ElectricAffinities
Language travels on porcelain postcards, connecting people, past and present, who speak to one another through poems, songs and text fragments selected by the artist. Embedded in porcelain, they represent Electric Affinities that reveal themselves in a series of imagined conversations.
Three themes run through the collection: love, defiance, solidarity.
Love honors the life of Serena Vicari. The artist memorializes her and their enduring love story in postcards sent to each other carrying songs and poems by Pino Daniele, Eugenio Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo.
Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.
~ Salvatore Quasimodo
Each of us stands alone on the heart of the earth
pierced by a shaft of sunlight:
and suddenly night falls.
In Defiance, the artist responds to the genocide in Gaza. Postcards to and from the many Palestinian doctors, medical workers, journalists, artists and poets killed in Gaza speak of the inhuman cruelty of the perpetrators, even as Palestinian defiance offers some hope. Poets Refaat Alareer (killed in an Israeli air strike in December 2023) and Mosab Abu Toha (now safely out of Palestine) engage in an impossible, imaginary conversation, captured here on stoneware and porcelain. Refaat Alareer mails a postcard to Benjamin Netanyahu, and sends the same message to the White House:
The scars on our children’s faces
will look for you.
Our children’s amputated legs
will run after you.
~Mosab Abu Toha, Forest of Noise, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2024
Solidarity draws on affinities between people who play a significant role in the artist’s life and work. The artist imagines United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese writing a postcard addressed To the Silent Consumers of Genocide in Gaza. Her message borrows from Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, updated by the artist.
I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta Geneva and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham Palestine. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
Elsewhere in the collection, Franz Kafka sends a postcard to Walther Benjamin, citing a 1916 poem by Osip Mandelstam:
Petropolis, diaphan: hier gehen wir zugrunde,
hier herrscht sie über uns: Proserpina.
Sooft die Uhr schlägt, schlägt die Todesstunde,
wir trinken Tod aus jedem Lufthauch da.
~ Osip Mandelstam, translated by Paul Celan
One of the artists whose work continues to electrify the artist is Nina Simone. Here she writes from her home in New York to James Baldwin in Paris, quoting from her 1964 song, Mississippi Goddam, which she composed following the murder of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in Mississippi and the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Lord, have mercy on this land of mine
We all gonna get it in due time
I don't belong here, I don't belong there
I've even stopped believing in prayer
Oh, but this whole country is full of lies
You're all gonna die and die like flies
Why don't you see it? Why don't you feel it?
I don't know, I don't know.
Judgement, polemic and protest at once, these postcards represent a form of solidarity connecting writers and readers in a spirit of resistance to inhumane cruelty.