The Project

Perched on a hill, Montalcino looks out onto the dazzling expanse of the Crete Senesi as it changes with the seasons. Jannis Kounellis (born in Piraieus, but living in Rome since the late 50s) counterposes in an open dialectic this horizontal extension with a vertical sinking. Penetrating the surface, passing through the stratifications of geological time, touching the bottom, that bottom of pitch blackness that medieval alchemists saw as the initial phase of every alchemic and redeeming process. From there, emerging towards the surface, rising from the bottom, crossing layers of history, this time not only geological but also political, ideological and cultural, the substance of human hope in knowledge and action, like the magma that spews out from the mouth of an active volcano. As in other works by Kounellis, it is a question of giving voice to silence, which is above all else the silence of history. That voice therefore has an excessive tone – imposed silence, when deviated into voice, provokes an excess. For this project, Kounellis has chosen a well, an essential component of any ancient settlement and an emblem of an archaic sociality upon which all principles of civilization rest. An enormous mass of glasses emerges from the well, instruments for seeing which modern civilization has equipped itself with in order to see better, to know in a more detailed way, to measure the world and the things within it. An emblem of a sophisticated knowledge and capable of distinguishing between every other form of ingenuous and primitive knowledge. But at the same time a fragile instrument, vulnerable in the face of any savage state or attitude. This, then, is the construction, the poetic syntax of the work. But there is more to the work than the act of its construction. It lays itself open to questions which it itself raises and leaves unanswered. To which of the many, sometimes tragic, narratives that mark our history can we associate this image? What form of judgement does the work imply? What outcome does it point to? We look into the well to see the instruments for seeing, a mass that sinks and rises.