Trying To Grow Wings

by Renata Summo O’connell
Independent Curator

Sharing Light With The Past

As anyone who visited Trying to Grow Wings by Ana Vujovic in Florence could realize, a palpable tension impacts the viewer from the beginning to end of this sound and visual narrative enrobed in iconic historic symbols.

In the MAD Murate Art Centre indoor stage of the installation, the sound scape commissioned to sound artist Mija Milovic, suggested a trapped bird, echoing the MAD surroundings – once a convent and, later, a jail- communicating a sense of tightness and angst. From the first act of the installation, outdoor, under the MAD’s porch, despite the sounds of a convivial nature that surround us - voices, clanging cutlery, an almost festive aura- the deserted, worn table, surmounted by an empty birdcage, hanging off bright blue silk thread, we are already on edge, expecting some uncanny developments.

Later, the improbable lines designed by the majestic nine meters of unfolding silk in the main area of the exhibit, the precarious balance of the paper sculptures and bas-reliefs, the odd escapes and fugues layered in paper in unexpected places in the other three spaces, all conspired to suggest a constant attempt at flying away as well as to prompt a desire to celebrate freedom.

From the outdoor installation to its indoor chapters, Trying to Grow Wings presents itself as a daring storytelling, defying all expectations of narrative continuity but dazzling us with visual artwork in silk and paper that constantly refer us to another narrative, one that seems to be folded in the plies of history.

When, a year earlier, I started to work with Ana Vujovic on the concept for this exhibit, we were still in the pandemic period and the artist responded to what I can only define as a tension of beauty she clearly perceived during her first visit to the city locked within stringent restrictions, obliged to observe a forced distance from its own treasure of beauty. Yet, in that time of suffering, the artist felt that restrictions lived right along people’s intense elan to go on living, to break free from any ties.

It is not by chance that reverberations of the rich iconography recognisable in this body of work are also often present at the heart of Florentine homes, in the intimacy of family life, finding its roots and references deep in the past, as well as in historic and historicised practices. In that climate of constriction and separation, Vujovic chose to refer to the core of the visual imagery found in Florentine houses, to textures and materials that are closer to domestic life rather than to the grand artistic practices characteristic of this city.

Historic research is a practice integrally present in Ana Vujovic’s work, a research process that in Vujovic’s case punctually unfolds in unexpected and uncanny directions.

Departing from a previous body of work entitled Kanonatra, with which Trying to Grow Wings shares an active investigation in iconic symbols, past practices, social destination of art, to name a few contexts of interest to Vujovic, the artist systematically conducts what is only apparently a personal and individual study, looking through the fabric of history for traces of the past to undo, to re-think, to create new opportunities to be in the present.

Reflecting on the relevance of Vujovic’s attempt at engaging with history, I found a poignant scope to appreciate it thanks to Rancière’s " poetics of knowledge", founded on the poetics created by many voices, documents, and gestures.[1] Vujovic’ s interest and methodology honour the story of those she encounters, although those encounters do not lead to casual outcomes as her exploration doesn’t stop at the mere collection of objects or signifiers.

The time of the material existence of the shared light that Ranciére refers to, speaking of photography in this instance, seems to be where Vujovic wants to bring us to, looking as she does for the opportunity to let us bask in that sun of judgment none of us can indeed escape[2], one that she encourages to share with the past. Ana Vujovic treasures and challenges at the same time the stories encountered in her research in Florence, a process of discovery, as well as understanding, sharing it with us.

The bird symbol, evident in the Renaissance silk fabric design Uccellini, as well as in some of the traditional paper chosen by the artists for this work, runs through all the works installed in Trying To Grow Wings, from the external space – the empty cage over the deserted table - to the interior of the MAD.

Vujovic seems to let Florence and its radiant suffering at that time of turbulence, to shine in full light, as locked as the city and her citizens were, in a tight contradiction between an undeniable, restrictive tension, where beauty, by its nature to be shared, becomes at times unshareable. Vujovic succeeds in proving to us that, at the same time, beauty itself and our search for it, are liberating energy that allows us to live and celebrate life.

Etel Adnan’s verses, quoted in the title, " We are not playing a game of sorrow, we are trying to grow wings and fly”, have defined the artist’s invitation to free ourselves and fly[3], embracing our own poetics of knowledge, a knowledge steeped in history.

Four chapters of a story, from the external audio installation under the MAD's porch, to the triumph of challenge in Sala Banti, through the joyful upheavals of the three cells, where Vujovic has celebrated not only a city, Florence, struggling to keep on living, clothed as it is in beauty but a common history and individual stories, choosing to inundate us in knowledge and recognition, in a process of collective subjectivation where a common space and common words allow reciprocal appreciation to occur.

An example of this is in the blazing work in precious golden silk installed in the severe Sala Banti, spreading imposingly in two directions, exposing its thread.

