Episode 2: Fluid boundaries

Season 1: Venice

Episode 2: Fluid boundaries with Cosimo Ferrigolo

Cosimo’s passion for listening to abandoned spaces shifted his career from theatre set design to performance art

Cosimo Ferrigolo dissolves boundaries to challenge us to live in a more inclusive and inter-connected way. He speaks to us from his home-studio in Venice about how fluidity permeates his work.

We met when I visited the Venice Biennale Architecturra last year. I was in Venice as one of five creative directors of the Australia Pavilion 2023 exhibition unsettling Queenstown.

In this episode we cover:

• how living in Venice takes on a political meaning

• how Cosimo’s passion for architectural spaces shifted his career from theatre set design to performance art as he was more interested in listening to abandoned spaces than creating a set in a blank canvas

• Cosimo’s involvement in Metaforte, the former Austrian naval fort turned artists live-in studio, in the Venezia lagoon

• blurring the boundaries on fact and fiction,

• the periphery’s relationship with the centre, and

• Cosimo’s shared feeling between his work and childhood

Whether you are interested in how artists and curators respond to the social, political and environmental tensions within a place, or you are fascinated by the beauty and mythology of Venice, this episode promises to reveal another layer of Venice that can only be experienced by immersing yourself in the lagoon.

Tune in to hear how the islands in the Venetian lagoon influence the psyche and the artistic imagination.

Biography

Cosimo Ferrigolo is a theatre stage manager and performance artist who studied architecture and urban design.

His interest in how artists work in urban spaces and the stories they reveal is influenced by his background in theatre set design and performance studies. He always works collaboratively and uses an interdisciplinary approach to dissolve the boundaries of how we experience the world, raising more questions than providing answers.

Since 2021 he has been the stage manager for the OHT theatre company. In 2020 he co-founded BARdaDino, a shared studio and cultural space in Venice. Since 2017 he has collaborated with MetaForte Association, a cultural urban regeneration project through art and housing. Cosimo works with curatorial and performance collective Extragarbo.

Transcript

0:00:01.7 Sarah Rhodes: My name is Sarah Rhodes, an artist based in Tasmania. I met with Cosimo Ferrigolo when I visited the Venice Biennale Architettura last year as one of five creative directors of the Australian community. Cosimo is a theatre stage manager and performance artist who studied architecture and urban design. He speaks to us from his home studio in Castello about his passion for abandoned spaces and their ability to reflect ourselves back to us.

Art Destinations will be published fortnightly and each season will focus on one place. The first season explores Venice and aims to provide an understanding of the layer tourists rarely see. Please take a minute to sign up to the email newsletter on the website artdestinations.org and follow this podcast on your hosting platform so you don't miss an episode.

Cosimo explains how fluid boundaries challenge us to live in a more inclusive and interconnected way. He described living in Venice as a political act, which is a very active way of thinking about our relationship to place. It goes to the heart what this podcast is setting out to explore. The idea that we are place, place is inside us and Venice speaks to us as a microcosm for many of the global issues we are talking about internationally.

Welcome Cosimo.

0:01:19.0 Cosimo Ferrigolo: Welcome Sarah. Thank you.

0:01:21.8 SR: We've just come back from a wonderful photo session where I photographed you in one of Venice's few remaining abandoned spaces. I'm going to post some of the pictures on Instagram, @artdestinations.podcast. There was something magical about the experience as you moved undirected through the space as though you were on a film set. You understood how the light illuminated and framed sections of the room. You moved into archways and through doorways, allowing the architectural elements to suggest a narrative. It was very clear that you see the world as a theatre stage and so living in Venice must be a highly stimulating place to live and work. I'd like to start the conversation with how and why Venice lends itself to artists making site-specific work.

0:02:05.3 CF: Venice is a city where the impacts of global process are very visible because of the shape of the city, because the city itself tends to resist to them because of its fragility, I think. Phenomena such as mass tourism or climate change are immediately apparent. Its transformation is perceived so clearly that it reflects on those who inhabit it that same sense of resistance that the city seems to experience on a daily basis. Living in Venice is, for many of us, takes on a political meaning. The city's problems become part of their own horizon of meaning. Perhaps this is why many of the imaginations that are born here or that are addressed here become site-specific. Because here, more than elsewhere, it is difficult not to take into consideration the place. And particularly not to hear its voice.

0:03:31.4 SR: It is also a magical city where the water brings a sense of impermanence and therefore stimulates the imagination. How do you think about the water in Venice?

