility of overcoming the barriers, thus forcefully demonstrating that both human beings and ideas cannot be hemmed in forever. Garaicoa’s artwork thus enjoys stupendous topicality, inspired as it was by another video-artwork that he will present, from September 30 through October 4, as part of a special project at Artforum Berlin.
The leading concept of Ama’s art project, launched in 2000, is the annual installation of an artwork through which an artist expresses his particular relationship with the environment that “hosts” it, thus creating an object uniquely and fully “in situ.”
Ama’s Genius Loci thus stimulates the artist’s fecundity and assists at the birth of a work that will remain as the artistic patrimony of and on the estate. Garaicoa was preceded by artists such as Michelangelo Pistoletto (2000), Daniel Buren (2001), Giulio Paolini (2002), Kendell Geers (2003), Anish Kapoor (2004), and Chen Zhen (2000-2005). All left traces of their genius in the most disparate places, ranging from the cellar to the garden, to a storage-room and small private chapels. “I am continually exhilarated by the logical processes that somehow enkindle creativity, ”confesses Marco Pallanti, who together with his wife Lorenza Sebasti animates the project; “it is truly amazing to see how the sensitivity of an individual artist, when confronted with an identical landscape, can express itself in a language so utterly novel. Where Daniel Buren was so struck by the beauty of the Renaissance frescoes that he was moved to frame that striking harmony, Carlos Garaicoa, coming from an almost diametrically opposite experience, absorbed that same beauty, but offered us a very different lesson, the negation of space and freedom.”
“Castello di Ama per l’Arte Contemporanea” continues to offer an artwork per year that conjures up wine and the vine, always with the same goal, of creating something unique and inimitable, a work that grows here and nowhere else, to witness the Artist and the Winemaker working side by side their respective crafts, in perfect synergy, in order to leave behind them a trace of our contemporary existence.
15.10.2006