Curatorial text conceived for the exhibition IO sono memoria by the artist Flaminia Celata at Curva Pura gallery, Rome 2021.
Madeleine
by Sara Palmieri
Madeleine
“[...] The tip of the tongue makes a journey of three steps on the palate to strike, on the third, against the teeth. Lo.Li.Ta. " “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-li-ta. "
Madeleine.
The first time I pronounce this name, the involuntary memory that precedes me marks the opening words in my mind of the novel by Vladimir Nabokov, read 30 years ago. The fictional force of a work has engraved an involuntary connection in that verbal movement of the language, to a sudden memory, awakening a powerful emotion linked to the moment of reading that work, to the fantasies generated, and to all the times that other images in the time of my life they called her back.
Madeleine is a woman, a lady from Beirut who suffers from a disease that causes a slow decline in memory, thinking and reasoning skills.
Madeleine calms down when she weaves pieces and threads of wool, she feels less lost.
The last pieces of wool that Flaminia Celata added to the sculpture that bears her name, arrived in the hands of the artist after a very long journey, are from Madeleine. A journey that began 6 months, 26 kilos and countless meters of thread ago, of wool parade from garments that belonged to people with problems related to memory loss, then twisted together in small twists and stitched together through a gesture identical to itself day after day, sometimes night after night, until it no longer needs to be remembered to be accomplished. The procedural memory, which the artist also calls into question in other works in the exhibition, 'the memory of doing things', becomes the final, decisive and liberating process and act of a research that lasted more than 4 years.
Madeleine.
When you give something a name, that something ceases to be an object. When something is questioned, it becomes subject to itself, an ego equipped with answers, capable of dialogue.
The first time the artist pronounces that name, her thoughts turn to Proust's madeleines in In Search of Lost Time, where the narrator tells how by eating a madeleine soaked in tea an involuntary childhood memory suddenly invests him, 'yes filled with a precious essence ': “I had stopped feeling mediocre, transitory, mortal”. The visual memory had fallen asleep but not the smell, not the taste, through which the mind is able to re- emerge a sensation, to create that I don't know which does not yet exist, to imagine it.
Celata decides to give a name to that memory that is lost, that loses its conscience, its own self. She decides to give will and body to the material and to entrust it with the task of being an interpreter, a witness, perceptive threshold. She opens a relationship through the senses, lets the gesture take over and becomes independent of herself and cathartic, she gives it words and movements, observes it become Memory and then again forgetting itself, changing and growing as the memory transforms itself with the passage of time and the flow of emotions that invest it with new meanings.
Remove and trim in another form, enter and exit, hold and let go.
There is an infinite past and an infinite future in that repeated gesture. The past of those memories "abandoned so long out of memory" whose "forms" were "abolished, asleep, had lost the expansive force that had allowed them to reach consciousness", and the future that eternally awakens a new form possible. Form generated not by thought and design, but by the symbolic gesture that seeks a union between wanting to hold back and learning to let go, and takes charge of all the identities represented by the threads recomposed in it, souls that thus regain possession of their weight and space, and their dignity.
Ma de-le-ine.
Madeleine is a woman, whose name someone who passionately loved her will have made it ring on their lips. Madeleine is a man, who wears his green scarf every time he goes out on the boat to be caressed by the wind. Madeleine is a little boy his father used to take to buy cotton candy on sundays, which once clung to his red sweater and never left. Madeleine is the mountain hikes, of those carefree years when you were there.
An experience that went through trying to understand, study, know, while leaving a small gap, a deliberately open chink, so that from there love would find its way of entry and finally liberation: thin as a thread, infinite like a bond that feeds on other bonds one after the other until it generates a new body, until it explodes in a form that recalls its old features and tries to imitate them. But she no longer needs it, they would no longer be able to hold back that birth of love.
The artist then, daughter and mother, does not cut the umbilical cord, that marrow of connections and impulses between body and brain, but exposes it to remind us that we must cling to ourselves to accept and finally let go, showing us an exit, a look that is lost upwards.
Memory exists independently of us. It survives time and the transience of the body.
And then Madeleine, in “IO sono memoria” together with the other works on display at Curva Pura, is a manifesto of hope and a legacy, the body of the artist and of each of us freed from the constraints of time and form, a tangible witness, matter immortal, silent guardian of our history.
"But, when nothing exists of an ancient past, after the death of beings, after the destruction of things, alone, more tenuous but more vivid, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and the taste, a long time they still persist, like souls, to remember, to wait, to hope, over the ruin of all the rest, bringing on their almost impalpable drop, without wavering, the immense edifice of memory ”.
Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu.
Bibliography:
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
À la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust
The sense of memory, Jean-Yves Tadié - Marc Tadié
Matter and memory, Henri Bergson
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Madeleine (2020-2021) is a sculpture in recycled wool threads, part of the exhibition IO sono memoria, Curva Pura gallery, Rome 2021.
Flaminia Celata wants to thank Ninni Romeo, the Gomitolorosa Association, Alessandra Drewien psychologist of the Alzheimer United Association of Rome and all the people who have donated a garment to them or a loved one, for their contribution to the realization of this project.
Sara Palmieri has been collaborating with Flaminia Celata for several years in the design and dissemination of projects focused on the development of potential through photography, constantly bringing individual research to the center of a shared debate.