In the catalogue artis lingua, Quaderni di storia dell’arte, Centro Immagini Koh-i-noor, Milan, 1985
Norio Shibata told me an old Japanese story which can still be found, about a community that moulded tableware and vases for its own survival from dry, sandy earth full of stones and permeated by ancient roots. They dug large hollows in a slope linked together like the rungs of a ladder. They deposited a particular earth in the topmost hollow; by means of holes, everything the rain could dissolve was passed into the neighbouring one, leaving the heaviest parts (sand, stones, etc.) at the bottom.
Successively, the muddy water deposited the heaviest parts in the second hollow, which were then used to make bricks. The more liquid part flowed into the third hollow and was left there until the water evaporated.
This process lasted two or three seasons.
When the water had almost all evaporated, the earth was collected, formed into a paste and left to rest in a closed and moist place. Each year it was removed and made into a paste again, and this went on for many years until it was judged suitable to mould vases and receptacles for grain, oil, etc.
It is said that those objects were used to imprison the wind and to hear the resonances of the voice.
Bachelard tells us that verticality abides in the flame of a candle. I like to think that the spirit of the place abides in the earth. So a spirit for every place.
This spirit that shares the same verticality as the flame, but finds its own transcendence in the opposite direction to the flame.
In fact, those dwellers knew that nearby there was perhaps earth already suitable to be moulded, or at least not so ‘recalcitrant’, but they also knew that the spirit of the place cannot, unlike words, be transported. It is like a plant with a single root.
I often go into the fields to collect clods of earth to reiterate that lay ritual, but the pastes I make, the clays I use, participate in that technology born from the ancient sacrilege. The navel of the moon is still beneath the bridge.
When I work I try to put the earth between me and the gaze: but meaning retreats too and moulding becomes dreaming. I find it sentimental, that is lacking in feeling, to assume the figures of ‘tradition’ as vehicles of value, because the earth is always indifference, that concealment of which Norio spoke, the questioning that goes to what is empty, to a medium without history. It is only the sensation of the earth that exists in our unconscious like a big memory.
But the gravitational value of values does not befit art, including that made with clay, and even less can one still speak of art as a symptom of the dispersion, of the crisis of the centre; but art made with fired clay can also tell us the apparitions of places, the presence, however distant, of abandoned ghosts, of mute faces, of non-reflective substances, of less expected directions. Clues, fragments, but certainly desire to escape again from metaphor.
