AICHI TRIENNALE

Aichi Art Center, curated by Jochen Voltz and Pier Luigi Tazzi, Nagoya, Japan, 2010.

“Michelangelo Consani has always focused on that History that might be defined as other than official History, and that manifests itself above all as tension, vital movement, both at the individual level – the individual as a part-unit of a set to which it belongs – and on the collective level, through a sort of spontaneous, sympathetic induction from individual to individual or group.

His project for the Aichi Triennale 2010, that has the thematic subtitle Arts and Cities, has to do with rural culture, more by counterpoint than by contrast.

The total environment created is composed by three works with distinct yet similar titles: the Japanese original,Shizen noho-wara ippon no kakumei, title of one of the books of Masanobu Fukuoka, inventor and passionate exegete of shizen noho, a sort of natural agriculture, as opposed to the agrarian science of the West, and its translations in English and Italian.

La rivoluzione del filo di paglia: the wall in front of the main entrance of the room is entirely occupied by the looped projection of a short sequence from the neo-realist film by the Italian director Giuseppe De Santis Riso amaro, 1949: the start of planting on a rice farm in the Vercellese area. The projector on the floor makes the shadows of visitors enter into a relationship with the figures and images in the film.

The One-Straw Revolution: at the center of the right wall, from floor to ceiling, visitors see the star map of the northern skies. In place of the stars, photographs taken from the Internet show environments, practices and personalities of the agricultural world from around the planet, and from the entire era after the invention of the camera.

Shizen noho-wara ippon no kakumei: in the corner to the left of the main entrance the sculpture, in raw clay, of a bust, representing Fukuoka. From the body catnip sprouts emerge, planted using a method popularized by Fukuoka himself.”

Pier Luigi Tazzi