Are We Ready to Become More Human?
Interview with Anna Raimondo
Article by Maritima01
Anna Raimondo is an italian artist based in Brussels and working internationally. Having received a recommendation from MACAAL museum to involve Anna in cooperation in Maritima project, I discovered an artist whose work is very diverse and relevant to reality. Anna describes herself as an artist working with listening. I recommend to watch her inventive and interesting performances and sound art particulary.
What is the fundamental idea of your creative process / artistic research?
I have travelled to numerous countries in Europe, south America and Africa and in a globalized world I am exploring and blending differences, special characteristics and multiple identities in order to break down the barriers between them, to accept their ill-defined boundaries and to transform them into a domain of possible conflicts. My work is a medium for encounters and exchanges. It can be defined as a journey that illustrates social diversity while creating possible areas of interaction. The method is flexible and variable, accepting the accidental as the unforeseeable. I do not seek to summarize a global reality, I rather allow myself to be surprised and led by the other. The initial strategy I used for many of my works, consists of an intervention in a public space intended to encourage encounters. An action leading to a break or gap in the permanent flow of daily life in which surprise, curiosity or astonishment provoke a dialogue. I am usually a part of the exchange. This material then becomes the imprint of a performance, as well as feeding images, videos, radiophonic creations. In all my works I am exploring daily feminism, particularly that concerning the social construction of gender and particularly the construction of the female identity, the constant questioning of which constitutes a resistance to its confinement. There is also a humorous and playful aspect in my works, both in the actions in public spaces and in my plastic creations.
Tell us a bit about your studio, where and how you work?
My artistic practice is processual, relational, site and time specific and can happen whenever and however as long as a kind of «encounter» on specific issues happens.
For sure, residency formats are the ideal context for the development of my practice, because I always try to work with the specificities of the context and the ephemeral communities which arises around the particular research.
What is your opinion on the importance of the dialogue between scientists and artists (science and art) ? Why is this necessary?
I think, art and science can be complementary to each other in order to encourage new balances, to rethink our contemporary societies.
What is your most interesting or current project?
I am working on a project about gender, listening and urban geography in Bruxelles in different districts of the city. As an outcome of the project I plan to produce a series of sound walks and new plastic works that will be shown in 2021 in the frame of Bruxelles Universelle II at la Centrale for Contemporary Art.
I am also preparing a radio documentary and a video installation about the story telling of a group of Marrakech women citizens devoted to the places they inhabit. The project aims to make audible and reveal through rhythms, via a sonic and visual installation, the complex relationship between visibility and invisibility of a group of women in the historic Medina of Marrakech. By focusing on the oral and aural approach, the intention is to create a multiple chorus of voices based on personal story-telling of their perceptions, values and experiences of their daily lives between private and public spaces, also by focusing on the liminal and public soundscape these women contribute to compose.
What art project would you like to implement in collaboration with scientists in the near future?
Once I was realizing the contemporary opera «Derrière la mer» for the Dakar Biennial in 2018 in which I mixed interviews I made to very different people with both Koranic and Biblical passages about the sea. I came up with this sentence that for me synthesized the whole work «The sea opens but it does not broke up» (La mer s’ouvre mais ne se déchire pas).
Now I would love to find a specific material which allows to leave this message hidden under the water of the Mediterranean sea, so that the sea itself could reveal this writing with its mouvements and then pick it up again. For that I would love to collaborate with scientists to choose the right material, media and methodology.
What do you think about the quarantine measures introduced, will it really affect the state of the environment or is it impossible in such a short time?
Is it possible that a virus is a product of high pollution and climate change?
Any other comments on the ecological/environmental/cultural situation nowadays of the Mediterranean.
I hope that this state of urgency helps us to be more unite and fight in order to have at least public health system and the right to the home. And also to sensibilize more and more people to rethink their ways to live together, beyond the capitalistic and patriarchal structures.
I have never felt the urgency of radical change before.
I have never felt like people around me had an urge for change.
And I have never made a list of questions I and people around me should think about…
Are we ready for a new society?
Are we ready to fight for public health?
Are we ready to fight for the right to the home?
Are we ready to fight so homes are no longer places of gendered violence?
Are we ready to become vegetarian or vegan?
Are we ready for some radical change for our salaries in order to be more equal?
Are we ready to recognize the economics worth of care?
Are we ready to rethink boundaries beyond frontiers?
Are we ready to reorganise global and local forces for a fairer society?
Are we ready to make our daily lives more sustainable?
Are we going to remember the importance of relationships ?
Are we going to respect our rhythms?
ARE WE READY TO BECOME MORE HUMAN?
That are just some of them and I am leaving you a space to add your own questions…