A look back at the poetic, political and anthropological dimensions of the collective performance initiated by artist Giorgio Andreotta Calò around a mining plant in Sardinia.
During the night of 4 December 2014, in the heart of the Sulcis Iglesiente area of Sardinia, an action by artist Giorgio Andreotta Calò took place, involving some ten local miners following a ritual path from dusk until dawn. Setting out from the very bowels of the Nuraxi Figus mining plant, the miners made their way towards Punta Trettu, where they were awaited by a group of fishermen who would ferry them to the island of Sant’Antioco. On their arrival, a boat was consumed by a fire. The community gathered around the flickering flames to witness the metamorphosis of the vessel into ashes and charcoal. This was the night of Santa Barbara, the patron saint of miners, and the Sulcis area was on the verge of a historical turning point: after more than a century of production, it had been announced that the mines would be closed down. Midway between political demonstration and pagan ritual, in girum imus nocte was more than a mere collective ritual. And this book, ten years after the action took place, reflects on its poetical, political and anthropological aspects, outlining a circular path that holds out against the prospect of a definitive end.
The performative and ephemeral work of Italian artist Giorgio Andreotta Calò (born 1979 in Venice, lives and works between his homeland and Amsterdam) rests at the intersection of art and architecture. He intervenes on buildings and landscape, appropriating and transforming architecture and space into symbolic and aesthetic experiences. Walking, understood as a gesture both real and symbolic, political and aesthetic, is a fundamental element in the artist's practice, actually becoming the artwork. His most significant works include a series of walks that took him 1,600 miles through France, Spain, and Portugal, or 98 kilometers along the abandoned coastal train line in Lebanon, or the appropriation of the abandoned parliament building in Sarajevo which he illuminated from sunset to sunrise with an artificial light. Calò participated in the 2011 Venice Biennale; in 2012 he was the recipient of the Young Artist Prize, awarded by the MAXXI Museum of Twenty-First Century Art in Rome. Through his sculptures, installations, videos, Giorgio Andreotta Calò is set on creating a work that is multiple, between poetry and politics, and inextricably linked to the question of landscape and the underground ties linking it to man. He never ceases to explore, almost obsessively, the boundaries of space and of the bodies inhabiting it while developing a very subjective kind of mythology. His works are a testimony of a new approach of peripheral zones in-between the city and the countryside, the inescapable social and psychological metaphors running through them as well as a blatant and unbearable collective uncertainty: the acute loneliness of the human being.
