In Minor Keys: Artistic Nourishment in the Beautiful Country
There are seasons for moving through the world, and seasons for allowing the world to move through you.
This summer in Italy has been, for us, a little of both.
When we are not in the water, we find other ways of staying close to it: training in swimming pools, spending quiet hours in spas, editing water-related photos and videos, planning our next projects that all evolve around the water in a way or another. Water has become one of our constants: not only a place where we work, teach, photograph and create, but a place where we return to ourselves.
And then there is the other kind of nourishment.
The nourishment that comes from art and critical thinking; from encountering like-minded people who look at the world through their unique perspective. From seeing what others are creating and remembering that creativity is not a solitary act, but something that grows through exchange.
This is perhaps why our time in Italy has felt less like a pause from our travels and more like another kind of journey.
A journey inward, sideways, through images, ideas, exhibitions, encounters and places.
“In minor keys”
This year’s Art Biennale theme was very dear to us. Koyo Kouoh's curatorial vision invited visitors to slow down, tune into quieter frequencies, and listen for the forms of beauty, hope and connection that continue to exist beneath the noise of a troubled world.
It resonated deeply.
Because we often feel that our own work lives in these quieter frequencies.
And we are interested in what happens beneath the obvious. Beneath the surface.
In the silence between breaths.
In the small gesture of a sensitive human.
In a conversation or gesture that changes something inside us.
In the invisible threads connecting people, places, water, memory and imagination.
This Biennale agreed with our belief that art does not always need to shout.
Sometimes it whispers.
And sometimes a whisper is exactly what we need to hear.
“The 61st edition of the Biennale Arte is grounded in a deep belief in artists as the vital interpreters of the social and psychic condition and catalysts of new relations and possibilities. Through a visual and meditative procession, the exhibition prompts all senses to interconnect and meander from one universe to the other, rendering visible the possibilities that reside in the in-between spaces and beyond the portals” (by this year’s curator, a great African woman and artist, Koyo Kouoh)
Link to the Venice Biennale:
“The Beautiful Country”
This was instead the theme of this year’s photo festival Cortona on the Move, dear to us due to an old personal and artistic link with this event.
And indeed this year we travelled through places in Italy where beauty seems almost impossible to contain.
We listened to incredible concerts at the Solomeo Festival, in this exquisitely restored and beautifully maintained medieval village in Umbria where history, culture, music and a deeply humanistic vision seem coexist naturally.
Venice, with its layers of history and contemporary artistic voices.
The Costiera Amalfitana, where landscape, architecture, colour and centuries of human imagination seem to exist in constant dialogue (and amazing Villa Rufolo, which was hosting the work of visionary William Kentridge: the kind of exhibition that reminds you why artists need to keep looking, questioning and creating.)
And then Cortona, with its endless charm, creative energy and particular ability to make art feel woven into everyday life.
And finally Ambientalmente, a garden in Tuscany where sculpture and nature coexist in an open, evolving dialogue; where art lives among trees, earth, light and changing seasons.
All these hybrid forms of expression dissolve the boundaries between art and landscape; when the environment becomes part of the artwork, we tend to look at the whole picture differently. And suddenly, art is no longer separate from life: it is woven into it.
Here’s some links to these artists’ work and events:
Cortona On The Move - international photo festival in Cortona, Italy
Perhaps this is what we are taking from Italy this summer:
not a list of places visited or exhibitions seen, but a collection of frequencies.
A different rhythm.
A reminder that nourishment can come from unexpected places: a swim, a painting, a conversation, a landscape, a friend, a forgotten corner of a city, an artist whose work suddenly makes something inside you shift.
The world is loud enough.
There is value in learning to listen for the minor keys.
To slow down.
To notice.
To remain curious.
To let beauty reach us.
And then, perhaps, to take that nourishment with us and transform it into something of our own.
Because creating and connecting are not things we do only when we have time.
For us, they are a way of living.
And the journey continues…
