An immense white arranged at the foot of an olive tree forms a mandala around its trunk. The candidly ruffled cloth collects shadows of the leaves, silvery signs; project themselves as slight forms that attract each other. The Coranic verse of the light defines the olive as a blessed tree, common to the east and the west that the oil shines without being touched by flame. The video Passage-Suspension is a triptych piece composed of three different moments constructed by alternating photogram. At first the spectator is involved in the slow and difficult task of laying out the circular cloth, spanning the breadth of the tree on the ground: the form of the cloth reshapes into its original destined form: It's a recycled parachute. That has become the media clearly connected to the creativity of Isabelle Fordin.

The material eludes to spatiality, to the plastic quality of the ethereal form, the clouds, that seem to fall to earth. From the first photogram the parachute is dragged along the ground and the rustling of the unfolding is observed. The breaking and the crackling sounds are present in the first passage, accompanied by the composition of light, captures the utopia of the place, in reconsideration of the myth. The construction of the work introduces the bare essentials, without words, with the disappearance of the manipulation of the hands, to the construction of a higher sense, the Sublime, dominating the second passage of the work.

The ritual of the harvest is structured in history keeping alive the tradition, in the operative moment, of the distance between earth and sky. The harvesting of olives is a part of simple life, and of initiation, present in the decoration of Grecian urns existing from the fifth century b.c., according to documentation that we have inherited. It’s the prelude of the transformation. First the element and then its distortion, moving down, to where, originates the link between the possibilities of reality and myth. The meeting is recognized by the sound of absence, the irregular rhythm of the falling on the white cloth. The distance between the earth and sky in a transparent space, emptied of every visible trace, attentive of what happens, receiving the majesty of the ritual. Everything is in the motion itself that emits its own sound and breath.

Passage-Suspension has different levels of interpretation, with combined mental effects, poetic, that extracts the experience, the contemplation of the artist. Isabelle Fordin removes, mobilizes an archive of concepts, of traditions that express themselves through a speculated language of shadows and sounds on white.

The cloth is the page on which the olive transcribes its own soul, its ephemeral, producing the simultaneous sensation of presence-absence. The central iconic space, alternates between the three screens: it’s tree, white and empty. Its continuum and the sign of a reflection, is the touch of the spirit of the places, suggested by the power of the representation, and to approach the distant, a wind that brings to the present the essence of another time. To place the olive on white makes the space sacred, and brings to mind the history of art, from Beuys to Klein, in the sense of the removal of the aesthetic object to enter into the cosmic rhythm, repeating the apparitions.

Vittoria Biasi