FALKE PISANO (EDITION II)

Chillida (Forms & Feelings)
Falke Pisano's lecture-performances, text-based video's, objects and photocopied publications are the elements of a body of work that is distinctly induced by a practice of writing. Although mainly text-based, Pisano's work displays a strong concern with the existence and features of concrete objects, and in particular abstract concrete objects.

Using language as a means to re-think the potential of abstraction, sculpture and artistic practice she activates the abstract sculpture as a thought-generating principle and employs the idea of the instable, transforming and disintegrating object as a way to address issues concerning object-qualities, form, construction and engagement.

Chillida (Forms & Feelings) is a personal account of Pisano's emotional reaction on the series of photographs taken by David Finn of sculptures by the Basque sculptor Chillida. While going through the pages of the photo-book Falke Pisano tries to trace the relationship between the characteristics of these specific objects, their depiction, the experience of the photographer and his daughter and her own preoccupations concerning existential matters and her emotional response.

(fragment) (...) Yes, it lies at first closer to sensation than to feeling. A wide curved arm stretches itself and I feel the sensation of the matter that is a concrete form in space. Two arms embrace space – I do not exactly experience a specific emotion but I am propelled into the awareness of my own existential disposition, which is not so much defined. I do not want to avoid this awareness, but I can’t really do so much with it. When my feeling is directed towards this state of existential awareness, it is not becoming any more specific, it rather dissolves into one fuzzy cloud of undetermined feeling, although there is a strong sense of direction and relation to it. (...)

(...) I looked again at the sculptures and slowly I started to suspect something else was going on. I couldn’t deny I was not getting anywhere in my descriptions of my feelings. Whenever I tried to become more specific it seemed like I lost the most important element of my affection. When focusing on separate elements of the sculptures, in order to articulate what their role was in the general affection I felt, something seemed to be slipping away. (...)