text Laura Barreca
10-12.2010
The work of Sissi is really difficult to define with a single word. It’s not only sculptures, performances, installations, pictures or drawings. It’s instead a complete aesthetic experience where materials, techniques, languages, meanings and structures twisted together, go straight to the public . Immediately the work of Sissi linked together life and art, making one essential for the other and vice versa. During the years she has experienced those structures and languages that link body to art, art to work, work to story, story to life. The artist’s life at the begin, then the lives of those who experience the art, who are asked to use other senses before the sight. As Marina Abramovič said in an interview about her work :” The greatest thing about being an artist is that you can look inside yourself, because that’s what you do best. The more you look inside yourself the easiest a different side of you emerge where people can recognize themselves in.” The “Take a look into yourself” motto has never abandoned Sissi’s work and life, because it’s a life lived at its best. Her first work with the name Sissi is the performance inside the well, where the net becomes really important (Il riposo dei miei pensieri, 2000).
From now on the net is the way to link an action to life: survival rope, anchor, Ariadne’s thread, a call to build, link, cover, surround, to extend towards the others on your own. Ten years ago Sissi experimented the performance as a favoured way to communicate, making her body the space of experimentation and conquest, of the personal growth, through a physic metamorphosis that has always been in her work. At the end of the ‘90s the discover of body as an area to investigate, as a place to cross, also through the absence of the body itself was assigned to female artists. In Sissi’s works the identification of the body and the dress happens contextually, one is the expression of the other and in several occasion the artist ends up as if eaten by the net itself (Nature, 2006 and Voliare, 2007), installations built as bastion and prosthesis between herself and reality. The difficulty of this relationship is the recognizable element, that varies in all the structures where Sissi put her body as the place of the representation. Time after time the enigma of the art goes toe to toe with the choice of a posture, of a subject, of a picture inside the work, mixing together private and intimate dimension with the public life. There’s a quote taken from the Orlando of Virginia Woolf: “Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.” This quote, that comes along with the artist book released in 2002, a collection of pictures of her early works, leads us straight to the heart of an artistic experience where art and life once again are together. In her never ending research of pictures, words, temporary emotions, the artist often commit her imagination to various pictures taken on film with the inseparable camera, details from where the interest of things has the root. For a long time Sissi has been collecting notebook, diaries with a huge amount of ideas, studies that create a story of her life, telling us where she finds her source of inspiration. Today in Palermo Sissi gives back her idea of a place, not only through a picture of the city but also giving some founded hints, selected with the interest of a scientist in an unknown land. Through them and with her, the visitor is invited to explore. The work is titled Installo sulla carne (2010) and it includes 9 pictures where the artist wears small sculptures on her. These are rests, remains from anywhere, from Stromboli to the sidewalk of Vucciria market, to the knick-knacks of stands at the bottom of a tree. The objects, seen as holy, are included in small cages, rolled up in sweet structures that underline their shapes.
Appesa is the great banquet where Sissi invited people to the rooms of the palace where she used to live, next to the gallery that displayed her works. Curtains in and out the windows that look out to the Vucciria market twisted with nets, vegetables, fruits, fish, food climbed on coloured and moving scaffoldings. The banquet that Sissi organized a summer night doesn’t touch the ground, everything is hanged as in the first moments of digestion, when food is still in circulation inside our body. Then we have a stole, a tapestry made of straws and nails. That’s the armor hanged between a wall and its floor, La fantasia morde la piega in bilico. The materials are the same that are used inside the mummies of the catacombs of the Cappuchins, refuge for lepers in the 17th century, souls without ties or burial. There’s an interest linked more to the structure and to the meaning in the revision that Sissi obtains weaving the work using elements that are in the decoration of the Sicilian carts. The interest is for the subject, how unravel it, to the ability of receive stimulus from a human action as is the weaving. As for the rosary, a litany, weaving belongs the female world of meditation. This prayer done with the hands is considered to be the blanket with whom Sissi invite you to cover and listen to her story in Palermo.
