Francesca Llopis IN RESiDENCE at the School Fort Pius

Video (18'32'')

PROPOSAL

The aim of this project is to recycle everyday objects and create a poetic rather than epic work, one in which the text is generated by the images themselves.

The image of the soul is one of the most abstract images I can think of. Moreover, if we link this image to an iceberg, we get a metaphor in which meaning or content lead to different places in our poetic imaginary. The iceberg is an example of isolated nature breaking off from its glacier. This act suggests a process of independence, of breaking up, an urge to see the world and wander aimlessly.

Iceberg shapes can also hint at things: all icebergs are different and they evoke images which can be read like clouds… we try to read the shapes of clouds and give a name to them.

Another characteristic of icebergs is loneliness, something that can be easily linked to our soul. We should often face the loneliness of our souls, and this is a necessary state to develop our creativity, think, study and, in short, grow as individuals.

Therefore, an iceberg can become something more than just a piece of ice going adrift at the North and South Poles. It is an element full of meaning and content, including another: individual and collective memory. This memory can be material or immaterial, an object or just a wish.

Thanks to the experiences of the people participating in this project and other people we will talk to, this work will be fuelled by our need to share some ideals as we look to the future.

The creative process is full of texts, drawings and reflections about icebergs—those large masses that we rarely see. I hope that, thanks to this experience, icebergs will become a complex symbol of our future and our life. The result is a film that includes all our evaluations in the shape of an iceberg, one that will disappear in our small sea.

Francesca Llopis

 

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Apunts per a un iceberg [Notes for an iceberg] is a video work full of metaphors that form a universe of poetry and existential thoughts about the process, because this is a journey: the journey of life through the adventure of knowledge, becoming aware of who we are and where we

Over a period of several months, in a series of sessions in the laboratory, observations and impressions were collected that enriched the work as a territory of experience and a field of research. The starting point for the proposal was the project on water: water as a key element in life. Water = life as a basic concept for this ongoing work, documentation for which, compiled in the form of an intervened audiovisual log, generates a series of artworks that range from video to “installative” environments that will gradually take shape in space-time.

The changes in state of water, from liquid to solid and back, were used, and a large block of ice was piled up, known to the artist and the pupils as the Iceberg. In this way, they froze water, life, to rethink it during the moment of freezing and develop their capacity to observe and perceive existence, life, through thought.

The children also expressed wishes and dreams, writing down their thoughts on encyclopaedia pages conceived as a metaphor of the support for knowledge, and inserted in the block of ice like messages. They also put in personal belongings, chosen for their particular importance to them. This is how, in experience, all form part of the Iceberg, a joint appropriation of dream and reality in a journey in constant transformation.

A poetic and philosophical approach, as well as an approach from physics and mathematics, like the Greeks or in Renaissance Romanticism, when art and science formed an inseparable whole. A dreamlike phenomenon in the context of a laboratory to embark on an epic journey through the interior and exterior of our lives. We can all be an iceberg travelling from north to south; we can all drift along the way, leaving footprints as we go, like messages in bottles from a shipwreck, until we find our course, our direction. We can all be a Ulysses, sailing the seas of the mythical imaginary and, at the same time, the tangible experience of the universe.

An iceberg of water like us, which contains our beloved objects, our memory, our knowledge, our thoughts, our dreams. An iceberg to help us to become aware of who we are, from the micro to the macro, from the particle to the universe. An iceberg signifying life, our life.

Angie Bonino