Episode 6: Psychotherapy with an island city

Season 1: Venice

Episode 6: Psychotherapy with an island city with Nuvola Ravera

Nuvola Ravera deep listening in a buried watercourse. Image: Anna Positano

Nuvola Ravera examines how human emotions can influence the environment through her project, If I Cry A Lot, Will the Lagoon Become a Sea?' (2016). In this project, Nuvola collaborates with gestalt psychotherapist Laura Castellani to view Venice as a patient in a psychotherapy session. Nuvola uses 3D sculptures, frottages, and sound recordings to capture the essence of Venice, alongside the verbatim transcript between Laura, Nuvola and the city.

In this episode Sarah and Nuvola discuss the themes of collaboration, fluid boundaries, and site-specific work, emphasising the importance of listening as we move through the world. Nuvola shares her experiences working with various professionals and how these collaborations shape her artistic practice. 

In this episode we cover:

• If I Cry A Lot, Will the Lagoon Become a Sea? (2016) treats Venice as a patient in psychotherapy, exploring how human emotions can influence the environment

• The conceptual premise and artistic outcomes of Nuvola's collaboration with gestalt psychotherapist Laura Castellani, including the se of 3D sculptures, frottages, and sound recordings to capture the essence of Venice

• How the themes collaboration, fluid boundaries, and site-specific work manifest in Nuvola's work

• Discussion on how deep listening can lead to a better understanding of our surroundings and foster mutual change, and

• Nuvola's experiences working with various professionals, including psychotherapists, lawyers, and anthropologists, and how these collaborations shape and enrich her artistic practice.

BIOGRAPHY

Nuvola Ravera explores how emotions are influenced by objects and cultural traditions, aiming for harmony between nature and human-made environments. She collaborates with various experts and uses natural materials to create art pieces that examine the experience of care.

Living and working between Genoa, Venice, and Berlin, Nuvola studied Painting at the Accademia Ligustica in Genoa and Contemporary Photography at Cfp Bauer in Milan. Her IUAV Venice thesis, Fake It Until You Make It, proposed "environmental therapy" through art. She treats art, spaces, and environments as living organisms, exploring ethnoclinical mediation and decolonial perspectives.

Her notable work, Soap Opera, created with architect Giuseppe Ricupero, won the Combat Prize for Sculpture and the MIbact/Siae Sillumina award in 2017. This soap architecture dissolves in a performative washing gesture at each exhibition, re-examining hygiene, care, heritage, and "dirty work."

Nuvola has exhibited at institutions like the Venice Biennale, Goethe-Institut, Macro Rome, and Transmediale Berlin. Artribune named her the best young Italian artist in 2017. She was featured in "222 emerging artists to invest in" (2021) and won the Special Utopia Prize for Talent Prize of Rome (2022).

TRANSCRIPT

SR: Welcome to Art Destinations. My name is Sarah Rhodes, an artist based in Lutruwita, Tasmania. In this episode, I'm in conversation with Nuvola Ravera about her work made with psychotherapist Laura Castellani, titled, If I Cry a Lot, Will the Lagoon Become a Sea? The city of Venice takes on the role as patient in a psychotherapy session, the result is an exhibition of work that portrays Venice as an interconnection of all living and non-living things. Nuvola expresses the body and the soul of Venice through 3D negative glass sculptures, frottages and sound recordings. A transcript between Laura and Nuvola in the psychotherapy sessions are also published.

To see examples of some of the work from, If I Cry a Lot, Will The Lagoon become a Sea pop over to our Instagram page, @artdestinations.podcast.

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. The second season will focus on Tasmania and the third, Sicily. 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.

In this conversation, Nuvola identifies deep listening as key to her approach and emphasises the importance for her to remain neutral and open when responding to a place.

SR: Welcome, Nuvola, it's great to have you on Art Destinations. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

NR: Thank you too. And thank you to invite me. It's a really a pleasure to have this conversation and possibility.

SR: So throughout this podcasts, the different artists that I've been interviewing, there's been some common themes that have come through. One is collaboration, which has been a really big theme, and fluid boundaries has been another theme and people making site specific work. And it's interesting because this work that I want to talk to you about really touches on all of those three themes. So this is an exciting opportunity to keep unpacking these ideas. Actually, I didn't ask you this question before, but the title, If I Cry A Lot, Will the Lagoon Become a Sea? What does that title mean?

