autoterapia

The “doll with the egg in it”, a traditional Sicilian Easter sweetmeat,
has the appearance of a human figure with a whole egg set in the belly:
an image of the mother and the birth of life, according to Maurizio
Ruggiano, who elects it as a magical food for a ritual of oral incorporation,
celebrating both the original mother-child symbiosis and the subsequent
evolutionary process that, assimilating its interior qualities, passes from
dependence to independence.
It is a liberating rite – recognizing the nutritional value of mother and
introjecting it so as to maintain a balance – with which Maurizio,
in the performance that accompanies the story of the video Selftherapy,
intuitively also traces the phase of introjection, considered by
psychoanalysts an essential mechanism in a child’s development when
together with the recognition of an external reality, the maternal ghost
becomes an internal representation.
In the work the artist brings himself into play, laying bare his personal
life and offering his story to the visitor as a possible mirror. The screen
scrolls the reasons and the genesis of this exhibition, but also its artistic
and existential arrival point. As in other works on display, Maurizio
Ruggiano demonstrates his familiarity with contemporary languages
and freely mixes their repertory bending it to his own discourse. His
personal mark is the extraordinary ability to be direct and the sincerity with which he orchestrates the whole, aiming at the meaningful heart
of things.
On the screen there flows a dual stream of images, to the left accelerated
like an incessant blob, to the right in real time. On the right, the artist
performs his ritual slowly chewing mouthfuls of the female “doll”,
while his emotional story in stringent captions goes across the screen
like a healing confession: “I feed the mother – it is she who gives me
food – the father is present absent – I detach myself – … – My only
nourishment is the mother – contact with the father is useful – he tells
me his life story – I’m listening – we talk for hours – this seems to fix –
something inside – I feel insecure with others – the separation from the
father – I move away from humans – love for the mother flows – love for
the father has found other routes – sitting for hours listening – they help
me to recover lost contacts – confidence is low – but I feel the need to
hear the father – the father inside me – Broken – Broken – now I feed on
others – though with some difficulty – to be able to find affinity.”
If no word now can make up for the original absence of the father,
which marked a relational break with the world, the recognition of
otherness and hence of one’s own individuality passes through an
active relationship with the maternal food: devouring the mother is
both a tribute and liberation. As with all movements in the regime of
interiority, action indeed has a dual aspect: it simultaneously welcomes
and destroys, activating a process of transformation. On a symbolic
level, food processing corresponds to psychic change. In her text in
the catalogue, Claudia Bongiorno shows clearly how the processing or
transformation is the key word of any therapeutic process. It is also
the key word of every artistic process, which consists precisely in
transforming raw material into aesthetic discourse, even and above all
mentally.
Here, in Maurizio’s video, the discourse is based on the juxtaposition
of times and spaces, self and world: to the slow development, on the
right of the screen, of the cannibalistic ritual in the egocentric space of
the self, in the half left there corresponds the hectic flow of the world
that cannibalizes our minds every day. Images of bodies, events, sex,
struggle, power, east, west, taken from the news (from the website of
the daily newspaper La Repubblica), are dramatically superimposed,
forcing us into an almost subliminal vision. It is a continuous flow,
pellicular and with no way out, that forces us into the corner of our
inability to understand the history in which we are immersed and in
which every day we are drowning. Only the interference of a feeling, a
private emotion, can suspend and slow down this electronic tsunami,
introducing the dilation of subjective time: a long embrace of love or that
plaster cherub going round and round on the panorama of events, as
a warning and a reminder. A decontextualised fragment of a sculpture
by Benedetto Civiletti, a nineteenth-century Palermo sculptor, the infant
with a broken arm, his identification tag and his desolate carousel,
is the pendulum that marks a time of no return, perhaps the time of
an unsolved riddle. Bubbles of memory like the long sequence of a
marriage of yesteryear, that of the artist’s parents, a family story pulled
out of the drawer, investigated a thousand times to discover that secret
from which his own destiny originates.
“Continue” a voice obsessively repeats while images scroll with no
respite and on the other side of the screen the artist slowly, sometimes
defiantly, chews his sacred and apotropaic biscuit. “Continue” says the
voice: insistent as in the act of love, but also underhand in its imperative
litany, even frightening in that relentless marking of a time and of
behaviour that appear compulsive like a condemnation. Voice of a lover
and voice of a puppeteer: love and power that make the carousel of life
turn, and often paradoxically coincide pulling our threads here and there.
“Continue” what? Looking at the incomprehensible kaleidoscope of the
world, making love, eating one’s own “doll”? Remembering, suffering,
anaesthetizing, going beyond, healing? “Continue” is the sound element
that unites the two halves of the screen on which there is represented
the split between space and time, internal and external to the subject,
and finally the sense of alienation and separation between the self and
the other that Maurizio has always experienced as a result of trauma,
and which he has always tried to make up for through the bridge of art.
In the end all that is left is the egg. The maternal body having been
introjected, its vital principle and generator remains intact. In the cultural
museum of mankind the egg, a unitary form that is self-sufficient and
contains the germ of life, is the image of the essence of the world and
an ancient symbol of rebirth. On the other half of the screen too a
landing place is delineated: the idle current of events and characters
finally stops at a road junction in front of a torn poster that looks like an
old work by Rotella; in it you can glimpse the figure of Jesus and the
fragment of a love letter. Like a torn paper flag, this ‘ad’ for the sacred
mystery in divine and human relationships marks the axis of a place of
passage, a nondesc<x>ript crossroads. Without religious or devout intents,
Maurizio thus suggests to us a truth which is simple but is ignored,
which lives in the folds of daily life, and does not defend from care but withstands in spite of the tears and the wounds. Perhaps naive, disarming.
Love as a hope-principle, the only key to being there, in the uncertain
region “where art ends, where life begins.”