Silvia Celeste Calcagno – Il pasto bianco (mosaico di me)

Created in collaboration with the MIC – International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza, the exhibition presents some of Silvia Celeste Calcagno’s most recent works, conceived and created for a site-specific project.
Through a series of references and allusions, ranging from The Naked Lunch, William Burroughs’ literary masterpiece, to David Cronenberg’s free-spirited film adaptation of the same name, SCC has developed a significant new project created for her solo exhibition, curated by Davide Caroli, at the Biblioteca Classense in Ravenna, as part of the Mosaic Biennale. The exhibition has been organised in collaboration with the MIC – International Museum of Ceramics in Faenza.
Once again, the artist employs ceramics – a medium through which she has long found her distinctive and original voice – placing it in dialogue with performance, installation and photography. In this instance, the exploration is enriched by a further element that brings mosaic into the mix.
Silvia Celeste Calcagno, who in 2015 won the 59th Faenza Prize with Interno 8 La fleur coupée – a work composed of countless tiles – had already recognised the potential of this fragmentary form of expression, almost a ‘cut-up’ – to refer once more to Burroughs and his experimental approach to writing.
The mosaic as a fragment, an infinitesimal detail, where, by joining the tiles, the image is eventually reconstructed, but not the narrative, nor even identity. And SCC works, on the one hand with her usual introspective attitude, and on the other with a viscerality that is at times harsh and ruthless, on her identity as a woman, grappling with the eternal contradiction between the body – a constraining, limited object – and the aspiration to free herself from its weight, to escape its limits, to become something else. The body is, first and foremost, matter, and is treated as such; yet it eludes the temptation to be merely descriptive, starting with the renunciation of colour. The universe of the ‘mosaic of me’ is white, achromatic, inessential and elusive. Every time it attempts to rise upwards, something physical pulls it back down to earth. We catch only glimpses of its fragments; nothing more is revealed.
Hence, then, Il pasto bianco, an installation that reassembles fragments of a body – a body that presents itself first and foremost as food, a banquet at which anyone may sit and eat, as in the tables laid by the master of surrealist cinema, Luis Buñuel. SCC says, “white like the colour of my flesh, devoid of the specific weight of a faceless body – which thus loses the identity of the self to become an archetype – in pieces, without a place, lost in the void, at times protected, at times soiled by manipulation and the working of the material”.
Il pasto bianco, a site-specific installation, covers part of the space like a skin using stoneware slabs of various sizes, employing a technique that fuses photography and material.
Another installation on display is A Private Story, a further reflection on the relationship between ourselves and others, featuring even more elusive and subtle signs of a body destined to shed its physicality.
Curated by: Davide Caroli
Head of Communications: Amalia di Lanno