NR: Hmm. Yes. Nice question. This title was the first title that I found for the project that I developed in the 2016 in Venice. After the title change, often I change the title in every place I'm going to work on, even it's the same approach or research. In that case, I was wondering if my tears, the tears of a human body could change the environment, and if we could have an exchange with the landscape with a lagoon, which kind of exchange we can have and if we can influence ourself in a dialectal changing.

SR: I was looking up the title to see if you'd taken the title from a quote from somewhere, and I couldn't see that you had, but there is a poet called Khalil Gibran, his poem is called The River Cannot Go Back. “The river cannot go back, nobody can go back, it's not about disappearing into the ocean but becoming the ocean”. And I just wondered if there was a relationship between his way of thinking about that and yours".

NR: I have to say thank you, Sarah, because, it's a good suggestion, the connection between Gibran's vision and my title, my project title. You make me think just as the river becomes one with the ocean and human tears, I guide the interconnected nature of water and our bodies.

SR: That's lovely. And that the tears are the memories and the experiences that are going into the water and everybody's got their own experiences. That's quite... That's very clever.

NR: Yes. It's our... Because I was thinking that our tears are, has the rivers, is crying, is one of our ways to water.

SR: So you collaborated with gestalt psychotherapist, Laura Castellani. Well, what was the premise of the work collaborating with a psychotherapist?

NR: Yes. With this specific psychotherapist you mean or in general?

SR: Or just in... Both. In general. We'll start with in general.

NR: I had in my experience some therapy that I had for a few years with a psycho-analytic method. But then when I was in Venice and I was looking for someone to collaborate with this specific project, I had just a suggestion from a curators that gave me the name of Laura Castellani. And then I found really interesting the gestalt therapy because I was thinking it was really resonant with my idea to work on the psychic residual of a city, of the lagoon of Venice. So we discussed the project and I propose her to collaborate, and so we decide to work together, like really when you go to the psychotherapist and you decide to start a therapy together. So it was a random encounter that then started to be an interesting collaboration. In particular, I found the special potential of gestalt therapy, because in my opinion, I could engage with social and urban change, its focus on the boundary where the relationships form and evolve. So it was for me really interesting to work with these kind of boundaries and with the possibility to generate ideas and proposal of the mutual change with a conversation with a therapist, but even with the places. So we try to destroy or to discuss the therapy setting and going outside the studio and starting to explore the city in the streets, the lagoon, walking and walking and speaking together, trying to make merge traces of a lagoon, traces of the places that we were encountering together.

SR: The gestalt psychotherapy that you said, it looks at boundaries, how does it play with the boundaries in psychotherapy?

NR: Yes. I think it's something of to exchange thought, to exchange memories, and the place where we exchange these experiences normally has this studio setting that has a kind of boundary. In that case we were in the... It was like to be in the house of a patient, in the house of the organism, Venice, the subject, Venice. And so I was thinking it was an interesting work on boundaries because it was like to try to meet the patient or this subject and this kind of memory of the city in the specific place where the city was living.

SR: Okay, okay. So then what was the process with you and Laura? How did you do your field work? Or how did you do your clinical sessions?

NR: Yes. We started really on the streets, we decided to use walking as the first step, and we started to record sound noises from the walking, what was living around the house. And we started a conversation, but a strange conversation, I could say, because we were sharing something about ourselves, for sure. But even we try to observe the places, the stones, the squares, everything that was merging around us really sound, people talking, voices, the flukes of the people, but even of the water, how the water was moving in the canals. So it was like to be really lucid or try to be really with an open eyes all around us with all our senses. So we tried to use all the senses we could use, so we exchange our experiences together. So even the therapist put something of her in our conversation, but we try to record these tracks that we had all around us. This was the first point.

SR: Okay. So at the beginning there was a little bit about the two of you talking and your response to the place, but then as you tuned in, you were really listening to the physical or the geographic, the natural environment. Is that right? That in the beginning it would be very hard to separate yourself from the session, but then over time you could take yourself out?

NR: It was an incredible experiment, in fact, because there were moment really personal where we put all our experiences and then we move out and we try really to start a silent game, [chuckle] and a listen game, like a deep listening session, even without speaking. So we had even this moment and we in the same time, I try to collect some material part of our experience. I collect this frottage, so I search textures and I had kind of relationships with the textures of the streets, of the stones, of the materials that were in our steps. And even I use three dimensional negatives with sculpture, so I copied a few parts of the places. And, yes. So it was, I try really to have a complex experience of this kind of meeting and the relationship to don't use only our senses and our speaking. And closing to the session we collect even a lot of materials, I can say documentation, but it was not really documentation, [laughter] because I took few sample of waters of the canals that started to be sculpture with edible jellies. So it was the kind of process of digestion and of a conversation that created different things and different materials and, yes. And thought about this experience that was really in a multilevel level form.

