NEMO_β

NEMO_Beta, HD movie, 39′ 36”, 2009-10.

NEMO is the Italian development project of KM3NeT, an European research infrastructure aimed to build a gigantic Cherenkov telescope, basically a giant underwater antenna, to detect high-energy astrophysical neutrinos. The movie documents the experimental installation of a twelve arms tower at 3500 meters depth. Below the sea level dozens of this module will form a grid of 1 square km about 700 meters high.

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Publicity still

The KM3NeT will be the only submarine telescope to operate in the northern hemisphere and will be complementary to the American telescope installed under the ice of Antarctica. If implemented, it would become a centre of world-class research in the field of basic research as well as the largest station for monitoring the marine environment. The depths chosen by the Italian project for this telescope installation are part of a large area of the Ionian Sea located approximately 80 km from Portopalo, very close to the area where occurred the 1996 Christmas Eve wreck (see Portopalo).

NEMO_Beta is also the continuation of BdA, the exhibition contents made for the  Science Museum of Catania whose purpose was to illustrate the recent history of development in Sicily.

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Portopalo

Portopalo, photographic installation, Durst Lambda prints on paper, variable dimensions, 2009.

Although it may seem paradoxical, “landscape” is a fundamental and recurrent theme of Modernism. So is it for those contemporary artists who through modernist models and structures once again put our way of seeing the landscape on the line. This practice clearly does not stop at the optical effect alone (or the “small pleasures”) but acts as a genuine investigative process. In this active exercise, the research (of documents and practices) overlaps with the taking apart and recomposition of the geographic and social space.

Portopalo.
Installation view at the group show PPS – People and Landscape of Sicily at Palazzo Riso, Regional Museum of Contemporary Art, Palermo 2010.

Jean François Lyotard discerned how in the dominant capitalist society, signs are immediately and totally transformed (and neutralized) in information. Breaking the traditional alliance or uniformity of purpose that bound art to Capital, some artists have taken the trouble to dismantle the information and restore the value and fullness of the signs.

For some years now, Federico Baronello’s work has efficaciously pursued this line. The works presented at the gianluca collica gallery of Catania show us a landscape; a very precise landscape, that of Portopalo and the southwestern Ionian Sea. In this landscape (presented through photographic prints and full-HD video) the information is profuse and different: the realization and the installation of sculpture groups along the Portopalo promenade, by the local parish priest Don Palacino, in memory of the 283 migrants drowned off Capo Passero in 1996 (with a religious-pop aesthetic, with obvious though surely unconscious references to Picasso as well as Ed and Nancy Kienholz); the probable installation again in the same waters off Portopalo, by the Institute of Nuclear physics, of an immensely powerful underwater telescope, a kind of antenna devised to reveal astrophysical neutrinos of the highest energy; the remains and markings of Islamic culture “etched” onto the seized fishing boats in the port of Portopalo.

In Baronello’s works, all these pieces of information reacquire the meanings of a story but above all are presented as signs of modernity: useful signs enabling us to understand also what we see.

Giovanni Iovane, presentation text for the solo show Portopalo at the gianluca collica gallery, Catania 2009.

Also, see Francesco Lucifora interview (in Italian)!

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P_0280 The inscription / prayer emphasizes the ethical spirit of the operation: “O God of the universe, do make our seas won’t be never again navigated by seafarers (would they be Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Saracens and pirates of all ages) who will load men in chains, without a home and without dignity. On the contrary, do make these seas be crossed by ships with free men and harbingers of civilization and peace. Amen.”

P_0339 Decorations on the sides, together with the text engraved and painted on the inner walls of the hull, are the perfect aesthetic counterpoint to the sculptures of the parish priest of Portopalo.

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P_1150 Inside the hulls…

P_1157 The hold destined to the conservation of the fish becomes valuable space for the transport of human load.

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P_0352 The symbolic fence of Portopalo…

P_0355 On the promenade of Portopalo a statue of the Madonna with her gaze turned towards the small fishing village…

P_0402 Monuments are erected along the boundaries of the town, on the waterfront and in the suburbs…

P_0364 A presence also in the very centre of the town, in the frescoes adorning the church that, every sunday, unites the community…

P_0498 The oasis of San Corrado, also intended by Don Palacino as a shelter for the refugees (actually somewhat improvised and lacking the necessary medical equipment)…

P_0487 Of course, with a supplement of new sculptures glorifying the saints, especially St. Francesco d’Assisi, the patron saint of ecology!

