Simone Fattal explores the many cultures of the Mediterranean in Venice  

VENICE: Paris-based Lebanese artist Simone Fattal’s newest work is at present on show within the Church of San Lorenzo in Venice, Italy.  

Fattal’s highly effective set up is titled “Sempre il mare, uomo libero, amerai!” which interprets from Italian to “All the time the ocean, freeman, you’ll love!” from the poem “Man and the Sea” by Charles Baudelaire, which describes the waves of the ocean because the mirror of the soul. The ocean, notes Baudelaire in his poem, is a pure and female ingredient that generates and nourishes. Fattal’s work equally gives a poignant and loving reflection of the Mediterranean, its fixed modifications, and the cultures it has separated and unified. 

“Via my work I attempt to transcend the precise floor of issues to make it extra significant by recollecting previous myths and tales,” Fattal tells Arab Information. “I believe this reconnection can carry loads to an individual, inside. There have been arduous occasions earlier than us and there are arduous occasions forward of us. 

“I create summary artwork as a result of it gives silence and silence is a constituent to artwork in any other case you possibly can’t actually go into it — artwork must be meditative,” she continues. 

The works are a part of the exhibition “Thus Waves Are available Pairs,” a line from the poem “Sea and Fog” by the late Etel Adnan. It runs at Ocean Area in Venice till Nov. 5 alongside different new commissions by Petrit Halilaj and Alvaro Urbano. 

“There are various Mediterraneans: the geographical, the historic, the philosophical … the private, the one we swim in,” Adnan as soon as stated. “It’s an expertise to swim, it’s one thing you possibly can’t clarify to any individual who by no means swam. This sense of being held up by this water.” 

Fattal’s set up includes two sculptures that occupy the empty niches of the church’s giant Baroque altar. One is “Younger Boy,” an summary determine coloured burnt yellow. The opposite is “Bricola,” a big ceramic sculpture with wealthy pure hues impressed by the eponymous Venetian picket poles used to information boats via the town’s canals evocative of navigation. It additionally consists of two monumental summary figures “Máyya and Ghaylán” — a pair of lovers celebrated in classical Arabic poetry, whom Fattal separates and joins by rectangular glass plates on the bottom evoking a golden sea — and “Distinction,” a collection of pearly spheres constituted of pink Murano glass onto which Fattal has engraved an inscription in lingua franca, a mestizo language drawn from Italian, French, Spanish and Arabic that was as soon as spoken by pirates, retailers, prisoners and slaves alongside the shores of the Mediterranean. These spheres lie on the ground on the other aspect of the house from the altar. 

The inscription on the spheres is taken from the textual content of the earliest proof of lingua franca, “Contrasto della Zerbitana” (The Battle with the Girl of Djerba), a 14th-century poem about an argument between a sailor and the mom of a girl he mistreated, set on the island of Djerba, off the coast of Tunisia. 

Poetry, as Fattal demonstrates in these new works, serves as a automobile for previous and current transmission from one language and tradition to a different. She portrays the complexities and forgotten recollections that form the colonial previous and neocolonial current of the Mediterranean and its diversified cultures and peoples.  

“I needed to hyperlink my work right here not solely to the church and the Mediterranean but additionally to the Gulf and the historical past of pearl buying and selling there,” she tells Arab Information. “I used to be additionally excited about how the Arab world linked to Venice via the commerce of pearls — that’s the place Venetian ladies as soon as bought their pearls: from the Gulf.” 

Fattal additionally stresses that the works show different supplies and abilities that originated within the Orient, together with glass blowing and velvet. Her works, directly poignant and melancholic, purpose to resurrect the essential historic hyperlink between Venice and the Orient, the East and the West, and present how the results of such commerce remains to be with us — via cultures, traditions, languages, and artwork.  

As Fattal notes: “All that you simply see in Venice that’s stunning are symbols of alternate of magnificence that occurred by way of the Mediterranean Sea.”