Antonella Raio

About three years ago I found a studio that fully welcomes my artistic research, the Calvanese nursery.
An ancient nursery that does not seem to belong to our time. Merged in a nature that, although manipulated by man, seems to contain that sacredness that indicates possible paths, which put me on the alert.

Art allows me to focus on the other. My intent is to create works that are pretexts to stop the viewer, who on any day may come across a small black hole, which catapults him elsewhere. I transform viewers' reactions into audio, video and photos. This material becomes the living part of my sculptures. Working on the other, I often find myself analyzing issues related to the sacred, which I propose as the first forms of creative doing.
In recent years my work has found in nature not only experimental concepts, but the very material of my sculptures, and that's why I looked for a space that could help me in this change.

The Calvanese nursery is a place opened to the public and is visited by different people every day. This constant opening of the place has completely changed me artistically. Every minute of my work can always be shared, even if I am caught up in the creative moment, concentrated in my inside. Here comes someone who has expected everything from a vintner, except an art laboratory. In this unexpected meeting I stop and share the moment. This total openness is causing me to question the whole concept of intimacy and private space.
In this place I am continuously in sight, but strangely the nature that inhabits it manages to create a rare discretion in me. As if you were always in a kind of harmony in which the other is part of this "whole".

This intimate search may one day end and maybe I will leave this place. I will leave it when I understand a little more about natural systems and their coexistence, when I understand what a tree wants to tell and how a seed does not contain death but the already formed future. Every time I touch a leaf, I know it contains something.
For now i use the mas sheets that make up my sculptures, but i am aware that i am still at the first ste. On the first page of a story, the end of which is only part of the journey In this Studio the space is minimal, even if it seems large. Everything has its place and the plants cannot be moved because they would suffer, just as in my small laboratory everything takes up space and what is added does not always improve. So you ask yourself what to subtract to maintain harmony? What is superfluous? If nature offers you harder leaves than leather and if a fallen trunk gives you the opportunity to understand how a social structure is born, why not use these materials without adding something that would contaminate the environment? Where does our desire to add come from? What if it were all a simple game of ego?

For now, I'm looking for answers.