SEEDS (2017) in memory of Pinuccio Sciola (March 15, 1942- May 13, 2016).
Clay, rice paper, turquoise ink, olive branch and leaves, hoe.
One day Pinuccio Sciola told me about being with a primary school class on top of a mountain nearby. He had prepared smaller than usual stone “seeds” for the occasion. Once on top, armed with hoes, they set about planting the seeds, and the children covered them with soil. Tired and sweaty, they then sat in a circle on the ground. Pinuccio asked, what do you think these seeds will generate? Some of che children answered, more stones, but the youngest girl, in a small voice, said: mountains! This episode shook and inspired me beyond the poetic significance of that moment. Sowing works underground. Working with clay, which, as Sciola said, is matter as sacred as stone, the idea of sowing earth in the earth resonated deeply with me.
The two seeds that compose this work are one olive and one olivaster, both made of clay, hollow as they are in nature so as to contain the bud. Each contains three things: a small twig around which I rolled a text I wrote for Pinuccio, and a leaf from the same branch that I found on a narrow street in Paris after a thunderstorm, with no olive tree nearby, the day I learned of his death. In February 2017, when I planted the seeds in the Giardino Sonoro, Pinuccio Sciola’s studio/orange garden, in San Sperate, Maria, his daughter gave me the hoe, but did not want to know where I would sow them. Together, however, we reread a fragment published in 2014 in Natura Petrea, by Leonel A. Mitre on Pinuccio Sciola:
…the master casts himself into the earth, and thus covered, he recites his last thanksgiving, for he enters the place where he has always belonged.
