Atlante Energetico – Energy Atlas 2024
Atlante Energetico – Energy Atlas
This essay is based on Elena Mazzi’s interview and exhibition Energy Atlas (Museo Novecento, Firenze, 2021).
The text was published 2024, when the exhibition catalogue was published. An essay by Ki Nurmenniemi, published in 2024 by Museo Novecento (Firenze). The essay is based on Elena Mazzi’s interview and exhibiton Energy Atlas (2021).
Rice as a Conductor of Energy
Screenprints played on the stark contrast between yellow and black, jute sacks filled with rice of different varieties and colours (black, brown, and white rice), drawings on rice sacks, and a short film on the subject of solar pyrolysis shot in Super 8. What is the common thread linking these works of art?
To retrace the stages of the process in which they took shape, we must go back to 2016, when Elena Mazzi was invited to act as a bridge between the rural setting of Fondazione Spinola Banna per l’Arte and the urban context of the GAM (Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Turin) with a new artistic commission. The director of GAM, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, asked Mazzi to focus on the all-encompassing theme of energy. In response, the artist started a multifaceted collaborative project in which rice, an important botanical life form of the Piedmont region, became the thread of several interdisciplinary activities. Mazzi’s works of art can be read as traces that highlight a number of crucial aspects of the extensive artistic and research process she conducted.
Mazzi embarked on this project by reflecting on the ways these two art institutions are deeply rooted in their respective environments and on how they could find closer cohesion by establishing useful practices to create shared knowledge. The first step was to identify a common element that would promote interdisciplinary dialogues on the topic of energy. This element had to be a factor of great significance for the Piedmont region, one capable of catalysing the attention of people from the most diverse backgrounds and with a wide variety of interests.
The ‘embodied experience’ that had her cycling along the roads through Piedmont’s rice fields directed Mazzi’s attention to this grain and its importance for the region. With this new commission, the artist was able to outline a research framework intended to shed light on a wide range of issues related to rice and its cultivation, both in the present and in a historical perspective with a scope of investigation ranging from a molecular to a planetary level.
In terms of energy, the reasons for Mazzi’s focus on rice are multiple. Locally and historically, rice is the staple food of the Piedmont region; globally, rice feeds more people than any other crop, providing a staple food for almost 3.5 billion people. When the plant migrated from its native Asia to the various areas of the world, it shaped cultural imagery and social dynamics. Rice is not only a resource that provides sustenance to humans, but also a botanical force that shapes ecosystems and transforms landscapes, fuelling creative expressions and belief systems.
The Energy Atlas Process
Mazzi structured her ambitious initiative entitled Energetic Atlas, around two workshops organised in October 2016 and May 2017 as part of Fondazione Spinola Banna’s residency and training programme for young artists. The project’s schedule and activities were planned around the rice growing cycle in Piedmont: in autumn, the programme explored the environmental aspects of rice cultivation from a scientific perspective. In the spring, the focus shifted to socio-cultural aspects.
Five artists were invited to participate in the programme under Mazzi’s supervision: Paola Pasquaretta, Nadia Pugliese, Fabio Roncato, Silvia Rossi and Chiara Sgaramella. Their itinerary included field studies, meetings with various stakeholders, workshops and other events, an exhibition at Fondazione Spinola Banna, and installations at GAM. The interconnection of the subject of rice and energy acted as a unifying agent between their respective artistic processes, and enabled them to become attuned to their surroundings and the questions evoked by different methodologies ranging from artistic mapping to storytelling.
As Mazzi and the other artists straddled their bicycles and ventured out to explore the surrounding countryside, their conversations always developed in relation to their perceptions of the changing scenery. Whether in the rice fields or within an art space, when something caught someone’s attention, the group would stop to reflect and discuss. The development of the entire project was built on open dialogue between the participants. Taking small steps proved essential, despite the intensity and excitement of the workshop days spent together.
In addition to the artists mentioned here, the workshops and numerous other events involved a diversified audience of artists, scholars, restaurateurs and viewers, and were attended by numerous guests representing bodies and organisations from near and far. I personally have had the pleasure of learning about their activities through conversations I have had with Mazzi over the years. The publication in paper form of the Energy Atlas – part log file, part logbook, part dictionary and part an artist’s book – allowed me to retrace the branching paths of the project. The atlas covers different areas of expertise and a polyphony of interests between visual art, literature, philosophy and natural sciences.
Deep Mapping of the Rice Trails
‘Environment, science, food, anthropology, economics, visual arts, literature, politics intertwine and entwine around a grain of rice.’
According to the artist, art is able to embrace a wide variety of disciplines, and connects otherwise incompatible ways of being and systems of knowledge. Mazzi’s artistic methods are based on promoting dialogue and shared learning between people who could not have met without the artist’s initiative. To promote this kind of collaborative processes, often in evolving environments and under the most diverse circumstances, the artist must first take a stand. For her, this often means starting with the fundamental questions: where am I? What do I have around me?
Then the questions become more nuanced and complex: what processes contribute to the situation I find myself in? What kind of social, political and ecological dynamics are at play? These are the first sketches of an artistic mapping that can go deeper, in an attempt to construct layered and complex perceptions of one’s environment using creative methods. Perhaps this approach could lay the foundations for the development of a new ecological perspective on the world. Being able to ask this kind of questions is the first step in the direction of a new awareness, and to becoming familiar with the interdependencies that weave the web of life.
