Vey’s artistic research expresses, through the practice of nomadism and photographic narration used to capture the movement, the sounds, the diversity of the landscapes and the abundance of the encounters that mark the stories of her travels. Walking, photography, videos and writing are blended together in a singular expressive form open to the aesthetic suggestions of a reality where the human figure remains on the fringes of sight.
This exhibition displays a video and a series of drawings. Contro corrente #3 (2008) is the result of a trip in reverse, divided into three parts, carried out by the artist between 2014 and 2017 in her Fiat 1100, retracing the itinerary undertaken by Pasolini in 1959 from Ventimiglia to Trieste. Vey revisited the places described by the poet sixty years earlier, while collecting photographs, videos, sounds, and words from chance meetings, then gathered them together in the trilogy Contro corrente #1, #2 and #3. From the series Iconographie Pasolinienne (2019), twelve drawings on paper are here exhibited, inspired by a collection of photographic portraits by Pasolini of his family, his friends and some Roman sites of his first films, revisited through a mark obtained by one single gesture. The almost spectral images are unique and unreproducible: the paper transfer originates from a movement, from the speed of friction and from the ink imprinted on the sheet.
Chantal Vey’s project
Veni ad ascoltare i fiumi del mio cuore
For Piazza IV November, Vey proposes an installation whose title (meaning, literally, ‘Come listen to the rivers of my heart’) is the first verse of the Pasolinian collection of poems in dialect Dov’è la mia patria, which also refers to the description of the Friulian farmers and workers’ insurrection in A Dream of Something. From this, the fragment « [...]shaking the flag» was, for the artist, the starting point for this new work, as well as the analysis of the historical and political events related to this square and of the domestic and pedagogical connection of Pasolini with Friuli.
The installation is composed of three flags, serving as a vehicle of a personal and collective history, with which Vey exhorts people to celebrate one of the greatest intellectuals of the twentieth century. “Poeta delle ceneri” with a red base coat, symbolic of rebellion, shows the phrase and a portrait of Pasolini, an iconic motif in the artist’s research. “Ahi madre!”, with a light pinkish base coat, symbol of love, displays a tenuous and private image, where mother and son are united in a hug. “Fantasma” only shows a text in the Friulian dialect about the loss of his younger brother. In this installation, words and pictures are awakened by the wind, and poetry has the role of political and popular conflict, a weapon of resistance and an act of resilience.
Chantal Vey (Saint-Agrève, 1970) lives and works in Brussels. After studying history of art in Lyon followed by a year of research in Italy, she specialized as a photographer. Her first residency abroad marked the beginning of her nomadic lifestyle, constantly renewed by numerous explorations in Europe and China. Over the last few years, her approach has turned towards the study of border zones: in 2010 she traveled the entire 1386 km of the Belgian border and in 2014 she explored the coast of Italy following the sixty-year-old itinerary undertaken and described in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s travel journal, published as The Long Road of Sand.
