Simone Cametti's research is based on a pragmatic and artisanal conception of artistic making, which is developed through operational interventions on the subject and the context within which it acts. Not the desire to retract or refer to the surrounding reality, but to tamper with it, causing a sob, a glitch that interrupts the flow of habitual perception and induces a pause. Cametti continues his work for actions, which, in his words: "They are not performances, because the performance has a bearing on theater and communication, which interest me little. They are actions, because I want them to act, just as the sculptor performs actions to change the material are actions ”.
These translate into multimedia and organic projects that seem to develop by budding from each other, linked by constant attention to the fundamental themes of nature, landscape, mineral and organic materials, space and its occupation. These actions are followed by a formalization of the work in the form of a photographic image, video, sculpture or installation, which documents the process of transformation and its persistence over time.
THE DROP BY SIMONE CAMETTI
He doesn't seem to give it too much thought. He doesn't like to talk about what he does, but when it happens he sometimes smiles, saying that it has now become a search for strange ways to risk his life, that ideas come to him by looking at the wall and that he thinks about titles for months.
He looks like a plumber or an electrician, in any case not an intellectual, so much so that his actions are made up of such elementary operations as to leave one speechless. He does things.
A few days ago he entered for the last time, after months of incursions through the window, into an abandoned building in Rome, one of many. He collected all the neon found and connected them in seven blocks with circuit breakers. Then he turned them on. At two in the morning, first one, then the other and so on until the last one. After a few minutes the overload tripped the switches and the lights went out. Nine floors of black in which, without any warning, a light appears, grows and then disappears again. Like a shooting star, a fireball in fact, like the title of the action. If there was no documentation, who would believe they saw it? It could have been a hallucination, a dream or a miracle.
In 2017 he worked on the figure of Tina Allori, a singer from the 1930s who wrote the wonderful song "Potessi revivere la mia vita". After some research she went to Norway, to Larvik, to the quarry from which the marble of Tina's tombstone comes, lovingly chosen by her husband, and there she made her song resonate, in that immense and deserted space. The most beautiful secular prayer that can be dedicated to a person. Wherever the object that establishes and certifies your end comes from, I bring your desire not to end, as if leaving the circle a moment before it closes.
Simone Cametti was invited to Borca di Cadore in 2015 for a residency project by Dolomiti Contemporanee. In the Eni colony, now abandoned and wanted by Enrico Mattei, Simone went with his family and did what no one would have done but which everyone knew was necessary. He redid the water, gas and electricity connections and went on holiday there with his camper, partner and children. At the academy, where he teaches, they ask him: "So taking holidays is art?". He sighs. He returned a place to its purpose, giving it back that simple human presence that he had been asking for for a long time.
Then he paints landscapes. He actually paints them. Since 2013, almost alone, she has been climbing the mountains with a camper loaded with water tanks, a water diffuser and plant paint (?!) to restore the greenery of the Apennine meadows that the summer sun has taken away from them. The resulting photos are perplexing. They seem like a joke. They are landscape photos. Stop. Beautiful, yes, but they are just landscape photos. Simone took the time that no one would take, with the photo editing and post production techniques now available. One click would be enough to have a beautiful "natural" green and a perfectly plausible image, but he wants to see the birth of that green again, that the color be that of the grass when it is fresh, giving back to photography that dignity as an imprint of reality that had at the origin and which has now faded away. It is a very tiring and imperceptible gesture, perhaps even more tiring for this reason, because the outcome is so fragile and natural that it does not even grant him the satisfaction of saying "what a great thing I have done!".
At the 2015 Expo he chewed a honeycomb for hours, ingesting such a quantity of honey that he risked a glycemic crisis, to take some wax out of his mouth to make six candles. To the work and sacrifice of the bees, which collect pollen and create matter, he adds his own, so that that possibility is not lost, so that that power becomes act, light and heat. A gesture so primordial as to be almost incomprehensible. And the work of the bees is always at the center of the action on the route of the battle of Montecassino. A place full of history and painful emptiness, in which Simone wanted to place a small and imperceptible sign of reconstruction by installing a honeycomb and its colony of bees in an open glass case, a small people dedicated to building a community, which with the its subtle and buzzing action fertilizes the territory all around. Invisible and necessary.