Connecting seemingly incompatible dots and coming to terms with the principles of interconnectedness and systemic complexity are prerequisites for addressing the numerous eco-socio-political crises that characterise the beginning of this 21st century. For Mazzi, it is important that artistic practices become an integral part of debates that transcend the field of art. Through her work, she has actively contributed to developing artistic methods aimed at capturing the heterogeneous phenomena that bring about social and ecological change in specific environments. Her works often take their cue from a particular place and gravitate around the relationships that people establish with their environment, focusing on the social issues that underlie environmental disruption.
When dealing with highly complex issues, it is important to identify a starting point and begin to ‘connect the dots’. In the case of the Energetic Atlas, the artists, scientists and other participants analysed the landscapes shaped by rice cultivation, highlighting the stratifications and intertwining of matter, energy and meaning. Tracing the paths of rice from the ancestral past to the present led to insights into the processes that have shaped the Novara and Vercelli regions. The project participants delved into the various relationships and interdependencies that have triggered profound transformations in other parts of the world as well. The artistic re-elaborations of the relationships between man and rice resulted in Mazzi’s drawings on rice sacks.
Collaborative Methods for Art and Scientific Research
In the wide variety of methods employed in the Energy Atlas project, most notable are experimentation, embodied experiences, and ‘cross-pollination’ between disciplines. To give just one example, Alice Benessia and Vincenzo Guarnieri, two scientists from IRIS, the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Sustainability gave a series of lectures at GAM on the role, ethics and politics of science, encouraging a critical debate on the topic of sustainability. They accepted Mazzi’s challenge to not use Power Point slides or traditional presentation tools, but to integrate their speeches with a series of carefully selected objects that fostered totally unexpected associations and forms of engagement.
Currently, the scientific community seems to have a certain interest in art-based research methods. However, it is still quite rare for scientists to experiment and publicly explore their potential for scientific work. For Benessia and Guarnieri, this may have been easier than for others, since they are also artists and have some experience in ‘navigating’ the cultural field.
The imprints of the objects used by Benessia and Guarnieri in their lecture performances are reproduced in the silkscreen series. Mazzi artistically translated the originally three-dimensional forms into two-dimensional image compositions. The local rice varieties, on the other hand, were exhibited as such, except for the jute rice sacks, which Mazzi used as surfaces for her drawings. The black-and-white film on solar pyrolysis is a bridge connecting these works on rice and energy with Mazzi’s earlier collaboration with scientist Hans Grassmann.
To move slowly towards shared learning and to remain open to dialogue and debate: it is not easy to remain faithful to these principles in artistic and academic environments that require constant production while adhering to certain conditions and norms. Building a creative practice around these cornerstones requires a long-term commitment, Mazzi knows this well. In her notes for Energy Atlas: ‘To work in a dialogue with someone or something (people and/or places), you must to experience them’.
This principle led her to move to Turin, at first on a temporary basis. In spring 2021, she is still stationed in the city, having just moved into a new studio. Although she continues to travel for work, as far as the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic allows it, she never just ‘parachutes’ herself into a new site, she is always willing to take the time to let the good things ‘ferment’. The results reward the efforts: as I write this text, Mazzi informs me that the artworks created within the framework of Energy Atlas are exhibited in various venues and the artists and the people involved have extended their collaboration to various derivative projects. This venture seems to have created opportunities for ongoing dialogue and growth – by nurturing its participants, it has fuelled its own energy.
From a recorded conversation with Elena Mazzi on Zoom. 11 February 2021.
References
These include the Swedish experimental artistic research centre Art Lab Gnesta, the Interdisciplinary Institute for Research on Sustainability (IRIS) based in Turin, the Ecomuseo del Freidano, part of the network of Piedmont’s ecomuseums, and the Nature Addicts! Fund. The artist-anthropologist Leone Contini, who has conducted studies on rice fermentation and ancient Chinese yeasts in the Po Valley, in collaboration with the restaurateur Ling Kuang Sung, organised collective tastings of fermented rice and rice distillates at the GAM and the Fondazione Spinola Banna.
In the publication, notes from the correspondence between Mazzi and GAM curator Elena Volpato weave together and deepen the reflection on the different strands of the project.
‘Pensieri su Atlante Energetico. Note di Elena Mazzi, Elena Volpato’, in Atlante Energetico, ed. by Elena Mazzi (Grafiche Antiga, 2017), p. 20, translation ours.
IRIS, in Atlante Energetico, p. 68.
Grassmann and his fellow researchers presented a prototype for biomass pyrolysis. Their device uses solar thermal energy generated by a reflective mirror system (Linear Mirror II) to heat a biomass from selected agricultural residues, such as wheat straw. See H. Grassmann, M. Boaro, M. Citossi, et al., ‘Solar Biomass Pyrolysis with the Linear Mirror II’, Smart Grid and Renewable Energy, vol. 6, no. 7 (July 2015), 179–186. <http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/sgre.2015.67016> [last accessed 28 June 2021].
Pensieri su Atlante Energetico, p. 28.