INTERVIEW WITH LOREDANA GALANTE

Loredana Galante is an always active volcano whose enthusiasm and creativity not only involve you but overwhelm you. I will not write an introduction because this interview really reveals a lot and I would have nothing else of interest to add to what she generously told about herself and her response work in response.

Umarmung, 2017-2019 stampa fotografica, centrin Dimensione 70 x 100 x 8 circa ph. Antonio Delluzio

All your works and performances deal with very serious themes, yet observing them or browsing through the many texts that speak of them are two of the most common terms that I came across and that, I confess, I would also use to define the figure: playful and ironic. It takes an uncommon talent to handle a delicate matter such as – for example – the unconscious, trauma, the feminine with such care and skill as to be able to communicate it through a playful language. Is it the mirror of your vision of life that you also apply to your art or is it the result of an artistic journey and your research?

The game and the irony belong to my family as well as a predisposition to pathos and the double ability to immerse oneself totally in the dramatic experiences without borders and to live everyday life with the climate and affection with which a party you care about is organized. . Difficulties remain a private matter and only the saving elements remain, such as live everyday life with irony and the guarantee of a smile.I would explain this modality as discretion but also, perhaps, a form of shame mixed with fear of admitting of suffering. A difficulty in feeling authorized. This analysis describes our formative tangles, we see it clearly and towards others from us, we are much more understanding and inclusive. For the promotion of games, parties, moments of aggregation and hospitality we are trained from an early age, generation after generation.

I believe the answer lies in the transition from feeling to giving back. Whereas about feeling, you have your channels that you have refined, with which you have confronted, understood, managed. Channels that belong to you and that represent you even when you sleep, you can plan the return. You can select what but above all how you tell yourself. In my life and in my work, I have made a similar choice. In life I keep afflictions and unpleasant events for myself, I try as much as possible to relate to others when I have enough enthusiasm and energy to be proactive, light.  It is a confidentiality that is not secrecy but is respect for the space of the other. Buddhist practices, training as a counselor, my research have also provided me with autonomy of containment. I don’t have to overflow, I don’t need confusion about the important things. There are no answers from anyone in the noise.I don’t want to say that I don’t need the others, like almost everyone I need confirmation, a need exacerbated by a job that, with some exceptions, needs an audience, speaks to someone who listens, if interested. I would like to be that person who makes you feel better than when you arrived and it is the same experience that I would like to repeat with my work. Mine is a space of refreshment and comfort and if you want to play I’m always ready. Because with my family, whenever possible, we play, laugh and celebrate the celebration of being together.With irony, you redesign life, take a little distance and review the proportions. If I have to overflow, I want to overflow with enthusiasm and confidence even when it seems like an unsustainable effort. I want to create Conforti, equipped rest areas, swimming pools with perfumed salts for social foot baths, heart-shaped flower beds, Sottane Madre. I don’t want to attack, go inside. I want to create spaces of containment, let in, greet diversities and console with Similes as manifestos of Understanding.

Sottana Madre, 2017 tessuto, ricamo, pizzo, uova di plastica, filo, 85x200cm

Relationship is one of the main themes (if not THE theme) of your art. What is the meaning of your work? What messages does it convey? What reflections does it raise?

My job is to observe, catalog, compose. The Relationship is the stimulus and the goal, a before and after, absolutely interchangeable in a repetition to infinity. It contains the contradictions including that of its contribution value as opposed to a suspicion of total and polluting uselessness. It is an area where you can get the accounts back, the alchemical laboratory of the lives that are dedicated to it, a tool for growth. My redemption from anonymity but also my social volunteer tool.

The meaning is to support the selection of my important things: feelings, emotions, others, the house that hosts us.

It conveys an incitement to responsibility and participation, a systemic vision, a very strong need for Respect. The re-appropriation of suspension times, slowness, expansion of reaction times in favor of processing times. My production is externalized in a drawing, a painting, an installation, an experience.

Underlying everyone is that desire to remain entangled in a fraction of poetry and saving beauty, the grace of measure, the eloquence of silence. With the recycling and saving of things, there is also a desire to reduce consumption, accumulations, the superfluous, avoid temporary false satisfactions and, as far as possible, obtain approvals. Neglect now has a very strong impact on my mood.

My calls to action, my workshops convey the same desire for sensitivity and attention and try to be functional to well-being. They are participatory and transformative rituals. If a whisper, a caress can affect it, this is my job: an act of Faith.