SR: So what was the feeling when the final work, what was the feeling that came? Like how is Venice, this city or this island, and what is it telling the psychotherapists?

NR: I'm not really sure about this because we proceeded step by step and the psychotherapists in the end made this sound verbatim that are like text where the therapist was speaking about the experience of the meeting with the patient, Venice, the patient lagoon. And she spoke about this meeting and after this experience emerged a lot of doubt and question, questioning if Venice, the lagoon changed after our meeting, if we exchange something or not. So we have experienced the city, in fact, but we don't know if the city experienced us. So it was really like to speak about voices that we collected, tracks and trying to ask ourselves what these voices could say as, but it's a kind of interpretation as the therapy meeting is not, so I don't have a specific answer but we collect a lot of question about the patient, the organism that we met. And yes, we hope that we could exchange ourself in a continuous experience of respect and listening. So this was the end or the starting point of the artwork and the project.

SR: That's a really interesting idea because listening essentially in terms of us moving forward as a humankind, listening is really the most important word in my view. That if everybody listened to the world around them and responded, then we'd be in a very good, much better place. So I think that's interesting. And the idea that you wouldn't articulate what you would... How you interpreted the city if it was a person is also interesting, because it would be very easy to project the over tourism and the climate change and the rising sea levels and the periodic flooding in Venice as this sort of place in distress. But you don't say that, you don't project that onto your exhibition or your work, or maybe you do and you just haven't said that.

NR: No, I didn't do this because I didn't want to really give voice to the water, to the organisms, Venice and the lagoon because, in fact, I could not do it. It was really about a relationship and to try to create this relationship and then to bring with... To other people, other places, this kind of experience that we had. But I could speak from us, from our point of view. So I could say, okay, I had this experience with the lagoon, and I could bring with me some materials and some track of his experience. But I prefer not react to kind of interpretation of yes, the mind of Venice, or the mind of the lagoon. We encounter, for sure, the memories and the postures soundscape expression, even contradiction and even traumas. We could say like that. We could find signs of this, but we prefer really to stay on the relationship and not to speak for someone else.

SR: Yeah. But surely you would feel a spirit like by doing the frottage and by recording the sounds of the water and the air, you would feel a spirit. But are you saying that that's up to the person coming to the exhibition to interpret that? You wouldn't say that because everybody might interpret that spirit differently. The other thing is, there's a lot of artists working in Tasmania, for example, or even Australia, and there's this very particularly in Tasmania, there's this very particular atmosphere that comes through a lot of people's work, and they're just, they are projecting, of course, because it's subjective, but there is a strong kind of feeling that comes through and they're responding to the place, like they're listening to the place, and that's what the place is telling them, and it's coming through in their work.

SR: And it's kind of this dark history because we have this dark history here, like a genocidal history, so that really comes through in a lot of people's work. There's sort of a black air, like blackness of the terrible things that have happened here. And so I was just wondering how it would be possible not for a spirit or an atmosphere not to come through that could be articulated.

NR: I think something emerged for sure, but my intents was not to be really clear about my specific point of view, interpretation, because I know something about the city. We know something about the histories and even the present moment that the Lagoon is leaving, that is a bit bad. But I wanted in a utopian point of view to make free the Lagoon from our actions, from our gestures that we made in history, and even in the present moment. It was just a little action to make possible to the city present herself in a way without reporting what we did to the city. [laughter]

SR: Why did you choose Venice as the place for this work?

NR: There is a few reasons. The first one was that I was in Venice when I was invited by a curator Angela Vettese, but it was a teacher too in my course of studies in Europe University. So I was living in Venice in that period. And I had a strong experience of Venice in that period of the place as a living subject. The curator invited us to work on the city of Venice. And I had this kind of epiphany of vision sleeping close to a canal.

NR: I was really tired. It was springtime, and I was sleeping really close to a little canal in the fondamenta degli incurabli.

[foreign language]

NR: That is a title of a book too. I don't remember the author. But in that moment, sleeping really in a deep way. I was dreaming, thinking it was like hypnagogic moment. And I had this strong sensation of a living organism that was breathing with me in that moment. So it was a kind of apparition, vision that I felt in my body. In that springtime I was reading James Hillman with his book the, I think The Thought of the Heart and The Soul of the World, maybe is this the title, that question the contrast between subject and object in a way, that question the Cartesian dualism to try to return to a stronger relationship between all the organism.

