In her work, artist, choreographer, dancer and writer Simone Forti channels the subversive elemental forces of freedom and spontaneity. Born in Florence in 1935, she fled soon after with her family to the United States to escape the rise of anti-Semitism. Very active on the New York scene of the 1960s, she escapes easy categorization as one of the pioneers of American postmodern dance.
It was in the late 1960s that Forti rekindled its relationship with Italy, thanks in part to the efforts of Fabio Sargentini, owner of Galleria L’Attico in Rome. In the “Distant Lands” exhibition, different expressive languages – drawing, writing, video, sound – touch on this link, the invisible thread between the two countries so dear to the artist.
The exhibition presents twelve drawings from the “News Animations” series, 1985-. For these, Forti commemorated the 1983 death of his father, an indefatigable reader of daily newspapers, by skimming through newspapers, improvising selected incidents to create a body of work that explores the potential of language by transforming it into a graphic performative movement. Humans, animals, landscapes, barely implied in black or colored graphite on paper, evoke worlds charged with meaning, but also its negation.
Pure performative work returns in the ten-minute video, News animation: the Getty Center, 2004, which shows Forti dancing with and against raw canvases painted with stars and stripes, an overriding American flag. On a wall, the three large video projections Weeding: Simone’s Garden, Weeding: Steve and Lisa’s Garden 1, And Weeding: Steve and Lisa’s Garden 2 (all 2019) document the softness that the artist brings to the earth and to nature. In his hands, the act of uprooting invasive species becomes a metaphor for a universal catharsis of ugliness that is rapidly overtaking humanity.
Translated from the Italian by Marguerite Shore.
