Save the Poetry / Night of Light

Save the Poetry / Night of Light

Venice Biennale Arte  53. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte | Eventi collaterali 2009 | Save the Poetry / Night of Light  Marco Nereo Rotelli Curator | Fondazione Mare Nostrum.

http://xoomer.virgilio.it/cprezi/pagine1-info.htm

List of participating poets

Collateral project of the 53. Venice Biennial, is the third event of a triad for the Venice Biennial, begun with “Bunker Poetico” (49. Venice Biennial 2001,Harald Szeemann Curator), developed with “Isola della Poesia” (51. Venice Biennial – Collateral Events 2005).These projects have a real part, an installation/event by Marco Nereo Rotelli, and a virtual part/events on line, projected and realized by Caterina Davinio.

THE NEW CIVILISATION In a state of emergency By Marco Nereo Rotelli

Creating a network of the small islands of the world is the work launched by Fondazione Mare Nostrum, who promoted the “Poetry Island” project at the 2005 Biennale. With Mercury HouseOne_Save the Poetry, it has come up with a work that is poised between art and technology, a work of high poetic value, in a contemporariness in which the values of identity seem to be lost.

In the state of global uncertainty which now touches every man, it is up to art to found again “the creativity of the individual who creates” (Harald Szeemann) and open up to unexpected interferences, embodying distant cultures, from the Isle of Failaka to Easter Island, realities that act almost as a warning to the men of our age.

Mercury House One is a habitable unit designed as a mobile lounge, created respecting ecological issues. The exterior shell is made from the finest Carrara marble. The marble is backlit at night, enhancing the form and creating special attention for evening events. MHO is “designed to lavish emotions and infuse an optimistic view of the future” (Gualtiero Vanelli), it is an architecture, which integrate functional and aesthetical considerations, ingeniously designed by Architecture and Vision and created by GVM, it is capable of “making one feel uncomfortable” with the purity of its form and “comfortable” with its contents, which are dictated by the defence of knowledge, sculpted on to the marble of its walls.

So we have to look at the MHO as at a future cave, a guardian of identities. This reminds us of Krauss’ warning on the loss of the ancient house of language but the foreboding, which globalisation has turned into something more real then ever, unveils a new scenario: the MHO is the new house of language.

Art leaves behind its challenging role and replaces it with the composition, which man “needs”. In this respect, the MHO is a “concept-place”, a technological cave for the man of the future, his knowledge in its DNA.

Save the Poetry, Marco Nereo Rotelli’s installation, carries ancient languages, from the mnemonic one of the Rongo Rongo tablets of Easter Island to those of the nomadic poems of the desert. The fonts used to display these words recall things of the past, the present and the future; the art of writing is part of everyone’s visual culture.

The Mercury House One is therefore a place of thought that contains an asset to be guarded, such as poetry, not just the metaphor of all the endangered languages, but a veritable ethical assumption.

This is how one should look at the “Night of light” event, which will bring to San Servolo artists and poets from all over the world.