The Veil and the Fortress

NICOLA RICCIARDI 

The Officine Grandi Riparazioni of Turin hosted an incessant succession of sounds from 1895: the ring of hammers, the gliding of gantry cranes, the hum of workers engaged in maintaining railway vehicles. Then, a century later, when the last train left the historic works in Corso Castelfidardo, the sound of work gave way to the quiet of abandon. A dozen or so years then had to pass before sound returned to inhabit the workshops: it was 30 September 2017 and the reborn OGR once again opened their doors to receive a since then uninterrupted flow of sounds, no longer made by industrial machinery but by the voice and instruments of an ensemble of heterogeneous artists who helped turn the old factory into a cultural institution, by way of exhibitions, concerts and performances. This repeated rotation of sound and silence generated many ideas at the OGR, including a sequence of projects aimed precisely at investigating the thin and permeable confine between the two elements. An exhibition aimed at analysing music as an art object - “In Concert” by Ari Benjamin Meyers - was followed, in spring 2019, by a project that, conversely, studied silence as a driver of creativity. This is primarily linguistic, given the numerous contradictory rhetorical figures that may be employed to “speak of that which cannot be spoken of without negating it”. Indeed, silence can be as fragile as ice or as impenetrable as stone, it can fall like a curtain or be raised like a bank, broken the word flows wildly; it can be a thin veil that gags the mouth or an impregnable fortress intended to cut off any form of communication. It is precisely from this flourishing of opposites that the theory behind “The veil and the fortress” blossomed, or rather it is precisely from this intrinsic contradiction, from this constant friction between opposites, that the creative spark that fills the absence of sound is unleashed. The first chapter in this argument in the form of an exhibition project was an analysis of the artistic research carried out by the Turin painter Max Pellegrini, whose work, aided also by his partial deafness, is built around the relationship between lack of sound and creation of the imagination. His big canvases represent allegories and visions steeped in mysticism and spirituality, ascetic and mute dreams in which sound becomes painting and words are immersed, hidden, and only just manifested in the rich titles of the works. In order to emphasise how silence does not necessarily exclude movement, Pellegrini’s canvases were thus used as the wings for a performance that for a month enlivened the cathedral interior - by definition the spiritual heart and place of the OGR - transformed for the occasion into a stage of multidisciplinary cross pollinations and other synaesthetic contradictions: from theatre meditation to the sound of silence, and on to thematising the incapacity of the word in philosophy, theology and anthropology. The visitors thus found themselves before a contemplative space from which to embark on a metaphorical journey between words and their negation, following a vague movement like that of the butterfly in one of Pellegrini’s works, whose river-title tells how one day this “fled from the underworld and flying came across the wedding of Cadmus and Harmonia and turned the rags into princesses. Then it went back to the underworld to take peace there, too”.