“A horse doesn’t know what to do with art”, glosses the introduction to The other RAVE (Quodlibet 2023), a precious volume that documents one of the most important collective experiences of environmental art in recent decades, not only in Italy, let it be said straight away. In the form of a conversation with Isabelle and Tiziana Pers, the founders of the East Village Artist Residency (RAVE) in lower Udinese, the book retraces a dozen years, in images and words, of an experience that can be defined as a work of collective art in search of a new way of relating to the animal world. In their overwhelming ability to involve different individuals, institutions, places, sensibilities and species, the Pers sisters have thus given life to a phenomenon capable of bringing art and nature truly back on the same level, not through cliché or affectation, but through a radical act of overcoming the speciesist vision that nourishes the Anthropocene. Starting from the names of the artists involved in the residencies at RAVE and reported in the volume – from Tomás Saraceno to Regina José Galindo, from Adrian Paci to Liliana Moro, from Diego Perrone to Giuseppe Stampone – one cannot help but be amazed by the quality, relevance and internationality taken from this independent experience. Over the years its reflection has reached institutions such as the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, the Triennale and the PAC in Milan, the MAXXI and the Macro in Rome, Villa Manin in Friuli; and then, beyond the border, she arrived at the Jeu de Palme in Paris, at the Film Festival in Rotterdam, at the MSUM in Ljubljana, at the Pixelache Helsinki Festival, at the One Night Stand Gallery in Sofia. They are names and institutions that testify to the pervasiveness of this artistic experience, the bridges it has been able to build between people and places, the connections it has created between humans and animals.
But the relevance of the RAVE experience, as for all artistic residencies, is measured in the quality of the works produced – their existential reflection, the intrinsic grammar, the external reflection – and not only in the activated circuits, made up of participants, places and institutions . In this sense, the dialogic proceeding of the book edited by Daniele Capra and Nico Covre proves useful and essential to gradually bring out the evolution of the debate within the group of artists who built and constituted RAVE. The different contributions of the artists are therefore perfectly linked in residence from 2011 to today, almost as if they were chapters of a single narrative. In this story it is amazing to discover how having lived on the RAVE farm, together with the numerous animals saved over the years from the slaughterhouse by Tiziana Pers, was a powerful stimulus for artists of solid international fame. Only by reconstructing the birth and the discussion within RAVE can we understand at what moment the woman-horse relationship became the subject of Inside the Circle (2011) by Paci; or how a flock of sheep fed the performance The black oveja (2014) by Galindo; or even for a dog to cross the two-channel video Do animals dream about freedom (2017) by Igor Grubić. In fact, these are works that have become central in the creative path of these artists, not venial sins or occasional products, and would be unthinkable without the relationships built during the experience at RAVE, also and above all with its animal participants.
Yet, the artistic relevance is perhaps overestimated, the book itself suggests. Returning to its incipit, moreover, the purpose of RAVE is clearly stated. Can a horse care about art or who makes it? Could a horse ever be interested in an art that makes animals its object of reflection? The answer, of course, is negative. In fact, not even a goat would know what to do with art or artists. And so it is for a donkey, for a sheep and even for a chicken. Coincidentally, the names of these species in our ordinary language have become epithets that we humans, from the height of a proud and contemptuous attitude, attach to beings considered inferior: beings at our mercy, about whose feelings and rights we don’t care in the slightest. Rather, they live according to us, in good times and in bad. Whether they are cute meme kittens or simple cannon fodder, animals are nothing more than our sentimental projection or, conversely, a food introjection. Precisely to strenuously fight this last fatal fate, without incurring the consolatory refuge of cuteness animal, the Pers sisters started RAVE. They didn’t intend to explain art to a goat, rather they wanted the goat to explain art, relationships, nature, existence itself to them. And the hope was that he would do it with all the artists brought to that farm, so as to cause a reversal of perspective on animal nature. On the other hand, the term RAVE derives precisely from the reversed initials of East Village Artist Residency, so much so that from the beginning the idea of subverting the concept of artistic residency was evident, in which the animals instead relate to the artists.
Unfortunately, there is little space dedicated to the significant artistic experiences of the Pers sisters derived from RAVE, such as the collective work on the memory of Isabella’s water or Tiziana’s practices of bartering the lives of animals destined for slaughter. They deserve a volume in themselves. On the other hand, there was no space in this book and, in truth, dedicating it to it would have distracted the attention that the Pers sisters themselves placed with RAVE on the perspective of animals. They are the true protagonists of this artistic story: the horse Chico, patiently recovered from the abuses suffered in the high riding schools; the donkey Toni Romeo, saved directly from the farm before being sold by weight of meat and heartened by the sound of literature; the dog Björk, who explores the environments of an abandoned slaughterhouse as the only animal to have ever made it out alive; the goat Pedro, who became an indivisible companion of Perrone and his games with the children. Precisely for this reason, at the center of everything in the volume – literally and editorially – there are them, the animals saved by Tiziana over the years and free to live on the farm with Isabella. All of them, not one less, and each with their own unique features designed by the Pers sisters, just as one usually portrays one’s dearest loved ones. The cow Ugola, the rabbits Alice and Chantal, the sow Lorelei, the goose Caterina, the cat Cesare, the hen Fiammetta, the goat Dina, the rooster Pasquale, the dog Heidi, and many others. Giving a name and a face to your animal companions means individualizing them and is the only way to give weight to our relationship with the animal world.
In short, entwined in our technological torpor, perhaps more than pondering whether androids dream of electric sheep, we should worry that real sheep do not feel fear and pain, that their rights and aspirations are guaranteed. As Tiziana Pers underlines in an exchange with Daniele Capra, radicalism is needed. He probably won’t save the (animal) world, but he will have set a good example and many will follow him. Finally, with regard to the limited scope of the History of Art – the one with a capital initial, yet insignificant compared to the question of animality – at least it can be indicated that in Friuli in the 1910s of the new millennium two artist sisters opened a unparalleled path at European level. When the new manuals are written, thanks to them Italian art will not find itself in the all too frequent position of subordination or delay. For future reference, this volume – a precious treasure chest of dialogues, photos and drawings – fortunately keeps track of the exciting RAVE experience. We really needed Isabella and Tiziana, Capra and Covre.
Goat, there’s nothing to say, nomen omen.
Daniele Capra, Nico Covre (ed.), The other RAVE: East Village Artist Residency, Quodlibet, Macerata 2023; 248 pp., colour, ISBN 978-88-229-2097-3, €23
