GEOGRAPHIES

A suitcase evokes the journey. What fits into a suitcase? Its depths contain the professional baggage accumulated over years of personal and professional experience. With the suitcase on their back, we see the story of the comings and goings of lives that are rooted in Italy but run beyond its borders.

Claudia Bonollo is a restless traveler who displays all her senses as an architect, artist and researcher. Her first steps have been impregnated by a search, always a step beyond the current reality, until her personal choices have turned into a creative attitude from the need to undertake projects increasingly rooted in a deep commitment to the transversal, multidisciplinary and open dialogue and experimentation as a way of “making the road by walking”.

Geography as a science that describes the Earth, or refers in its figurative sense to the territory and the landscape, is an aspect that appears repeatedly in the personal cosmography of Claudia Bonollo. From her artist’s book about the Venetian lagoons to the biological landscapes you perceive her will to transcend the Earth’s surface, even of the body, and to immerse herself in sensitive, but not intangible, spaces.

If we intend to decipher the Greek compound word which is implicit in the word geography, we find tracks on the slopes leading to the river:

Gea, from the latin Gæa, or alternatively, from ancient Greek Gaya, is a primordial deity in the ancient Greek pantheon, considered the Mother Earth. This mythological name was rescued in 1979 by James Lovelock for his Gaia hypothesis. The hypothesis proposes that living organisms and inorganic materials are part of a dynamic system that gives shape to the biosphere of the Earth. The Earth itself is considered an organism with self-regulating functions.

In a very similar way Claudia Bonollo conceives her multidisciplinary research called The Imagined Body on cells and the human body, transforming them into visual narrations.

The apparently physical structure of the body as a holographic projection of consciousness, which designates the psychologist Keith Floyd, converts the body in a map of the state of consciousness receptive to mutations that lead to significant changes in the corporeal hologram through visualizing healing images.

An important reference to understand profoundly the concept of mutations is in her suitcase and occupies even the first place: it is the I Ching, the book of changes or mutations that talks with a figurative language about 64 possible situations in the life of man, single or in relationship with others, represented in 64 hexagrams formed by the combination of the upper and the lower trigrams.

An intense work of five years collects in a splendid artist’s book an interpretation of each hexagram in a double page of reverberant colors in overlapping layers. It is a work that connects the mutations of the I Ching with the emotional metamorphosis through color. The color is the last of the five elements within the suitcase, in a kind of conceptual alpha and omega.

The suffix -graphy of the compound word geography refers to the ‘description’, the ‘treaty’, ‘script’, or ‘graphical representation’, but also means the way of 

writing or representing sounds, and, in particular, the use of such letter or such graphic sign to represent a given sound.

This meaning designates the multisensorial aspect that underlies her multidisciplinary project of therapy as an art. Visual narratives are materialized in virtual environments, projections where experience various levels of well-being as in ther Sensitive Spaces, in short films and techniques of visualizations with colors that are precisely called chromatic narrations.

Her approach also includes geography as a whole: it is no coincidence that cells become a map of consciousness in her transfigurated cells, or that biological landscapes are cartographies of  the being where the body is represented as a sacred icon.

Maps also appear in her architectural work, some of them in collaboration with Einander, as in the offices of Continental Producciones in Madrid and A Coruña or the restaurant of the Golf Club in Majadahonda.

The Galician project shows best the development of maps, textures and materials as layers in space. The floor is a maritime map interpreted in a composition of pavements with embedded objects returned by the sea. The ceiling with its crosses of oxidized metal with running rails for spotlights is organized according to a celestial map. The vertical plane of the walls and windows dramatize the variations of climate and light of the Galician coast. Space shrinks or can be redistributed meeting the needs of the production company.

The geographer Franco Farinelli analyzes in a set of five audiovisuals produced for the exhibition “Contemporary Cartographies. Drawing Thought” (CaixaForum Madrid, from November 21, 2012, to 24 February, 2013) how the topographic cartography has modeled the conception of the world of Western man. Geography is not a knowledge concerning the place, as believed for a long time. By selecting the things that are to be represented, geography creates the world. Space is an invention of modernity and is based on the technique of transforming a sphere in a plane, such as Claudius Ptolemy describes it in the second century in his book “Geography”. The birth of the modern space has its origin in Florence, at the beginning of the 15th century, when the largely lost knowledge of this last of the Greek scholars is regained. At the same time emerges the figure of the architect who projected works. The use of the word ‘project’ to describe the act of creating spaces in a plan is relevant since it comes from Alchemy and encloses the conscience of transformation of a heterogeneous reality in a unique extension. In Alchemy ‘projecting’ is equivalent to the moment in which a vulgar metal is transformed into gold.

The Apollo 11 lunar landing on July 20, 1969 marks the end of Modernity and the beginning of Globalization. Therefore, argues Farinelli, the map enters crisis and settles the logic of the Network or the sphere.

EXPO PARTIRE TORNARE RESTARE

Andrea Buchner Anfruns

Impulsora cultural de RCR Bunka Fundació Privada at RCR Arquitectes

• Twitter
• Instagram
• LinkedIn

EXPO PARTIRE TORNARE RESTARE

Claudia Bonollo’s work

AIAC

(Associazione Italiana Architettura e Critica)