Ragni Tessitori, lavoro alluncinetto e bottoni misure variabili2014, 2021

This exercise of comparison and inclusion of the other also includes the creation of To be kind, a sui generis artist studio / atelier …

The meters I lived in and worked on have always been a transit space, so massive that it sometimes loses count. I become morbidly fond of my walls because they surround the proscenium of so many important events, interactions and bonds. To be kind is the last from a chronological point of view, it is five years old and the largest in size: 270 square meters. It is located in Milan and has hosted exhibitions, theater, poetry workshops, the time, events and certainly parties. The logo has a heart formed by the B (be) and the K of Kind and stands out on the canvas shopping bags to carry around my invitation.

Courtesy Loredana Galante

Among the projects of the last few years to which you are particularly attached are the Weaving Spiders. Can you tell me what it is? 

Spiders are industrious creatures that with virtuosity and patience weave wonderful and precious webs. Like Relationships, it takes time and resources to build them but they are sensitive and fragile. A gust of wind or carelessness can destroy or compromise them. The doilies and buttons were collected by known people and not through social calls. The time of withdrawal is time dedicated to the meeting. The collection is an analog catalog of stories and at the same time a way to save “things” and prolong their life.

The doilies, old-fashioned objects, concentrates of time and manual ability cover the spidery forms and create cobwebs whose shadows are projected creating spaces of composition as happened at the Macro in Rome. The thread with its symbolic value and its tactility makes us enter and exit, surround, pin down.

Drawing with thread for me has the candor and grace of a prayer, the intrope of a meditation.

The cobwebs of the most varied shapes, suspended between spaces and pinned to the sides, prove to be very fragile, as are the relationships between humans. Days, years to build something that a word uttered casually, a clumsy gesture can destroy. Mending is much more difficult, it takes even more attention, it is necessary to recognize the broken threads and find a way to recompose the harmony of the design. The small cobwebs are ethereal webs of conscious belonging to be protected and respected.

The Tana: sheltering inside spider, built in a period of forced isolation, has a space, a den that welcomes sensitive and vulnerable parts: the nose and mouth. These months, during which protecting our relationships required a physical distance, have been a time to review and reset all the community rituals we were used to.

Pantoufles au crochet, 2020, 11x25x 8 cmpantofole, uncinetto e ricamo

Tokyo, Shengzhen, Tehran and then Mexico, Burkina Faso… you have brought your performances and your work in different geographical and cultural contexts. How does the experience, especially performative, change in different places?

It changes. If you want to communicate, you first have to worry about being understandable. If you want to meet someone, start walking, one step after another towards him / her. Each place was the result of very different circumstances and invitations. An exhibition, the inauguration of a museum, a period of study and documentation, a UNESCO project … In Iran I wore the veil and wore appropriate clothes, in China I wore the dress from the collection of designer Hui Zhou Zhao of the Each Way museum in Shengzhen

The long skirt / dress designed to descend from the ceiling of the museum conceals a Wunderkammer, a small inventory of images, memories, secrets, postcards from new worlds, souvenirs from the West and the East. Forms, objects encountered, recognized and collected, witnesses of a ritual of celebration of the exceptional nature of the moment. The river dress lets time flow over itself and retains some relics of everyday life, fragments of a poetic gesture that includes everyone. 

In Burkina Faso, camped in the middle of nowhere with a flooded tent and open air toilet, I worked looking for some shade with my feet in a bucket of water …

The common intent of all experiences is to shorten distances. Performance is an emotional event that has the right intensity only if it is strongly participated. All my work, without the others, has no reason to exist and has no energy. The gaze on the world is a gaze of constant wonder. My works and my actions are inserted in the inconsistent and ideal place of possibility, of suspended observation, of the unexpected. My events are announced by whispers and have the subtle texture and permeability of the skin. I hate firecrackers and I suffer for the little birds that die from them.

Cornucopia, Libri, 2013-2019, 230 x 90 x 50 cm. circa, tecnica mista stoffa ricamo oggetti vari

How has your work evolved over the years?

Since when? In my life I have spent more years doing my work than those in which I had not yet started it. A fidelity and constancy of a certain tone. I am forced to admit it, “If I fall down a drain, apart from my mother, nobody notices it!”: With this phrase I have often “made fun of myself” putting my husband in that “nobody” too.That question of existing if they look for you, see you, listen to you and buy you at least enough to call it your profession, to look after you and your Creatures. I moved by including everything I liked in my doing, not without authorizations from my part that came with time, experience, courses, urgency. The performance and relational actions came after the painting and again after the installation. To date I have not given up anything.

