Synopsis
forestories
samburke+domenicodeclario
630pmseptember22/2011/thebritishschool gallery/viagramsci61roma/italia
1. home (his story)
last night like most nights she fell asleep as he was reading to her he reads to her every night the odyssey the poems of kabir sufi essays accounts of the strange lives of zen monks he watched her breathing become more regular as it aligned itself to the rhythm of his reading when they became as one he asked are you asleep? she didnt answer and so he then felt free to speak to her in ways he cannot when she’s awake he began to tell her other stories of how he feels far away from everything the far-awayness you feel when you realize how much dust has been slowly accumulating in the unobserved corners of your life’s periphery and suddenly that moment it’s turned upside down then all the reference points you’ve hung on to dissolve and the landscape of your life becomes vaster than you can contain becomes the landscape of un-belonging just like the huge dry lake back home almost in the very centre of the southern continent they both live in yes there was a vast lake here once and you can sense its presence yes there were many people here living together for thousands of years but it’s all gone all buried under endless waves of sand itself becoming over centuries and wave by wave a frozen grainy ocean but home to what? home to memory of sand or to each grain itself? he tells her how through all this perhaps because of this he’s been trying to get home again and suddenly home became her how did this happen? he wasn’t looking for a second he averted his eyes for just an instant and the universe he saw when he looked up was distinctly another other stars other gravities a lung-burning otherness
2. aspettaci (their story)
i sat down on one of the kitchen chairs someone had placed on the footpath outside her house and she came to sit next to me we talked a bit i don’t remember much of the conversation what i remember is her hands she was mending something with a needle and thread and her fingers were moving the cloth around very nimbly
‘I like those funny paintings that go all the way around the picture rail.’ ‘Yes they’re very nice’, he said and continued in the same breath to chew on his calamari whilst recounting to me, with his mouth full, the life he saw ahead for himself. I listened quietly as I looked up at the funny, colourful shapes above my head; the little blue boat made me smile
they were delicate and strong at the same time they reminded me of plants of the stalks of a long-gone species of flowers that had once resembled human hands i wanted to hold one and smell her palm i wanted to inhale the fragrance of the petals of her hands
I remember pushing the branch gently away from my face and then looking up at the grand eucalypt with its furtherest away leaves blinking in the morning sun, or was it my eyes blinking from the sunlight, I can’t remember now. ‘I don’t want to live in Italy’, I said to him that morning, ‘I want to live here, this is where I live, this is where my heart is, this is my home’
it began to rain on the afternoon we arranged to see each other for the first time i went to our agreed meeting place right by the river’s edge with my grandson both armed with umbrellas we slowly picked a bunch of wildflowers together daisies bluebells unnamed pink petals from scattered clumps that grew irreverently in patches at both ends of the iron bridge
It was so wonderful to meet you tonight’, she said ‘I feel like my life has opened up’, and she grabbed my hand in the dark car: gently squeezing it. ‘Yes, it was nice wasn’t it’, I shyly smiled. The concrete was still warm under my bare feet as I stood on the footpath holding my sandals and watched her car drive off down alfred crescent
the pearl hidden inside the shell is built from irritants from excrement from what isn’t wanted into the perfection of imperfection
She doesn’t understand what you’re saying you old fool’, but he continued to recite to me his Calabrian poems and I smiled and his brown eyes, lived in and worn with a foreign life, smiled back even if his mouth remained fixed /
i’m watching her now looking at the blue sicilian sea through the train windows as we head further and further east along the orange-grove coast towards the poor lands and cities of my father
My fingers held the final chord and I gently propped my guitar back up againstthe couch. ‘You’re Irish’ he said, his face suddenly soft and then repeated again, gently, ‘You’re Irish.’
as she rests her head against the train window her hair falls sideways and her neck is revealed in all its fragility i want to reach out to her i want to touch her hair touch her cheek but she turns and the moment instantly becomes another
Aspettaci’, she cried out from the platform as I negotiated my suitcase down the train aisle. It rang in my ears and made my heart beat loudly and the train, oblivious, pulled slowly out.