NR: And so, I think, Venice was perfect because I was there in that moment. I was living this strong and deep experience of connection with that water, that place. And even, there was an occasion to work on it. So, these few reasons make me decide to work really in that sense.

SR: Did you feel, 'cause you were sleeping by the canal, did you feel that you were Venice, that it was sort of becoming part of you?

NR: I didn't become Venice or the water, because it was like we were even before the same thing, the same organism. One time, Virginia Woolf wrote that there are tides in the body, and I think water of Venice is really influencing the tides of the human bodies that are living there. All the bodies are so present and so strong. It give you the possibility to really feel another kind of material, another kind of subject. And, with this project I was thinking to be and to start to feel as another material and to imagine if these materials could be like us, like bodies with a kind of thoughts and memories and so on.

SR: Okay. That's really great. I think that's very poetic. So in that case, my next question was how much of yourself was in this work? But I think you've probably almost answered that.

NR: I try to put myself, but even to forget myself. So, it was a work of losing the subject of a personal identity to make a emerge a collective kind of identity. But even putting, putting myself, so I try to be in the border between me and something other, someone other, someone else.

SR: You are responding to it. So therefore, you are in this work. This work is probably just as much about you as it is about Venice, but at the same time, you're taking yourself out of it. And so therefore, you're probably taking Venice out of it as well.

NR: I try to work on doubting about what is me, what is the subject, what is a specific identity and an individual identity? And with a collective identity and the environment and organism, place that is breathing with us. So, it was the possibility to have a meeting doubting all the time, and to be often in the border of subject, object, me, you, the lagoon, the water, the stones that created the city as we could see nowadays. So, these big sonography, leaving the sonography with all these actors with these, to draw kind of unconsciousness that, in a way doesn't separate ourself. The unconsciousness is the place where we are not separated.

SR: Just speaking about the fluid boundary that you're talking about just then, I'm interested in the Italian language and how it uses gender to describe land and sea and the relationship between the two.

NR: Yes. For me, it's interesting, this language subject activation, but in a way, I feel that this element could be without gender and because they have in common, really this boundary. So, the interesting thing is this place in between where the land and the sea have a meeting, and that little invisible line that separate is even the place where they have the possibility to have a relationship and to be something other. So it's the creation of another identity that is more interesting because it is the possibility to put together different voices, different forms and bodies in between. So, it's a third subject.

SR: I think that's really interesting, especially in the current way of thinking with the, how we see gender is increasingly becoming a non... Everything's becoming in a sort of a non-binary way of looking at the world. We're being asked not to... Even art practice really, that the idea of each discipline is really being de-constructed and artists are working across disciplines more than... They always have, but it's sort of, it's even in art schools, it's sort of becoming studio practice rather than specific disciplines. So, I think it's interesting that everything is the shorelines is this beautiful metaphor for how society is increasingly looking at the world.

NR: Yes, it's a possibility to nourish ourselves not to, yes, to experience other possibilities to live the world and to interpretate the world because we have so many ways to do it. One is dangerous maybe to be really in one structures that is heavy and not in movement.

SR: Yeah, which leads me to the next part about your practice more broadly, you're always working with different disciplines. And you worked with a psychotherapist in this project, but you work with lawyers and anthropologists. And you also in your actual mediums, you're working in sculpture and film, video, photography, drawing. So you're looking at things from multiple viewpoints all the time. My first thought is when you're working with someone, you're always going to be an outsider to their discipline, and they're going to be an outsider to your discipline. So how does that collaboration work?

NR: Yeah, it depends really from the occasion and the places and the people that are involved in the project or collaboration. In general, I think to the artistic practice really as a performative way to lose the separation between what someone calls soft and hard sciences. In the past, these boundaries between scientists and artists were not really strong. So the training was similar. An artist could be a scientist too. So it's a kind of humanistic approach. Not only humanistic, but post-human approach to try to discuss the fragility of our convictions and the fragility of our discipline too. Every time I approach to a project, depending really on the place and the situation, I try to understand if I could have a new relationship with someone that could teach something new about the topic, about my research or about the place.

NR: So every time it's a kind of new learning and I see a new possibility to discover new forms of studying the world and the places around us. So I don't have a methodology, a specific methodology to work and to collaborate with someone else. But I try to better understand the complexity of a project and of the world that is involving this specific project through meetings, encounters and even discussions on our really difficult structures that we are involved in. Because every discipline has chronic bad habits. So it's a way to try to discuss our bad habits in all our approach and to find, even in this case, a place in between where we could be more sensitive and open.