In Europe Moon, which earned him the Terna Award in 2014, placed photos of two frozen lakes side by side, one in Abruzzo and one in New Hampshire, and added earphones to each with a recording. Having found the frozen lake, he did what anyone would do. He started throwing rocks on it. And from the earphones you can hear the sound of the stones hitting the surface in the water. A work of almost offensive simplicity. What idiot would climb onto the surface of a frozen lake, ignoring the thickness of the ice, to make holes in it, put microphones in it to record the noise in the water of the stones you throw on it? Who would risk a swim in a frozen lake just for this? Not even him, if he didn't sense that those sounds are the echo of a life that that surface asks for, that anyone who looks at a surface desires and hopes for. A presence like that of a fish that breaks the surface of dawn and reminds you in an instant of a world that exists even without you.
In 2013, for some reason, he entered the cemetery of Ascoli Piceno, at night, went towards the columbaria with the lights lit and began to turn them off, leaving only some of them lit. He leaves, comes back after months and composes, with the candles left lit, incontrovertibly, the word LOVE. It took months to find that word, so simple, so natural and terrifying that it was always pronounced with difficulty. He brought her back there, where she watches over her memory, in the darkness and silence. Some photos remain.
In 2012 at the Colonna Castle in Genazzano, on the pedestrian bridge that leads to the complex, he began, armed with a hose, mallet and chisel, to remove some cobblestones on the edge line. Then he relocated them a little further inside the roadway, leaving a morse message: SOS. He interrupted a stasis, creating a discontinuity making it what it is, a cry for help.
His actions are crossed by an insistent and imperceptible push, like the drops that dig the karst subsoil, unstoppable and very delicate, that insistent and ineliminable vital pulsation that beats under our time, the desire that life and being happen again and show themselves, and be part of it. A continuous work under our work, a drop that digs into the ground, crosses the geological layers and before falling leaves a trace that forms a magnificent stalactite that is only there for those who want to go and look in depth.
But the really curious thing is that he defines himself as a sculptor. I once told him that I realized how the effort of my work was partly supported by the image of a result that I sensed and glimpsed, relying on something material and persistent, comforting because it was tangible, and I asked him how he lived the what, if and why he did performances, and if they really were, because they didn't even seem like it.
He told me: “They are not performances, because performance has a connection with theater and communication, which are of little interest to me. They are actions, because I want them to act, just as those that a sculptor performs to change the material are actions"
Then I said: “Yes, but what modification is it? It lasts very little, it is practically inconsistent. What do they change?”
And so he: “They change me”
Alberto Montorfano
Nix, Francesca Antonini Arte contemporanea, Roma, curated by Daniela Lancioni, 2023
Ochre Yellow, Montoro 12 Gallery, Bruxelles, 2022
PRIMITIVO, Shazar Gallery, curated by Valentina Muzzi, Napoli, 2021
4.500 Gradi Kelvin, with a text by Lorenzo Balbi, Francesca Antonini Arte Contemporanea, Roma, 2020
OH BE A FINE GIRL, KISS ME, Galleria NContemporary, Milano, 2020
TINA, Auditorium park of Music in Rome / MACRO, Rome
Greenit, Gallery Francesca Antonini contemporary art, Rome - Propoli, Galleria il Segno, Rome
6 candles, expo 2015, Feeding the planet energy for life, Milan
5
artists in 5 acts, Viterbo
Anthropocene, Gallery Riccardo Crespi, Milan
Honeycombs, “Path of the battle” Abbey of Montecassino, Cassino
Nell'acqua capisco, the 55° International Art Exhibition Venice Biennale, Collateral Event
Start, Saatchi Gallery, London
Art is Real, Piazza Pasquino, Rome
It is not easy/Non è facile, Spazio Fandango Incontro, Rome
Ostrale 013, International Austellung, Zeitgenössischer Künste, Dresda (D)
Ente Comunale di Consumo, National Gallery of Cosenza Palazzo Arnone, Vittoriano Monumental Complex, Rome.