Meeting with Giuseppe Mongiello, at the first public occasion, an activity of the Van-Up Association of which he is the President, was an opportunity to learn about his artistic research and his vision on the social role of art.
From the title of the Workshop, organized at the Sacristy of the Church of San Nicola di Bari in Catona di Ascea (SA), iCON #1 La Fonte-Giardino che abita il Monte, shows the need to interpret the meaning and symbolism of the Sacred Mountains of Cilento by comparing the different theological, superstitious, and mythical legends. Proposing to create a route to the Order of the Discalced Carmelites, to the community that houses the Sanctuary of Mount Carmel where there was an anthropological experiment with 15 participants, from the very young to the elderly. A holy process has been self-reconstructed similar to that of the rural areas: the object made of semi-processed material, as part of a ritual, on 16 July, it was blessed by the parish priest Don Filippo, and distributed to their writers.
The speeches about these criteria are defined by Giuseppe Mongiello as Time-Specific, a neologism that sums up how the approach of his art, when it relates to an area where the people must go beyond the effort of Esserci (being), coherently to the landscape that welcomes it, to the beliefs and specific characteristics of a community, and knowing how to respect its deadlines. Only in this way can art, according to him, coincide with the ceremony.
The sacred space that art is capable of generating must remain open to any type of judgment, from popular to elitist, and face the sharpness of dogmas through the fragility of a popular philosophy, veiling itself by revealing itself. A form of “con-divisible” symbolism. Giuseppe Mongiello, who grew up in extra-academic humus, from conceptual to vernacular art, was started with Fiber Art through field research alongside the architect and textile expert Maria Pasqui, in Southeast Asia and India. He later specialized in the manufacture of pendulum spun yarns, extraction, cold-dyeing and vertical loom weaving at the Museo del Bisso di Chiara Vigo in Sant’Antioco (SU). After the meeting and his participation in Helen Mirra’s project, Incomparable Standard (Kunst Merano Arte, Andriesse Eyck Gallery Amsterdam, Large Glass Gallery London) decided to concentrate his artistic adventure in a canvas through the textile medium and investigate possible theoretical/practical applications.
From that moment on, his background of site-specific installations, ephemeral and environmental art, meets the domestic, votive, weaving dimension and his works begin to draw on and be inspired by domestic altars, which from afar, and slowly, take to resemblance to those he has known in his homeland: Cilento. The artist is then able to reconstruct the sacred space because it has always coincided with the domestic one and consequently the expectation of inspiration also corresponds to that of his return home, and creation with prayer. Facing the Byzantine iconography, inherited from the aesthetic experience of the Basilian Monks, the sacred geography, Sacra dei Monti delle Sette Sorelle, and the respective cultures and stories that interest them have represented for the VAN-UP association a source rich in knowledge, from the popular to those of the Eleate thinkers, to grow even if in an invisible way, a social monument made up of small targeted and specific interventions.
Rosita Taurone