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Footnote

BdA

Silver Bars (in Brimstone), documentary movie, 16:9 SD 64’, 2007-08.

BdA, photographic series, Durst Lambda prints on metal paper on Dibond panels with aluminium frames and museum glass, each dimension cm. 115×76,5, 2008.

Building a Science Museum in a disused sulphur refinery in the old industrial area of Catania may be an opportunity for a journey into the modern history of eastern Sicily. Indeed, the sulphur mines exploitation, which started in the early nineteenth century, immediately linked Sicily to the industrialization process that was spreading from England in Europe and America.

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Installation view from the exhibition DA QUI # 01.09, gianluca collica gallery, Catania 2009.

BdA (Barre d’Argento – Silver Bars) is an acronym chosen to indicate two different works, which were intended to complete the exhibition contents of the  Science Museum of Catania, and which purpose was to illustrate the recent history of the development in Sicily. The title was inspired by a work of the American artist Lawrence Weiner, which was realized in Catania at the gianluca collica gallery, the statement Silver Bars Bathed in Brimstone.

The documentary movie Silver Bars (in Brimstone) and the photographic installation BdA7793… are far-reaching journeys telling a story that goes from the sulphur years to those of oil and developers, up until the technological district and the numerous scientific research programmes that have developed around the Department of Physics of Catania. A journey from the bowels of the world to the top of volcano. It’s a laborious ascension to the vastness of the sea and the sky, from Inferno to Paradise. Furthermore, the two BdA works both represent an attempt to reconcile the experimental fury of the art in 1900 with a – often unevenly – communicator function of the work of art.

The narration of Silver Bars (in Brimstone) links the protagonists’ testimonies (from miners, owners of the deposits, scientists) and the historians’ interviews, with extracts of Sicilian literature (Luigi Pirandello, Giovanni Verga, Enzo Di Bernardo, Melissa Panarello). Locations views from the Floristella mine to the Priolo petrochemical centre, from the commercial centre (designed by the Italian archistar Massimiliano Fucksas) to the nuclear accelerator at the university campus, alternate with film excerpts of Italian documentary masterpieces such as Surfarara by Vittorio De Seta, Col cuore fermo Sicilia by Gianfranco Mingozzi, Gela antica e nuova by Giuseppe Ferrara, or with archival footage of scientific experiments.

Eight (plus two) panels make the photographic installation; each one is the combination of two photographs. This combination of two creates a reciprocal relationship. On one hand, we have a dialectic regarding the subject contents of the photos. On the other, there are two portions of space that confront each other for the purely formal aspect of the composition. In each panel each photo, or portion of space, communicates with the other but also with those making the remaining seven panels. Each area represents also a place or a matter: cave, sea, sky or earth, air, water, fire, or sea, mountain/volcano, sun.

Landscape, thus, works as a narrative of a (hi)story. The structure of the photo installation, then, aims to replace specific formal, thus ideological, references of modernism.

[Federico Baronello, a written report to Helmut Friedel after the work’s acquisition by the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, München, Oct. 2009]

 

BdA7793notitle Underground of the Palazzo Pennisi Floristella, Valguarnera and archival photo of the Trabonella mine, Caltanissetta.

BdA_notitle8340 The founder of the Nuclear Physics in Catania and the Clean Room at the Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems – CNR, Catania.

BdA_77988867 Underground of the Palazzo Pennisi Floristella, Valguarnera and 15MeV nuclear accelerator at the INFN – Laboratories of South, Catania.

BdA_07647926 The disused ENEL Solar Central of Adrano and the INGV underground shelter at Pizzi Deneri, Mount Etna.

BdA_8606notitle Pineapple into a Growth Room and a TAC photo-still of the head of a pig for the positioning of a robotic arm during an experiment of neurosurgery.

BdA_87868827 Antenna for GPS monitoring of Etna’s volcanic soils and the NEMO’s data analysis laboratory at the port of Catania.

BdA_08618763 A view of the moon from INAF at Serra la Nave, Mount Etna and the conurbation of eastern Sicily seen from Rifugio Sapienza, Mount Etna.

BdA_84608474 The Francofonte wind farm and the INAF-IRA radio telescope, Noto.

BdA_87038587 A De Chirico Italian Piazza and the underground parking lot at Etnapolis, a shopping mall designed by Massimiliano Fuksas.

BdA_88558847 Corridors and the CHIMERA particle detection apparatus at the INFN – Laboratories of South, Catania.