0:03:41.1 CF: The water elements and its fluidity are fundamental characteristics for understanding how Venice works. Although it looks like a single mass, in the water of the sea there are different levels, different temperatures. There are currents, especially at certain times of the day and for certain periods of the year. Everything seems connected and yet, when the day is over, everything goes back to where it belongs. When you walk around the city at night, it does not seem possible that the same streets during the day are so crowded with people from all over the world. Every night, Venice goes to bed early. I think its way of surviving in a certain sense. This also happens among people. Tourist, locals and people for whom Venice has become home when they grow up, they meet and often their activities are connected. But it is very difficult for this connection to be maintained beyond the purely working dimension. It can happen, but it is rare. Everyone in the evening goes back to their bubble to breathe.

0:05:21.8 SR: That's really interesting to make a parallel between the layers in the water and the currents and the movement of people. I have never really considered that before, but I think that is quite beautiful. When you are on the water anyway, you feel, for me, the imagination is stimulated and there is kind of this impermanence and there is this kind of fluidity. I feel like there are no real strong borders. And does that influence your work living in Venice?

0:05:51.8 CF: Yeah. Here I think there is immaterial, not material borders in a certain way. It changed a lot. For example, if you have a boat here or you don't have, because, for example, this was the first year I had a boat for a period. And the sense of freedom that having this transport possibility, it was incredible. I spent seven years or eight years in this island without having it.

0:06:30.2 CF: My sense of this place changed totally when I gain it. For example, this is... It was an experience which make me feel that this border there are... And the perception of people who are born here, for example, is totally different to my experience.

0:06:53.4 SR: So thinking about the lagoon, there's Venice the island, but then there's a lot of islands within this lagoon. You began your practice at one end of the lagoon and now you're living in more of the central part or the central in terms of how people are moving. So, what role does the lagoon play in your exploration?

0:07:13.5 CF: My first approach to cultural life in Venice was with MetaForte Association. In my first year at the Academy of Fine Arts, I met Oscar, who the first time we met, you say the normal thing when you meet people for the first time, a person for the first time, and, "What do you do? Where do you live?" And he said, "Me, I live in a military fortification of 1850." I told, "Hah. Wow. How is possible?" [laughter] "Can I join you? Can I come to see?" And he said, "Yeah, yeah, come, come." And I realized that he was living with his mother, Manuela, in a incredible place, really an incredible place, in an old Austrian's fort in Punta Sabbioni, in the northern part of the Venetian Lagoon. When I went to visit him the first time, I couldn't believe my eyes. It was a fantastic play, cared for by a community of people from many different places, many people born in the lagoon, but with international experience. Some families also lived in the fort. Oscar mother's Manuela, herself was born there in the early '60s. After the war, the Italian state had made that huge fortified building available for poor families and refugees. Manuela is a very radical artist, I think very anarchic. And after various experience, she started to take care of this building and restoring the parts that the people were gradually abandoning. Many artists and friends gave her an hand by building their studio in the fort.

0:09:31.1 CF: And in 2012, Oscar want to formalize this spontaneous activity, recognizing its cultural value. The MetaForte Project does not limit itself to safeguarding an asset of high historical and architectural value, but strongly believing in its public interest, but invest in the creation of an active and shared cultural pole in that area. The project purpose of collective preservation, according to which each individual is motivated to offer his or her own creative contribution to the maintenance of a common good. For me, MetaForte was the entry point to start working in this area together with its inhabitants. Over years, I have tried to bring as many people as possible there because the problem of the spaces is wide, widespread. A lot of young artists have worked there and used for to gain experience.

0:10:56.2 CF: In 2017, unfortunately, the state evicted the association and all its inhabitants, the inhabitants of the fort, due to security issues, not so real but... And since 2018, MetaForte has moved into another space, a military tower from the First World War, and restarted its activity by recovering this space and by winning also a public call for urban regeneration, which was really motivating for us. And the old fort, now, the first place of the association is still there, abandoned and for sale, testifying to the lack of the foresight of Italian institution regarding the management of the archeological asset they own.

0:12:12.6 SR: So she's putting her own money into restoring a building that's not hers. That's amazing.

0:12:18.8 CF: Of course.

0:12:21.0 SR: That's amazing.

0:12:21.4 CF: Yeah. But it's a question of care. When you feel something yours because of the story it contains, because of the experience you have with that space, you don't want to see it going in ruin. So if you don't have the instrument to...

0:12:55.7 CF: To take care it officially, you have to understand how to do it. There is also a question that you... When you want that the institution do something for you and for the space you take care of. You demand everything to them. You don't have the power, for example, to maintain the poetry in a certain way of a space. So when you have this sensibility and this feeling, maybe you want to do the minimum intervention, not big intervention. And this is another problem for me to involve institution in this restoring processes because it's difficult to maintain really the ghosts who make space speak big.

