Gloria

 Giorgio Andreotta Calò

If in the practice of the artist that walks through France, Spain and Portugal, from Amsterdam to Venice, from Beirut to Tripoli, from Genoa to Ventimiglia, the motus is an intellectual necessity as well as physical, in walking from Venice to L’Aquila new reflections are sown in the relation between man and nature. On August 24, 2016, Giorgio found himself in his city, Venice, and even at this great distance could feel the echoes of the earthquake that shook Amatrice and neighboring zones. The physical perception of that terrae-motus is placed in emotive contact with those who suffered pain from that roar, losing their own life or those of their loved ones.

Three years later, on August 24, 2019, Giorgio will set out walking from Venice towards L’Aquila: along the long stretch of the Gloria fault, an orogenic split at the origin of the major earthquakes of the peninsula. A solitary walk of about a month that will give life to an immaterial work titled Gloria. At the height of the eastern Francigena of Lazio, the artist will enter the route that from Leonessa leads to Amatrice, leaving a sign, today not present.

The profound natural and human crisis generated from the terrae-motus is transformed into a physical and interior motus towards a hurt community, an aesthetic and political gesture of solidarity, sharing, love, but also aimed to overcome emotive fractures, interpersonal faults, and sudden crises.

Giorgio affirms, “A walk, a pathway, exists in the moment in which it is furrowed; the action of walking is that which maintains alive its route and, in consequence, walking assumes an absolute value, not instrumental to other forms of production (of objects) or of entertainment (of visitors). Walking is a concrete and symbolic gesture, a spiritual gesture, political and aesthetic. A gesture that can become a work of art itself.”

The results of this fourty day journey on foot have been collected in a diary entitled Gloria, published by Humboldt Books.