Hundred billion castaways, looking for a home."
Trafalgar Square on a cloudy Sunday afternoon is a place bursting with people: Londoners, tourist competing to have a picture on the lions at the base of Nelson's column, families with children running around freely, skating teens. I have a very nice memory of an hot afternoon back in 1993 when I had my first school trip to London to learn English: people were bathing in the two fountains, with children even wearing bath suits. Of course, although I was fully dressed, I joined them. Not even in your most forbidden dreams would you do it in Bernini's fountain in Piazza Navona, Rome: you'll get arrested on the spot, no questions asked.
At that time, I didn't noticed the empty plinth.
It sparked my interest when I learned, several years later, that it was being used to commission temporary site specific artworks: from Rachel Whiteread to Marc Quinn, the plinth joined his equals to host contemporary art which exquisitely mixed up with the eldest in the monumental square.
Now, under the corner stare of neighbor George IV, the Fourth Plinth hosts Yinka Shonibare's Nelson's Ship in a Bottle. You would say it is overshadowing from the pictures and the various reportage on TV; instead, at that height the bottle seems contained, almost disappearing compared to the imposing plinth. A little monument for a big square, directly linked to the historical victory of Nelson at the battle of Trafalgar at the beginning of 1800, which freed the seas allowing England to get in touch with different cultures, and to become the cosmopolitan country we live in today. The colored patterned sails, made out of Shonibare's trademark African textiles, refer exactly to this: the British colonialism legacy.
The so skilfully realised ship, rich in details, is enclosed in a giant bottle, like the tiny traditional handicraft work; this seems to make the concept behind its creation small and contained, almost silenced. Shonibare is not an artist who leaves anything to chance, therefore even the fact that you can’t really make out the ship’s details nor the sails patterns by looking at it from the bottom of the tall plinth means something.
The so skilfully realised ship, rich in details, is enclosed in a giant bottle, like the tiny traditional handicraft work; this seems to make the concept behind its creation small and contained, almost silenced. Shonibare is not an artist who leaves anything to chance, therefore even the fact that you can’t really make out the ship’s details nor the sails patterns by looking at it from the bottom of the tall plinth means something.
It’s the first time that the empty plinth hosts a work so directly linked not only to the history of the square, but also to the city of London in particular. The multiculturalism and immigration Shonibare is talking about is all there, making London the seaport she wanted to be: people arrive and leave all the time. Maybe they'll leave traces of their passage, maybe they won't. Strangers are so many in this city you can hardly make out the features. Multiplicity often leads to confusion, and then tolerance steps in: polite smiles, shifts to one side to make some more room, just a tiny bit. London’s social and cultural structure is indeed a very colorful and patterned fabric like the one in Shonibare’s ship, but every community is an island, trying to look at one another from too much a distance to figure out the details.
An updated version of this post is going to be published as an article on the magazine Arte e Critica n.64
No comments:
Post a Comment