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RESILIENT SELF PORTRAITS
Everything evolves continuously and to some extent emigrates, leaving the territory of origin to settle in another. Even the making of art, the concepts expressed, the names given to projects can change, be rethought out of the immobility and monolithicity of established thinking.
So the action of flaunting the handkerchief, first in Air Shapes then in Goodbye Mother and in the existential process of the passage of lived time, it seems natural to me its migration in a context that is the extension of the first ones, which I love to call Resilient Self-Portraits .
The depicted series of actions may represent familial greeting gestures as well as simply exploits to support the handkerchief.
The artists’ action is in fact a research for a powerful lyrical image that may make air visible, allowing air to reveal itself through the shapes that it forms within the handkerchief. Giving shape to air, make way to manifest the invisible: this is Calì’s territory; this is the fundamental effort of Cali’s art.
“I am not inactive: I am here “ fits into this artistic project and research in a site specific fashion. Being a migrant himself, in a world where the artist is often marginalized, Calì knows how creative working conditions considerably deteriorate when the artist is also a migrant.
In “I am not inactive : I am here ” Calì is again performing motionless, making art just as he is voicing the frustration at being unable to pursue art’s project. Embracing his personal present as well as the collective history, Calì draws the viewer in the recollection and affirmation that “I am not inactive; I am here “ in fact declares.
Extract from a text by Renata Summo O'Connell, Curator
(Un) confortable Portrait.
2018. 50x50x5 cm.
Digital print and gold acrylic on canvas.
Work taken from the homonymous digital performance, with the latter I mean a process that transports mere documentation into a work of art accomplished in itself, performanace that does not end in action but in its creative phase of digital post production.
(Un) confortable Portrait. Digital Performance.
Final version 26052020.
Performed in Malta, 08012017, limited edition, signed and numbered.
Eostre Action . Digital Performance.
Final version 19052020
Performed in Malta, 23042017, limited edition, signed and numbered.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%92ostre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_egg
We do not live by bread alone I.
Digital Performance.
Performed in Malta 01052017.
Final version 27052020
Limited edition, signed and numbered
We do not live by bread alone II.
Digital Performance .
Performed in Malta 01052017.
Final version 26052020
Limited edition, signed and numbered
We do not live by bread alone III.
Digital Performance .
Performed in Malta 01052017.
Final version 01052020
Limited edition, signed and numbered
NOT ONLY BREAD LIVES MAN, BUT OF EVERY WORD THAT COMES FROM THE MOUTH OF GOD
I wonder if the words of one of the first "socialists" in human history continue to be valid today.
We continue after two thousand years to base our well-being expressly on material goods, that in order to obtain them we force ourselves and accept living and existential and above all working conditions that in most cases wear us out ... in American societies it is usual to say: work hard and enjoy a lot (work hard, play hard). This statement is really valid is what each of us wants? Or is life not only the enjoyment of our hard work but spending time to "feed our soul" with any desire for activities, other than mere work?
"Work is a prison".
From this performance reflections arose around the project "give us our daily bread today"
Proudly I serves
Digital Performance. Agita in Belgrade 29062019
Final version 29052020
Edition signed and numbered
Photography by Andreja Agrez
On one of her business trips to the States, my partner sent me a picture of a takeaway glass for coffee with proudly written we serve. Enlightening! But what do we really serve? Where does it end and what and who feeds our daily work?
Religious secularism
Digital Perfomance.
Performed in Venice 21072019. Final version 25042020
Edition signed and numbered
Photography by Andreja Agrez
religióne sf [from lat. religio -onis, prob. akin to religare «legare», with reference to the binding value of sacred obligations and prohibitions]
( http://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/religione )
I have never been interested in "a political art", in fact I firmly rejected the idea, but like everything that is rejected in reality it is something to which our soul asks us to pay attention.
My making of art is born mainly from my experience as a man, I don't think there is a difference between art and life but the two things actually complement each other, they interchange continuously, so in the progress of art and life I discovered that in reality art is politics!
Politics in the sense of the etymology of the Greek term - (…) that which belongs to the dimension of common life, that is, of the city and its citizens -. (Art is Conscious Life, says Garry Hill)
Aquileia action, nature takes back its children
Digital Performance, 25082019
Final version 26052020
Numbered and signed edition.
Photography by Andreja Agrez.
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