Urbanautica

THE HOLY SPECTATOR. A JOURNEY WITH CLAUDIO BEORCHIA

by Steve Bisson

I recently visited the exhibition 'Tra Cielo e Terra' (Between Sky and Earth) by the artist Claudio Beorchia, at the Mufocu - Museum Contemporary of Photography in Milan. A well-articulated exhibition that showcases the results of a performative process on a regional scale aimed at restoring a plural vision of the Lombard territories. How? By activating, almost miraculously, the glances of the saints who over the centuries have inhabited these lands with their religious niches, votive chapels and small altars made by the faithful practitioners. To satisfy this vision, the artist, along with the curator Matteo Balduzzi, the Museum and local associations, has mobilized the participation of local citizens with specific campaigns. A few months' investigations followed for shaping a landscape mosaic from the bottom up, from this galaxy of religious "branches" that underpin the Lombardy region. To emerge is a multitude of colorful shots far from photographic ambition, and among which those of Beorchia are subtly mixed. The visitor is lead to wear the saints' shoes, to philosophize on the sense of looking, and on the passage of time. In addition to admiring the rich typology of votive niches that refer to a resilient Christian tradition and perhaps to previous apotropaic customs, the attempt to problematize what we often take for granted, or rather we no longer see, should be appreciated.

Backstage of the project 'Di Fede Osservanti'. Claudio Beorchia performs with a local saint's point of view. Asolo, 2018. This series constitutes methodological anticipation of what will be later developed to a regional scale in Lombardia.

Claudio Beorchia's diptych from the series 'Di Fede Osservanti', Asolo, 2018. The left image is a portrait of a saint and on the right what the saint sees.

The book Asolo Sine Qua Non which features the result of the art residency programme Save Asolo, published by Urbanautica Institute, 2018

The project 'Di Fede Osservanti' featured on the book Asolo Sine Qua Non which features the result of the art residency programme Save Asolo, published by Urbanautica Institute, 2018

The singular point of view chosen by Beorchia offers a neutral observatory, which leaves little room for the contradictory, if not for the choice of the geographical scale that limits the possibility to measure oneself with precise local consistency. An operation that was more plausible in Beorchia's previous experience accomplished at the art residency programme Save Asolo in 2018, in a limited and describable area of investigation. In fact, the landscape is learned, it does not exist a priori. And learning requires dedication, immersion, knowledge. We say we know the landscape, but we don't even know the name of the trees we immortalize, the flowers we admire. Thus we might say that we only know the surface of the world, the image we make of it. Photography remains a surface if it does not become permeable to history, to a sense of belonging. We are often inclined to seek those footsteps whose echo has carved us deeply, like actors who try to stage a past script. Thus places are linked to our memory. Life is like sowing memories, and those that resist time are often those in which strong feelings are deposited or those that marked our own very substance.

The participatory process designed by Claudio Beorchia is significant because it undermines the act of looking with respect to our personal and sometimes prejudicial point of view. It builds an ideal stage because it is impartial. And it invites us to go up and to strip off our subjective lenses. Beorchia offers us a one-way ticket since we have to make the return ourselves. This is what exhibitions are for. Clearly the return depends on what we observe but above all on the way we do it. The ancient Greeks taught us that there are two ways of looking, the contemplative one (from the Greek orao) and the scopic or targeted one, like an endoscopy, we would say today. The stage in question, precisely because of the wide panorama to which it is addressed, predisposes us to a reflection on the whole (from the Greek pan as panorama), that is, on Man and creation. A creation whose existence, as we know, is no longer marked by the cycle of nature, but by linear time on which the will of human power can accelerate without limits, in a space that is null because it is boundless.

The abandonment of the sense of right measure on which beauty, or harmony, was built, manifests itself with different intensities in the world that we can still contemplate. As we know, our territories have now become disharmonious, poor in diversity or, metaphorically, in words and, therefore, thoughts. The creation that the saints of today observe is a large slab of asphalt on which Man plays to make God. Therefore saints observe petrified the failure of the Judeo / Christian culture on whose laws the western castle now turned towards sunset was built. As elders, they peer incredulously from the walls of the castle and struggle to recognize the landscape. They struggle to accept that change is upon us.

The book 'Saint Scapes. View of Lombardy', Mufocu, 2019

The book 'Saint Scapes. View of Lombardy', Mufocu, 2019

The divine face of creation has been disfigured in the run-up to a "bad infinite", in boundless freedom, and perhaps today it does not make much sense even for mortals to go on that stage on which their story has long been told. The curtain falls, the play stops. There is no beauty left to contemplate. And here is the drama of the accelerated progress of history that produces the disorientation of Man, made enslaved or silent by the technology that deprived him of the word, as had already happened previously with that of God, the unpronounceable name made of pure consonants.

At the very moment when the technology became "the language" and pronounced «Man», the Enlightenment civilization with its dictates began to crumble. Therefore Man died, just as God died for Nietzsche for no longer being the actor of history. And so humanity in decline appears alone and surrounded by insignificant products and signs. The saints or whoever in their place, have only to unearth the ancient hatchet or rather to question the meaning of existence, to realize that life cannot unfold in a linear way, as modernity preached, but is consolidated cyclically through the act of memory. So it goes without saying that to modern man at the mercy of a boundless and laic pilgrim, ousted from the celestial throne, chased again from heaven on earth, and condemned to oblivion in the obsolescent artifice of the here and now, forced to wander indefinitely in a landscape "orthopedized" by the catechism sans frontiers of the neoliberalism, there remains only one possibility: to recover the time of the seasons, or to follow nature and reconcile with sky and earth, the two dimensions that provide a title to the exhibition of Beorchia. How? Well, maybe it would be appropriate to ask the trees who are aware of the issue. Of course, without taking anything away from the forgotten lives of the saints.

Installation view of the exhibition 'Tra cielo e Terra' di Claudio Beorchia, Mufocu, Milano, 2019-2020

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LINKS
Claudio Beorchia
MUFOCU Museum of Contemporary Photography
Urbanautica Italy

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