SR: To what extent are you collaborating on these projects? Like, for example, with the lawyer or with Laura, the psychotherapist? You're obviously driving it, but are they equal contributors or are they just contributing a small amount and sort of guiding, using their discipline to guide your practice?

NR: It really depends on the moment and the occasion. With Laura Castellani, we decided to hold sessions outside the studio as part of a project. She was involved as if she were working with her own practice. Sometimes I seek suggestions and interpretations from other disciplines, yes, and other times collaborators have equal say and involvement in the project. For example, in 2021, in another project that I could say it's the evolution of the project on Venetian Lagoon, we founded a collective in Genoa called the Corpi Idrici or Water Bodies. We involved architects, biologists, and we include a legal expert too. By exploring the complex water system of Genoa, we invited a lawyer to discuss the right of non-human entities.

NR: And so together we co-authored a charter of water bodies rights, maintaining a legal and poetic language too. We were inspired by the French Charter of Rights of Trees and the Charter of Children's Rights. And I like to think that the environment and places contribute to the project as well as the various disciplines and people that are working together. Really often I expect that the project will evolve significantly from its initial conception.

SR: I guess, if the premise of your work is listening, then of course you're going to adapt as it develops. So you said that Venice sort of defined your practice or influenced your practice. We've talked a lot about your practice, but I'm just wondering if you could summarise or conclude how Venice did influence you.

NR: Sure, Sarah. I think summarising is always a bit tricky, but I try to do it. I'm really sure that Venice had strong influences on me, just like growing up near water and in nature did when I was a kid, yes, because in fact, I always lived near water. I grew up moving around with my parents in a lot of anarchist communities, along the coast of France, Spain, and Italy in Genoa. And all the time we were lived around water, and water was around us. Then Venice is one of a place where I stayed more time as an adult, and it's a really place that I dream a lot. Before I actually went there, I could say that Lagoon with her special steel water and murky waters had a stronger power on me.

NR: Remind me of the unconsciousness mind. And after experience Venice with her goals, I started developing what I could call my current artistic practice. In fact, after the psychotherapy of the Lagoon, I continued using this same approach a bit different, for sure, but in other places. I have to say that sensing the Lagoon as a living organism profoundly remind me something that came from my childhood that had been lost in my memory. Maybe you have this experience of animistic approach when you are a child. This sensation that often we have when we can feel up object and materials as a living friends. So, yes, I really can say that my work reborn in Venice with all these experience and make me more aware of everything around me, not just people, but all parts of the environment that are co-living with us.

SR: So I was just thinking, Nuvola, it would be quite fun to have a little word game, and if I said a word to you, you could say a word, the first word that came into your mind, and I have a little list of words that I thought you might respond to. So, do you wanna have a little play?

NR: Yes. That's cool. That's fantastic. Try.

SR: Okay. Water.

NR: Texture.

SR: Reverberate.

NR: Glitter.

SR: Sustain.

NR: Invisible.

SR: Give.

NR: Structure.

SR: Isolate.

NR: Appears.

SR: Connect.

NR: Speaking.

SR: Conceal.

NR: Time.

SR: Engulf.

NR: Arrogance.

SR: Swallow.

NR: Protection.

SR: Hold.

NR: Sand.

SR: Suffocate.

NR: Snorkels.

SR: Island.

NR: Humanity.

SR: Belonging.

NR: Leaves.

SR: Mediate.

NR: Remedy.

SR: And last one. Meditate.

NR: Breathe.

SR: Breathe?

NR: Mm-hmm.

0SR: Okay. That was fun. It's so interesting because all of those answers were surprising. So I really like that.

NR: It's a chaotic, it's like an cadavre exquis.

NR: With a Dadaistic game that create a figure with pieces of drawing of different people, but covering your part, my part and the part of the others.

SR: I don't know that game. I'll have to look that up. That's cute. Okay. Nuvola, thank you so much for taking the time to meet with us. It was really interesting and so, such a poetic practice. I really enjoy listening to you.

NR: Thanks. You too. And it was super-interesting to try to answer to your question. And thank you really because you make me think about my work in a different way. So really, thanks.

SR: No, that's sweet. Thank you.

SR: Thank you for listening to the 6th episode of Art Destinations. Next, we'll be in conversation with photographic artist David Degano, on what it means to be Italian. Please subscribe to Art Destinations wherever you find your podcasts. And sign up to our newsletter on our website, artdestinations.org as we send out fortnightly newsletters promoting the next episode.

SR: I am your host, Sarah Rhodes

With support from a Regional Arts Australia Quick Response Grant 2023