Bandite
The Bandite project is dedicated to some Savona partisans - Clelia Corradini, Ines Negri, Franca Lanzone, Paola Garelli, Luigia Comotto and the 'Maria bambina' Sisters of the Santa Corona hospital in Pietra Ligure - who are testimony to the fundamental role of the dwarfs in the liberation struggle and are a symbol of the many martyrs for freedom.
During the rites of commemoration of the caution of the Resistance, the honours of the flag are also performed in front of the memorial stone commemorating the sacrifice of the partisan: the flags on that occasion are many and varied, and all are waved with firmness and transport.
The Bandite project consists of a series of flags, one for each partisan, created in such a way that they can be waved by a group of flag wavers. The flag wavers originated in the 14th century as 'signalmen' during wartime. The flag expressed a strategic need because through the different and multiple colours, it could be a point of reference and recognition during combat.
The task of the flag wavers was in fact to communicate with the units through throwing and waving, indicating, according to a precise code, the salient phases of the battle. The flag wavers had to be faithful, discreet and ingenious, and if they were captured by the enemy they had to jealously guard the signals of the dance code, keeping the secret until death.
The partisan struggle is a naked existential experience animated by an elementary drive for human redemption that required the unconditional and total adhesion of men and women who were also faithful, discreet and ingenious, and who had to understand each other in silence and act in unison, hiding and concealing information, people, weapons, at the cost of their lives.
Bandite is developed in the form of a performance enacted by professional flag wavers who, through a studied choreography, move and 'attract' the Bandite flags. Flags have always been used to represent an ideology, a belief, a belonging. The flag is a symbol of values, and the dance enacted by the flag-wavers can symbolically become a new process of enhancing stories in history.
In this project, the form and content of the work, in addition to dealing with memory and territory, investigate the parallelism and juxtaposition between the natural element, flowers, and the existential complexity of certain biographies: on each flag is represented a flower of Ligurian flora belonging to an endangered species - the Savona Campanula, the Scilla della riviera, the Erica cinema, the Ligurian Gentian, the Orchid patente, the Mountain Tulip - and a word is embroidered, chosen from those engraved on the memorial stones of the Savona partisans to whom the flags are dedicated - 'coraggio' (bravery), 'caddero' (fell), 'resistenza' (resistance), 'libertà' (freedom), 'medita' (meditation), 'cura' (care).
The very strong and primary relationship with their land for the partisans means that the landscape is not considered merely as a frame or backdrop to the events, but a protagonist element of the Resistance. "The Resistance represented the fusion of landscape and people>, writes Calvino in the preface of '64 to Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno.
The flowers depicted on the Bandite flags, which are meant to be the image of this relationship, are in their precarious existence as a threatened species, an example of resistance; the tenacity and at the same time the fragility of the flowers have value as iconicity: they are the very metaphor of life, of the alternation of the seasons, of birth and death, but they also refer to nature's capacity to enact continuous processes of rebirth and transformation.
Flags for flags, replacement and stamped applications on fabric, 130x130 cm.
2024
ph. Alessio Barchitta / Francesca Cirilli
The term “Bandito” from which the title of the work takes shape has the same etymological root of “Bandiera” (flag), because both come from the word “Bando”, here with the meaning of showing, emerge, announce. “Bandi”, notices of public interest that must be made known to everyone, they represent also the injuction of a sentence, they forbid, they exclude, they are the expression with which it is urged to set aside, to leave something behind. Therefore “Bandito” means banned , excluded, but according to the etymology a double valence also compets here, the one of something that appears evident, manifest,well visible and that shows itself like a flag.
“Bandite” is referred to either the female partisans and the flags, but to the flowers as well: the term has a double meaning that sums two opposites, hidden and evident. The contribution of the partisans has been for too long on the margins, hidden: it took many years before we started to discuss their choice to fight as partisans in the war as a self awareness and their value, and that the female partisans were ablte to tell the memories that they themselves had banned because “ lots of people’s silent lives that during the resistance had done extraordinary things, in the aftermath of the liberation returned to their everyday life without claiming any special role, without being part of any official commemoration, without talking about it with anyone”.
(The script was published on “La Repubblica” on april the 23rd 1985 on the insert “25 aprile 1945. Quarant’anni dopo" (now in Calvino, essay.op.cit.II.pp 2912-2919)
ph. Natascia Giulivi
Selected projects
Silvia Margaria spent three years at the film archive of Cineteca at the National Cinema Museum in Turin, working in the field of inspection and cataloguing films.
This work experience was fundamental in forming her current artistic research: the careful way of approaching the memories and the storytelling identity from the past, and the effort of bringing you to look beyond your own ordinary bustle, they have the intermittence of the case allusions and fragments, the precariousness and fragility. Her working methodology gives importance to dialogue and participation with other visual traces taking into account the relationship between opposites understood as tensions comprising the experience of relationship with the memory of the complexity of the relationship between man and the environment.
Her research is based on a rhythm that makes slowness a method of action, to ensure that attention can be manifested in an open, measured and responsible way.
“Friction, between a nature that reveals itself and at the same time retreats into its most essential part, is the very secret of nature, namely the invisible reason of which the world is its external manifestation. Silvia Margaria’s poetic vision straddles this very point: the artist seeks the imperceptible part of nature and explores its process of appearing with an observational work based on the desire to understand the mystery of life as it runs its course. Her work, in line with what it explores, is configured in the ambiguity of opposites (scattering/concentration – hiding/revealing – searching/finding – one/many – solitude/collectivity – communication/relationship – remembrance/oblivion – resistance/change) in relation to each other rather than in their divergent reciprocation, through the processing of the transitive quality of concepts, so that the consequential motion that characterises the natural flux of things can be drawn from their dialogic link.”