I move among the media with my own code of consistency, which is not readable or acceptable to everyone, in some cases anti-functional.

I would say that I have not skimped on the bit of wisdom that I picked up by paying the high price of the years already spent. I threw it all into it. The “noises” and the “rhythms” have changed but the intentions are similar, while that self-referenced energy was replaced by youthful strategies of self-maintenance in strength because you really put a lot of energy, time, passion into it. A now obsolete mechanism of production of enthusiasm is working at full speed. I wouldn’t trade it for anything more sophisticated or digital. I remain of the minority ethnic group of analogues.

Le Portatrici 2020/21, ricamo e tessuto su tende d’epoca

Kindness is another leitmotiv of your art and is also at the center of a project in progress – The gentle revolution. Can you explain to me what it is and how to participate?

“What is a Revolution? A subversion, an upheaval to be implemented suddenly and abruptly or even an intention of consistency and repeated efforts to introduce a particle of change, albeit a small one, into the environment.

Where do I start my Gentle Revolution? From contemplating the blades of grass without tearing them, from sanitizing my thoughts before giving them the green light, feeling part of a unicum to participate in with my best version, “don’t skimp on my life”, make offers, cultivate gratitude in silence, do not waste, take charge of my and others’ vulnerability …

Kindness unites and trains it in all its gratuitousness. The result of an existential inclination to abundance, to sharing, to wet eyes. An inclination that triggers a reciprocity mechanism, which feeds itself. 

The causes of the Gentle Revolution have immediate effects and latent effects whose petals will open in due time. Trust and patience are important to enlist.

Kindness is outdated and too little sensationalistic to be noticed in cacophonous and accelerated factories, but there are those who practice it. The armor supplied is minimal, permeable, fragile. It takes time to assimilate, welcome, mend, mend tears and wounds but also to admire the drawing made with the thread of chosen words, reassuring scenarios, sentimental constellations. It is an indicator of serenity and the pleasure of living. This is why it is so difficult.It is necessary to get out of the climate of famine, undressing fears to move lightly towards the construction of a common feeling, an unstable building built on the sands of our inconsistencies and our suspicions, which must be reinforced, propped up, manned day and night while remaining awake and willing to listen. . “

You have just read my manifesto which has its origins from taking charge of my surname: GALANTE. To participate, “arm yourself” with strips of salvaged fabric and write, draw, embroider messages of inclusion, harmony and attention aimed at a logic of the common good. I await from anyone and from everywhere a phrase, a thought, an intuition that has the purpose of radiating frequencies of transformation and care, because The Gentile Revolution is not just an exhibition, it is a proposal to think together, a wave of improvement that starts from ourselves.

A due generazioni di distanzatoujour la meme feuille

A year, the one that passed, which slowed down the whole art system. Where do you start from and what has changed or should change in your opinion? You, in particular, what are your plans for the near future? 

I left Milan after seven months in Camogli, a temporary space for To be kind with a garden that allowed me to forget the constant issue of masking. I have never stopped working, producing, exhibiting, explaining, responding. I had a credit from Mare that I tried to compensate, the desire to watch the buds emerge and the flowers bloom.

The exhibition The Gentle Revolution at the Dino Zoli Foundation in Forlì, born as a result of the Arteamcup Award 2019 artist residency, opens in September and will be open for three months. COVID postponed the inauguration but allowed longer and more reasoned dedication to work times. I would not want the collection of strips to end with the inauguration. The reflection that I invite you to do, I would like it to reach as many people as possible and that each could bring his idea, proposal, wish, encouragement.

For the future…

I think that the budgets in a professional choice like ours are frequent, the results are measured but the changes are detected. Sometimes I have heard of identification with one’s work. The identifications are binding and reductive. Instead, I think that any friction between being and doing in this work is unbearable.Precisely because it is a job that starts with you and is made up and not just performed by you. I think this is the case when you feel the material and substance of your work. And I see it in many of my colleagues who work in a certain way. What we produce is content and container. Both must match and be reconfirmed when changing. And change is inherent in every step.

So my program is always a test of my energy and my motivation. I could tell about the complicated management of desires and expectations but I prefer that you imagine them by browsing my catalogs or by visiting me at To be Kind

If you got to the bottom of this novel: either you approached me or you wanted to see if at some point I would stop this litany to become more fun as they tell me. I was born in Genoa and how many times I laugh thinking about that phrase by De Andrè “we know that people give good advice when they can no longer set a bad example”.

In reality, “setting a good example” does not have a season as well as “Amori”.

Therefore PEACE and LOVE. There is a great need!