0:14:06.5 SR: 'cause they formalize it.

0:14:07.2 CF: Yeah. In a certain way. Yeah. So I think that Manuela, for example, was worried also about that. And this is another reason why she preferred to do things with local people, with people who recovered, for example, materials. She had a big space where she collects elements to do the substitution of something. But yeah, in a very ecological system where you can really see that someone make an intervention there.

0:15:02.5 SR: I was watching you in the abandoned space we photographed in earlier. I can see how your love for architecture animates your imagination. It is clear that these spaces are the ideal sites for performance, where you can explore the political and the social issues of the day alongside the aesthetics of the space. You trained as a theatre set designer and have shifted into site specific performance art. Can you please share with us the thread that led you along this path?

0:15:28.3 CF: The fact that I moved from the traditional set design, so the projects, architectural projects of the theatrical spaces, is the fact that I found that building all those pays from nothing for the theatrical black box. It was something that didn't interest me because I found that in the city there were a lot of spaces which was inhabited from ghosts of the past and relate me and the project to the history of those space. I have always been fascinated by architecture, listening to space and speaking with their history and their ghost to underline their tensions fascinates me more than of creating ex nihilo out of nothing. There is a sentence I like very much written by a German scholar, Erika Fischer-Lichte, according to which the design of the aesthetic of performance, it's purpose is to transform borders into thresholds. The border is an element I think, ignorant to the dimension of architectural space. If borders are a place of surveillance, power and low thresholds are often space of magic. Our work are based on this permeability of architecture, on the ability of atmosphere to transform the perception of a space in the transition between the inside and the outside, to summon the ghosts of the past and make them speak with a contemporary city with these struggles and claims.

0:17:41.2 SR: Do you have an example of a site-specific performance where you've responded to the space?

0:17:46.7 CF: For example, the past two project we had one in Rome and one in Milan. The first was, Abracadabra was a project inside a fascist space, the ex-jail, the house where the young people was educated to the fascist propaganda through sports and military education. And it's full of writings on the wall to narrate the huge power of the Italian empire. And it is a central space. It is in the centre of the city and we bring the history and we try to relate it with the contemporary city. Trying to find other spaces related, for example, to sports that are doing in the present. The contrary of this education, and we work a lot around the periphery, we find a lot of popular projects. For example, we recorded what in those space was going on and putting the sounds of those space inside this building. We try to break in a certain way the monumentality of this building trying to give life this white building.

0:19:33.8 SR: Can you describe this feeling of what drives you to work in these derelict spaces?

0:19:38.6 CF: I think that is what's happened to me when I enter in some kind of space, because I feel a sort of transformation also in coming back from an inside to the outside because I really believe in the energies that the space contains. So working with lights, for example, and with sounds, it means to relate with those energies and don't put someone else inside, but working with what exists. And I also think that is, we can say an ecological approach, so working with what, just still there, learn how to feel. More artists can do that. When you learn to see to listen differently, you change yourself and you pass the border.

0:20:54.2 SR: So are you exploring the boundary of the threshold with fact and fiction as well?

0:21:01.0 CF: Yeah. For example, we made a show, it was called Washer Art, Washer City. It was a sort of touristic guide. We made and we presented ourself as guides of Venice, but mixing fictional facts to historical facts. We tried to underline the problem of the usage of the city, the extractive dimension of also cultural institutions because sometimes these are rhetoric, for example, of care that the institution made on the city, but the same time, the effects they provoke on the city, it's the contrary. The guide was like he was presenting the next Biennale exposition and incredible idea of transforming the city by artistic interventions, trying to show which was the limits of this approach and how art can, the real aims, the real objective, the economic objective of its production behind the rhetoric of doing good and be good with the city.

0:22:37.2 SR: I could imagine the tension between young artists finding space in Venice to be quite difficult.

0:22:44.0 CF: It's difficult to maintain the spaces, but at the same time there is something for continuing doing this work because I think that all the people are working here feeling also this city as a home. It's difficult, but it's more hard, I think to leave your home in a certain sense.

0:23:12.3 SR: Well, it's a real sight for the imagination, I think. There's the water, the impermanence, the fluidity really excites the imagination that we're talking at the beginning about boundaries and with fact and fiction. There's kid of this nebulous state all the time, and it's quite, as an artist, very, very exciting. And I could imagine it would be challenging to live here on one level, but the magic of it could underpin your work and you wouldn't really want to be pushed out because it's so inspiring as a place periphery. What I've also noticed when I've been chatting to some of your colleagues in Venice, your fellow artists friends, that everyone's talking about ideas of boundaries, peripheries. So what does the word periphery mean to you?

