Alberi Trees

So is the snow, beneath the sun, unsealed;
and so, on the light leaves, beneath the wind,
the oracles the Sibyl wrote were lost.
Dante, Par. XXXIII

The tree, its substance: wrinkled materials such as the trunk, the bark, soft and sinuous materials, such as the leaves. In both cases, potential systems of signs, traces, skins. Costanza Ferrini, in her approach to the achronic time of trees, lyrically stages the tree as poetic writing of time, at least in the sense of event. In fact, the life of a tree is not marked by facts, like human life, but by furrows, growth rings or voids opening in the trunk.
At the same time, the tree develops systems of branches and leaves. They are networks in which map and life coincide, anticipating the neural pathways of mammals. Paths which, however, cannot be reduced to a rational and scientific gaze since, to the human eye, they are a source of evocation and wonder, spontaneously becoming sign and writing. A writing manifesting itself in poetic form.
Ferrini’s works are details of drawing, poetic adventure, and structural installation at the same time. The last term is particularly important, because drawing and words neither describe nor are they reducible to a rational linguistic code. Rather they become evidences of a cosmogony constantly taking place before our eyes. The tree is an efflorescence of life, emanating its own existence: like human poetry, it is a kind of infinite imaginative source springing and expanding in everything.

Fabio Benincasa ©