I loved my sculpture symposia.
Not as folklore, and not as a career move, but as a state of being: mornings with the dust of foreign lands on my skin, midday with the sun on my neck, evenings with that half-broken laughter of fatigue and the wine, women, and songs of my colleagues.
We were like modern artistic wanderers.
Material traded for time, and in the end, something remained standing, something greater than the sum of our hands.
Thailand – Wax under trees and forty degrees above
Ubon Ratchathani: the air as sweet as syrup, the yellow of royal wax sculptures against the dark green of the trees.
Wax is honest, it shows every mark, every hesitation, every quick decision, and then it melts away. There I understood how temporary monumentality can be, all monumentality. That greatness is not measured in tons, but in participation, in people and ideas.
Ubon is a place where entire districts gather around sculpture; where the festival calendar dictates the rhythm of art, Asanha Puja and the beginning of the rainy season. It grounded me: art as a people’s festival, as collective memory, not as a white-cube special effect. Every year anew! Wonderful people in Thailand, true party souls, many still friends today. Thank you, and a great thanks again to the students of Silpakorn University! Viva Team Italia!!
Argentina – Neuquén/Cipolletti, travertine, glass, and foam
In Cipolletti I shoved a whole pack of bottles into the throat of my figure, my drunken, self-destructive alter ego. Real bottles, real weight, real risk, on a pack of Marlboros.
Some purists grumbled: “Stone must stay stone! Leave the other materials alone!”
But for me it was important that the sculpture stung the present, the smoke, the booze, the poverty of the Argentinian provinces, the traces of use. We worked in a public park, for everyone, ten or twelve days; the local press came, neighbours brought maté, the local gangsters chased away the security guards and took over the night shift voluntarily, they liked me.
That was the best version of the symposium format: public, contradictory, direct, and unpolished. (The event took place in October 2008, organised as an international encounter open to the public, perfectly matching my idea of work as dialogue.)
Many greetings still to my dear friend Otto and his Maria, a German couple who emigrated in the 1950s and always had a good story from the region. Cipolletti was, by far, my favourite symposium.
Tendola – Two white marble birds
In Tendola I allowed myself the freedom to be quietly monumental. Two birds, no pathos. My wife’s sculpture greets the traveller entering the village; mine says goodbye at its end, in the Lunigiana hills.
Carrara marble, dense rhythm, edge, curve.
What I liked about this piece was that it didn’t impose itself on the surroundings but joined them, stubborn and proud like the people who live there, and I mean that as a compliment. Greetings to Ursula and Sergio, the kind organisers!
Verona – Sole, Luna e Stelle
In San Giovanni Lupatoto I had a beautiful three-coloured block of Rosso Verona marble, but only a dull draft, an arch connecting sun and moon, utterly boring. My working title was “Sonnenmondbanane”, rejected! (It was my first symposium, so forgive me.)
A star as a cheeky accent that didn’t help much either. For me it became an early confession: play is not a weakness. Never bend yourself again, don’t twist it, keep it straight. It’s a method of insight.
Those who play find connections that sobriety would never allow. In truth, I was misused to produce that nonsense. All in all, a failure, I almost never wanted to work publicly again. Except for the fellow sculptors, everything was awful, and even they trembled before the organiser. A tough beginning.
Israel – The bench with two masks
Maʿalot-Tarshiha, Stone in the Galilee. Ah, beautiful Israel, my holy land! My work, a bench inviting rest, carries two faces, left and right. Not decorative trophies, but listeners. The title: Beauty and the Beast. Whoever sits down is not alone, they sit between roles, moods, audiences.
Beautiful or beastly.
I wanted the act of sitting itself to become a small performance. The piece found its place in front of the town hall, where, as we know, beauty and beastliness meet in the generous or petty faces of officials. The festival is strongly international, curated with an eye for the public, and has been a fixed point of Israel’s stone-sculpture scene since the 1990s. Germany I could not officially represent, for obvious reasons, the German flag was not welcomed, but disguised as an Italian, I was allowed to take part.
Since that symposium in Maʿalot, I have loved the country deeply and always will. We moved freely, explored everything, even the West Bank and the Negev were not safe from us. Beautiful and beastly, that’s how I’d describe the land itself.
What Has Changed
After some years, something shifted. Not everywhere, not at once, but noticeably.The places of experiment became, elsewhere, stages for convenience. Big sculptures bought cheap.
The open calls multiplied, the number of applicants exploded, the budgets shrank, longer work for less money. The unpredictable, the unruly, the thought provoking, all receded, while the easily delegated forms came to the fore. In some places, art became event infrastructure: photogenic, unproblematic, boring as hell. Design.
This isn’t a complain, on the contrary.
Good symposia are still, for me, the most democratic form of sculpture: outdoors, accessible, tangible. That was the origin, the idea of international symposia as workshops of exchange since the pioneers of 1959, to soften borders, to force dialogue between people and materials, to leave behind a fragment of place.
That idea remains true.
But when open calls begin to see art mainly as a selfie backdrop, the chisel grows dull. The result? Everything becomes a little more correct, more harmless, and at the same time, more meaningless. Juries try to sell conflict avoidance as civic virtue. And in doing so, we lose exactly what once made us strong: the right to fail, to provoke, to explode, and to slap someone’s fingers, visibly, audibly, instructively.
What Remains
I regret not a single symposium. On the contrary, I learned to think amid noise, to draw in motion, to discuss with an audience without explaining myself. I learned that the public becoming of a form is at least as important as its final state. I built friendships with people I’m still close to today, many of whom became collaborators in later projects.
Today I choose more carefully.
I go where questions are still allowed, where material does more than decorate, where a city is not just a client but a partner. I stand by the fact that some of my works are uncomfortable, with bottles in the throat, with grimaces on a bench, and so on.
That’s not a pose.
It’s my attempt to meet the truth of a place and not its glossy brochure. I loved those years. I carry them with me, in Carrara, in my studio, in every new block of stone. Every time I make a fresh cut, I hear that old concert again, grinder, hammer, laughter, questions.
That is my Dominik Festival.
Notes:
- Ubon Ratchathani Candle/Wax Festival: time frame and context of the wax-sculpture procession 2008
- International Stone Symposium Cipolletti (Neuquén/Río Negro): public working period in October 2008
- “Stone in the Galilee” (Maʿalot-Tarshiha), Israel 2007
- “Simposio in Tendola,” Lunigiana, Italy 2006
- “Simposio in Cavaion Veronese” (Universe in stone) 2006
