PARCO NAZIONALE DELLE CINQUE TERRE COMUNE DI RIOMAGGIORE

“SEQUENCE OF THE MEMORY”

Sky levels and sea levels

2004-2007

WORK OF ART OF SILVIO BENEDETTO FOR THE ARTISTIC ITINERARY OF THE PARK

THIS “MURALES POLIMATERICO” IS CONCEIVED AND REALISED,

PERSONALLY AND ON THE SPOT, BY SILVIO BENEDETTO

WITH THE HELP OF OLGA MACALUSO AND SILVIA LOTTI

THE COLLABORATORS: BRUNO AMMANN, DAVIDE RICCI, SILVIA DI BLASI, MARIANO BENEDETTO,

MASCHA BOM, FLAVIA BENEDETTO, LUISA RACANELLI

MOREOVER, FOR FRIENDSHIP NUMEROUS PERSONS WITH VARIOUS TASKS HAVE PARTICIPATED

info@silviobenedetto.com       © Silvio Benedetto by SIAE

THE ORIGIN OF THE RAILWAY AND THE VIA DELL’AMORE

The railway line La Spezia – Genova has been completed in 1874. It was the first, very important, connection over land between the Cinque Terre and the villages nearby.

The Via dell’Amore is constructed in the twenties in two different parts (first the Manarola side and after the Riomaggiore side), a narrow path digged in the steep cliff walls above the sea, to keep the explosives, necessary for the realisation of the two railway tunnels (the tunnel “La Batternara” connects Riomaggiore with Manarola, and the tunnel “Biassa” leads in the direction of La Spezia) far away from the villages. Some years after, the voluntary assistance of the inhabitants of Riomaggiore and Manarola has contributed to link both parts of the Via dell’Amore.

Later, in the fifties, in the tunnel “Biassa”, next to the railway lines, a new concrete wall was build to protect the pedestrian traffic. Around the year 2000 this footpath becomes a covered tunnel thanks to the curved plexiglas covering, fixed with steel ribs.

THE GALLERY OF THE MOSAICS

Nowadays, Silvio Benedetto has developed along this long concrete wall, within the project of the Artistic Itineraries, assigned to him by the Park, his murales polimaterico “Sequence of the memory”.

He realised this work by himself directly on the spot (without delegating models to specialistic or industrial handicraft companies) and entirely by hand (approximately 200 meters of length, thousands and thousands of pieces, shaped and placed, one for one, by hand).

“…In due course, I have found the new concrete wall, the blue polished covering and the old railway wall, mighty with his big blocks of stone and bricks.

I didn’t want to interfere in the old wall to respect and to safeguard the ‘memory’, testimony of a still visible railway architecture. I wanted to consider this old railway wall, given the typology and the colour of the material, as a monochrome neutral complementary element of the vibrating polychromy which I wanted to develop on the opposite wall”.

Therefore, the pre-existing and the new form one unique ensemble together in the creation of the artist.

“…In the choice of the composition (shape, colours, materials) I have taken in consideration beyond this neutral, rigorous, simple, opaque rest zone (like a pause in music – always expressively significant – which is never an interruption), also of the reflecting brightness of the vault in plexiglas and steel; I considered the sharp colour, above all in relation of the utilization, wanted by me, of some lucid glazed majolicas that I have inserted together with other innumerable mixed materials: stones, pebbles, marbles (inclusive the red and green marble of Levanto), crystals, mirrors, shells and pottery.”

“…In the entrance of the side of the station, considering the natural context (the mountain and the reef, the sea and sky), I preferred to use little rocks, stones and grey marble.

On the side of the town, where the stores and the houses are animated by a certain touristic air of souvenirs, I ‘played’ (inviting also many other artistic friends) applying on the wall of the porch fairy, popular, painted subjects in a myriad of terracotta tiles 10x10, like an infantile collection of figures: and so is created the ‘Wall of the majolicas’ which closes (or, if you like, introduces) our adventure of the ‘murales polimaterico’”“.

THE POETICS

It is known that Benedetto has a sensible immediate receptivity, a facility to catch immediately the events and to translate them in an artistic way; also known are his commitment and his actions of denunciation of the social injustice: the outrage, the cultural, social violence of customs from the small communities to the world-wide genocide.

In the same way the artist receives his impressions from nature and from the cosmos and later on gives his sensations artistically back.

“Sometimes I make visible that what is secret in me, sometimes the things penetrate me to re-emerge, sometimes they watch me, other times I watch that what I have realised with detachment: it is a sequence of the memory” says Silvio Benedetto.

A sequence of composition, shape and colour; a dynamic sequence where every section refers to another, for the visible perception of the spectator who is moving, who is in transit in both directions of the crowded tunnel which unites the railway station with the centre of town.

A sequence that Silvio Benedetto defines: “A sensation that the passer-by has perceived and persists in him also when he is already gone away... the sensation to have seen something, like happens to us when we have the impression to see fantasy animals or faces and who knows what else in the variegations of the marble, in the shapes of the moving clouds, in the steep rocks: the see, a seagull, a boat, a storm, like in a magic story.

It depends on us: on our own capacity of abstraction and fantasy; on the caprice of the shapes; on the rare quality to watch like children do and it depends on us in the first place not to ask the signification: which sometimes is a habit that immobilizes the mood.”

Benedetto therefore speaks of a long dynamic composition and of spectators in movement, however he has searched and realised precise and determinated moments of rest where the spectator finds a declared subject: the moon, the sun, the stars, creatures from the bottom of the sea.

One curiosity: the big, polychrome starfish signs the middle of the tunnel.