So I think that all the arts, when they are willing to listen to each other, find that they are speaking the same language, and that is an aspect of the question that fascinates me so much. Then it doesn’t necessarily have to happen, but I think when it does happen it’s a kind of magic that goes beyond space and time.
Flavia Bucci
In this interview Flavia Bucci speaks about a constantly evolving artistic path and the affinity between her art and a musical symphony.
Hi Flavia, tell us a little bit about your artistic path.
Hi Michela, I started my studies at the Academy of Fine Arts (in Carrara) in 2011 as a painter, even if I have always loved to use different media and create any kind of installation. I like when materials and supports that I use are closely related to the concepts I want to talk about with my works. I realized my first installations when I still was a student. I used to involve a scanner and my method was rhythmic and repetitive: this has become a distinctive feature of my work over time. My first exhibitions were in 2014 and, in the same year, I started attending some festivals and residencies. They were all good experiences, which allowed me to learn and face the world. Gradually in my artistic research, I simplified my images and gave less definition to my concepts. This doesn’t mean that my works don’t have a concept, but only that the latter is changing, not definitive. I like it a lot because when I observe what I create, I become a spectator and draw some new nuances from it. Anyway, this simplification led me back to the “origins”, and takes place today usually with drawings and graphic works. I still attend each artistic situation in which I can meet new people and create new points of view; I like to observe the world with other’s eyes and to learn from them.
I hope to never stop and to never think I have “arrived”. I want my artistic path to be represented as a series of stages. A passage of the Talmud says something like “you will not be the one to complete the work but you cannot refrain from trying“, this is the spirit with which I currently feel I am living my work.
Experimentation belongs to you. Anticorpi, your project started in 2015 and finished in 2019, is today more relevant than ever. How was it born?
Anticorpi was a project in which I created patterns by hand printing vertebrae of animals and drawing many times the same face on the prints. In that time I studied some dystopias and my imagery was full of pessimistic views of the human being. In my everyday life, I use to consider myself quite optimistic, but those studies were so charming and useful to understand certain aspects of life like the importance to pay attention and to take care of everything surrounding us. At a certain point in a book (unfortunately I don’t remember which one) I read a sentence about some cybernetic systems able to absorb every element who tries to fight them without fighting them back. In short words these systems use their opposers as antibodies. That sentence seemed very relevant to me and applicable to many types of exploitation carried out by exponents of politics and media. Then I imagined this human being perpetually trapped in a mechanism like a small cog among many, unable to deal with it. In the meantime, someone gave me some animal vertebras. The vertebrae seemed to me perfect for expressing the gears of a mechanism and I immediately tried to ink and print them. Today the thing has taken on a new shade of meaning due to what is happening in the world.
Trame (Wefts) are your artworks made up of many small circular shapes. They send me back to the music vibrations. How does the creation of these works take place?
Trame is my attempt to draw dynamic situations. I realize these works by drawing (with acrylic and china ink) small circles all together to compose an abstract image. The juxtaposition and the different sizes of the circles define a plastic but not well-defined image that at first sight seems a simple chiaroscuro, but when you see it closer it reveals the obsessive number of circles. I always imagined these works as parts of a symphony under construction, and this is the reason why they are so strictly related to the music world and to the physical laws that determine the birth of a sound.
In the works that I realized for Tabloud I tried to “play” with some music scores and the shape of notes. This was my chance to link two languages and make them talk, I found it so interesting and I think I’ll keep going on doing it.
On Tabloud you also published a wonderful triptych inspired by 3 songs of Gianni Maroccolo’s album Alone vol. IV. I’ll let you talk of it.
This was a great challenge. Even if music is very important in my life, I have never realized a work totally inspired by a song before this. So I tried to get involved by considering a “sign of the destiny” the subject of the CD: these are issues that, for personal reasons, I feel very close. So I let enter this musical project by lowering my defenses and being hurt too. I have been listening to it for some days and then I started drawing as the result of a mood I didn’t control even if I was totally aware of it, especially for the tracks that I chase. The result was a mix of instinctive gesture and typical elements belonging to my imagery. The tracks that inspired my drawings are “Sognando”, “Ogni luce” and “E mentre tu giri, giri e giri io ti guardo”. The first one is atrocious and the resulting drawing traces the feeling of imprisonment that it conveyed to me; the second one tastes desperately sweet in the way it talks about the subject of the reality distortion, the drawing takes its cue from that mood; the third one is spatial, is the stillness inside the movement. Finally, I’m not able to define the quality of my drawings but I’m really satisfied about the honesty I put in them.
What does the links between Art and Music mean to you?
I think the artist is a person able to build and represent, also and above all something that still doesn’t exist, something invisible and imperceptible. This is something you can do by writing, painting, playing etc. As far as I am concerned, thanks to my parents I grew up among books, art exhibitions and lots of CD’s (and tapes too!). When I draw or paint, I got always some music not as a background, but as a sort of a works director, a light that shows me the way. I learnt most of the values I believe in from the artists and I’m very proud of it. I suppose I understood that certain sentiments are common to all the various fields of the arts and that indeed, having the ability to represent archetypes is precisely one of the foundations of those who take this kind of path. So I think that all the arts, when they are willing to listen to each other, find that they are speaking the same language, and that is an aspect of the question that fascinates me so much. Then it doesn’t necessarily have to happen, but I think when it does happen it’s a kind of magic that goes beyond space and time.
What are you working on?
For now I am pursuing the drawings of Trame that are constantly evolving, so-particularly in terms of the scenarios in which they are immersed.
For the past few months I have been studenting in an engraving school, trying to learn some very fascinating techniques that also lead me to define different paths and projects. Finally I am thinking about new works in which they can walk closely with music, since I started thanks to your Tabloud project I have continuously wondered why I had not done it before.
