Interview

Feb 15

Alessandro Vergari

Alessandro was born in 1964 in Florence. It’s been more than 10 years that he is starting to make totem in his wood. In the last two years, he also started with the Ri-totems work, displaying them in several bio-markets in Tuscany. He has a show of several Ri-totems in the botanical garden of Vico di Val d'Elsa.

What is your background and how did you start your journey in the art world?

“I have always been creative, with my hands and mind, and I like to explore this creativity in different fields. I started with photography, which I still enjoy, and with travel, always trying to find places and situations that are not obvious and as authentic as possible. As a trekking guide and walker I always like to take the path less traveled, to be guided by intuition and the sensation of the moment. When we stopped due to Covid-19, I could no longer move with my body, I started traveling with my mind, inventing trips to distant places that turned into real travel guides, published by a publisher who liked the idea. In recent years I have then found my way to leave a more beautiful world, using a stretch of abandoned forest which has become a forge and laboratory of my totems, of my installations created with dead and dry trees that I transform with stones and other materials, such as iron, metal and glass, and which become real beings, each with its own history and personality. There are now more than 50 works along this path and although it is just a few hundred meters long, it takes more than an hour to explore it calmly.”

What inspires you?

“Totems are a symbol that has always been among us; as a small statue kept at home to commemorate the deceased, as a boundary stone to delimit a territory, as a symbol of power, or as a link be-tween our world and the afterlife and the hidden forces of nature, and this is why building them takes us it brings us back to a pantheism that in some way is always present, not completely erased by centuries of Christianity or scientific thought.”

What themes do you pursue? Is there an underlying message in your work?

“Deciding to have a totem is something more than having a height, because, especially in the larger ones, I always ask for the collaboration of the client in using personal objects to include in the installation, so that it becomes part of the individual, of his story and his life. Something that gives it a soul, in short.”

“Deciding to have a totem is something more than having a height, because, especially in the larger ones, I always ask for the collaboration of the client in using personal objects to include in the installation, so that it becomes part of the individual, of his story and his life.”

How would you describe your work?

“In my forest, with its fifty or more installations, there is the story of part of my life, because I remember of each one the origin of the objects that compose it and the idea that brought it to fruition, to which we I add up all the times I took care of it because a piece of it had fallen off in the wind or something else had broken. There is also a profound irony and a great sense of imagination about everything, which I also highlighted in one of the first installations of the path in the woods where a sort of jester holds a sort of bat where it is written, “is it a joke or is it madness?” a quote from Verdi's A Masquerade Ball, which preludes the subtle difference in emotions that can arouse in someone who sits down to admire my gallery in nature and which, I hope, can be said of all of my works.”

Which artists influence you most?

“The examples from which I take inspiration are numerous and range from Miazaki's films to Fosco Maraini's metasemantic poems, from Hie-ronimus Bosch's paintings to Basho's haiku, from Carnia carnival masks to pre-Inca figures, and the list could go on and on. “What am I doing here?” I could say remembering a book by a great traveler Chatwin. My idea is quite simple, do what inspiration tells me and do it anyway to give my modest contribution to the beauty of the world, because I am convinced of improving it, in my small way, the continuation of the work and the maintenance of my artistic space in nature, and continuing to repopulate the world with archaic totems.”

What is your creative process like?

“I honestly don't know, I just know that I observe an object, a piece of wood, a stone, a piece of metal and, without even thinking, I see something in it and a little voice tells me; here's a fish! It happens like this.”

What is an artist’s role in society and how do you see that evolving?

““What am I doing here?” I could say remembering a book by a great traveler Chatwin. My idea is quite simple, do what inspiration tells me and do it anyway to give my modest contribution to the beauty of the world, because I am convinced of improving it, in my small way, the continuation of the work and the maintenance of my artistic space in nature, and continuing to repopulate the world with archaic totems.”