0:24:00.2 CF: Periphery is also a place of mind, a very rich cultural code that varies from place to place. What all the words periphery having common is that they develop in constant confrontation with the centre. There is an imbalance of power whereby the periphery has taken on a negative value, but increasingly the centre are contaminated places, I think, where economic interests and control devices accumulate. Here it is a problem of narrative. Often the narrative of the periphery is mixed with the nutation of crime, ignorance, violence, and often there is also much more, and it is difficult to get rid of a stigma and realise how this narrative is functional to the maintenance of a highly unjust situation. In the work, Abracadabra for example by extraGarbo we worked precisely on the relationship between the centre and the periphery of Rome in that case, and we were greatly...

0:25:42.2 CF: Helped to in our research by a book by Valerio Mattioli, manual of Roman Peripheral culture, according to which sooner on the or later the centre will disappear suffocated by the periphery because we are really living a moment when the periphery is dimension is continually growing. So when the cultural knowledge of this huge part of the city maybe will stop to confront in a negative way with the centre and take the value of itself, maybe something will change. I don't know.

0:26:39.7 SR: It's a really interesting way of looking at it because we were talking earlier about the influence of Istanbul and even North Africa on Venice and how in the Fortuny fabrics there was a real sort of influence from the Arab cultures. And also Venice really has this kind of... Because of its trading history, it's got this real influence by all the Mediterranean cultures and it's sort of looking to the sea or it's looking in that direction rather than to what we would think of as the center of France, Germany, Rome, or the continent. So all the places that we're in the Mediterranean, they are from the position of the continent. They are the periphery. But for Venice, they are the centre and the continent is the periphery. And that's really interesting. All those islands are sort of connecting. It's quite beautiful.

0:27:42.5 SR: What was your childhood like? Did you have lots of free space and were you living in a centre or were you living in the countryside?

0:27:51.2 CF: When I was child, I grew up in a little village, 40 kilometre far from Rome. My parents was not born there. Were not born there. My father is from here, from  Mestre and my mother from Rome. But I think that I grew up in a small village is something that is related to my activity here, to my love, to this place. Because when I was teenager, I remember that the main necessity for me was to escape from this village and find a place where no one can know me, for example. And living in Rome in this big city was incredible. It was amazing to be no one. But in the end, for example, yesterday I met a child with her mom here near there. And in a moment he said to her mom.

0:29:17.2 CF: "Mom in Venice, they are all friends." And I said, "Strange." Because it's not true, but interesting that he felt a link between people in a certain way. And this is something that is more common in a village than in a city. And here we are in a strange city because there are both dimensions melt together, the international city where the place to be. And here in this neighbourhood you can understand that there are people who maybe don't know what is Biennale, they don't understand. They live in another dimension totally. A dimension where they old women come with their chair and talk in the evening together using the public space of an extension... As an extension of their house where everyone knows each other. And yeah, this sense of community, it's something that influence, I think also the people who comes here from other cities. And it's something that I like a lot. I love.

0:31:12.7 SR: So do you share a feeling between your childhood and your work now?

0:31:21.5 CF: Yeah, sometimes I interrogate me on this point, in this moment of my life, I have this perception of the fact that everything is related. I think that keep relation with the childhood, it's something important for human beings because there are a lot of things that can change the beginning perception of the world during life. But having this sense of connection of line that pass through your life and you can recognise the moment of changing, but you also recognise our drawing is something that it's really important to an identity sense, but not to build an identity, but discovering which identity you are, you have before. I remember that when I was really, really little, I started to interest me and for example, to space, to wild space. And I was continuously fascinated from this kind of spaces. For example, this is a connection, but there are a lot of that. So when I lose this perception, usually there are period that I don't feel good. I feel lost. So yeah, it's a good question because I think it's important to ask ourself why you are doing something. What's the reason? The intimate reason not only, yeah, for the world, for the equality, for good reasons, but which is the intimate movement that you are following.

0:34:03.4 SR: That's beautiful. So I think that's a beautiful way to end the conversation. Thank you so much, Cosimo.

0:34:08.0 CF: Thank you Sarah.

0:34:10.1 SR: Thank you for listening to this episode of Art Destinations. We will return in two weeks. In the meantime, please subscribe to Art Destinations wherever you find your podcasts. And sign up to our newsletter on our website artdestinations.org. And make sure you find the photos Cosimo in the abandoned spaces on Instagram @artdestinations.podcast. Ciao for now.

With support from a Regional Arts Australia Quick Response Grant 2023