3. love (everyone’s story)
love is not eternity; nor is it the time of calendars and watches, successive time.
the time of love is neither great nor small; it is the perception of all times, of all lives, in a single instant.
it does not free us from death but makes us see it face to face; that instant is the reverse and complement of the ‘oceanic feeling’.
it is not the return to the waters of origin but the attainment of a state that reconciles us to our having been driven out of paradise.
we are the theatre of the embrace of opposites and of their dissolution, resolved in a single note that is not affirmation or negation but acceptance.
what does the couple see in the space of an instant, a blink of the eye?
the equation of appearance and disappearance, the truth of the body and the non-body, the vision of the presence that dissolves...
octavio paz
4. only a weathercast warning (her story)
on a street in the town of palermo
an old man went about on his way
when he stopped by a jewellery shop window
for something took his breath away
on a shelf in between the gold watches
a silver ring with a pearl
its beauty was that of no other
it was meant for only one girl
the bells on the door made a jingle
though the shop it was quiet as church
a man stood behind the old counter
it took him no time for the search
fifteen years I have sat by this till here
have seen many a prosperous day
but that ring has sat there asunder
always wondered who’d take it away
in his pocket it sat for the train ride
to the fishermans town cefalu’
when that night in the dark of their bedroom
by the light of a sicilian moon
she cried at its beauty
they wept in each others’ arms
fear is the anchor of duty
love is a bird of winged charm
it was only a weathercast warning
but she took to the sea anyway
did not hear artemis calling
til she took the pearl ring away
Biography
Domenico de Clario was born in Trieste, Italy, in 1947 and migrated to Australia with his family in 1956.
He studied Architecture and Town Planning at the University of Melbourne from 1966 to 1970 and was awarded an Italian Government Scholarship to study Painting at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan and lithography at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Urbino, Italy, during 1967- 68.
In 1974 he completed a Diploma of Art at the Preston Institute of Technology and in 1998 he was awarded an MA (Performance Studies) in the Faculty of Human Movement at Melbourne’s Victoria University.
In 2001 he completed a PhD in the same Faculty. This PhD project focused on the translation of Italo Calvino’s master novel ’Invisible Cities’ into a vast sound/performance work lasting 56 evenings, including the novel’s translation into English, Triestine (the Italian dialect from the region of Trieste) and a sound version whose keyboard notation system was devised by de Clario. This PhD project was awarded Victoria University’s Best Postgraduate Thesis for 2001.
From 1973 until 1996 he variously taught painting, drawing, sculpture, performance and installation at RMIT in Melbourne (previously PIT).
In 2001 he was appointed Head of the School of Contemporary Arts at Perth's Edith Cowan University as well as being appointed Associate Dean for Research and Development at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. In December 2005 he was appointed Head of the Department of Fine Arts at Monash University's Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design.
In December 2008 he was appointed Artistic and Organizational Director of Adelaide’s Australian Experimental Art Foundation, the first and most distinguished of Australia’s not-for-profit contemporary arts organizations.
Since 1966 he has held more than 200 solo exhibitions of paintings, drawings, prints, installations and sound performances, and has been invited to exhibit in more than 140 group shows presented worldwide and in major Australian cities. He has published a number of books of prose and poems as well as four compact discs of his keyboard improvisations.
He has received numerous international residencies and grants from the Australia Council, including its highest honour, the Australia Council Fellowship in 1996-8, the Paretaio Residency, Italy (1984); the New York Studio Residency at Greene Street (1991) and the Rome Studio Residency at the British School, Rome (2011).
In 1997 Domenico de Clario was awarded the Inaugural Italia Arts Award by the CO.AS.IT, celebrating the Italian community’s four major individual achievers over the previous fifty years (Business: Rino Grollo; Sport: Sergio Silvagni; Communities: Cavour Club; Arts: Domenico de Clario).
In 2005 he was commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art to re-build a version of his childhood home inside the ACCA. He and his parents inhabited this building for two weeks, inviting visitors to share both typical Triestine dishes and the de Clarios’ recollections of the migrant experience. In 2009 he was an invited finalist in Australia’s most prestigious contemporary art award, the NGV’s Clemenger Prize.
He is represented in all major public and private collections in Australia, including the MOMA in New York, as well as in numerous private collections worldwide.
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