The Renaissance columns around the work, are wrapped in a sort of luminous barrier tightened around the space, made of blue silk yarn, minimal although present, almost hinting at a barrier preventing us from accessing the artwork and its radiance. As if hinting that the effort to come near the installation, the choice to approach it, is open to us, part of our trying to grow our collective wings. And yet the meters of individual thread meticulously folded, strand by strand, at both ends of the artwork, are a labour of various artisans and artists that have collaborated with the artist. The very nature of the work, besides its installation, suggest challenge and aspiration together with precariousness and fragility, generating a breath-taking momentum thanks precisely to the shared nature of the effort evidently a celebration of a an intention to partake at a time where major external factors aim at dividing and isolating us.

From the first to the last cell, past, present, and future follow each other without apparent continuity, only seemingly tied and bound to and by tradition, whilst carved and engraved, exposed, and concealed, recomposed in works solely in silk or paper. The poetics of knowledge flow into a joyous narrative of today as well as of our flight beyond tradition and history, because “we are not playing a game of sorrow”.

In the second cell, with white walls but ceiling covered with Florentine paper, from above, clouds of paper look like fabric, hanging down, capsized, suddenly exposing Tiepolo like colours, filled with light, inviting to a contemplative state. Unexpectedly, from a Florentine horizon, we move East, closer to the European orient, in a state of contemplation far removed from the chaotic struggle with history of the first cell.

In the third and last cell, where walls and ceiling were left white, a new carved work, this time at the centre of the floor, offered the last words on a reflection that aims at a conclusive realization, an acknowledgment of what by this stage has become a shared narrative space, populated by distance and proximities. Scattered terracotta, shards of it surround the support also in terracotta, where a carved paper artwork, in the tradition of Kanonatra, spiralling inward within the terracotta support, designs the silhouette of the “uccellino”.

Again, as we started with the empty bird cage, we feel back into our moment in time, although connected to previous times, in that instant of materials existence where we share light with the past, our past, however ready to grow wings, with the option to fly.

[1] Jacques Rancière (1994) The Names of History. On the Poetics of Knowledge

[2] Jacques Rancière (2014) Figures of History. Politi Press, p. 12

[3] Etel Adnan, from ‘Love Poems’, Women of the Fertile Crescent: An Anthology of Modern Poetry by Arab Women (ed. & trans. Kamal Boullata) 1978, Washington DC Three Continents.

Trying to Grow Wings

by Maja Ćirić, PhD
Independent Curator and Art Critic

 Bending Instead of Breaking

Undoubtful greatness of the solid Renaissance - the big explosion of light and creativity -  centuries later and during the historical anomaly such as pandemic - the collective involuntary lifequake[1] -  still attracts humans like bees to honey. But even in Florence - a heterotopia[2] - a place in which simultaneously various epochs co-exist with not too many contradictions, the function of contemporary art is to transcend rather than to mimic and worship the inherited realities. Add to these complexities the fact that in the great transition from humanities to digital humanities, the identification with the normative Rennaisance subject, the so called non-inclusive Vitruvian man[3], his institutions and his materiality, needs to be reconsidered.

While the collective consciousness materialises a fantasy, wider than reality,  by regressing to Renaissance structures and modes of conduct, Ana Vujović investigates if it is the historical structures and/or the idea of a Vitruvian man that is broken. Her artistic practice is initially conditioned to the materiality of things found in the architecture of MAD, as a plateau of various becomings (the convent turned into a prison turned into an art institution, as well as the typical Florentine materials such as silk and paper). However, following her inherent, recognizable and reconfirmed artistic method, Vujović focuses all over again on the potentiality of transcendence. Delicately, her entire project is not based on totally breaking free from the fundamentals. Instead, her artistic intervention is still glued to the materiality of inherited structures (architecture, materials, ideologies), in a sense that her intervention bends around the context and plays with finesses of textures and structures. She suggests that the  legacy of the broken Vitruvian man (his cosmography of the microcosm) should be paradoxically gently  approached from the point of perspectivism grounded in inherited institutions and tackled by means of working with material foundations.

It is by introducing birds as a symbol[4], in this case a non-gendered animality other to humans, that Vujović breaks away from the paradigm of the Vitruvian man. On one hand, the  heteronormative subject is loaded with relationships of power, his established institutions of both convent, prison and art gallery.  On the other hand, an idea of a necessity to grow wings radiates from the non-material symbolism of  birds. The idea of taking off, the anticipation of the lines of flight thus emanates through the exhibition in which the vibration of suspense points out to the creative affirmation of difference.

It seems at first glance  that Vujović breaks away from a broken, disoriented and destabilised human subject. She disidentifies with him and his institutions in order to explore the limitations and possibilities by navigating the transition away from the establishment to the yet unknown. However, taking off, in this case, actually means to reach out towards apotential perspective, while coming to terms with what has been grounded in the normativity of inherited materialism, and the institutional rules and regulations. Like a bird applying the aeroflexible aerodynamics, Vujović's grows a muscle to materiality of silk and paper. Her take off is paradoxically yet sensitively achieved by means of many bending moves,frozen in moments of an attempt to break free.

 September, 2022.

[1] Bruce Feiler, The Life is in the Transititon, Mastering Change at Any Age, 2020

[2] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, 1966

[3] as Rosi Braidotti rightly points out all over again, it was never a neutral turn, never was an  inclusive term.

[4] embeded in the tissue of paper

.