MARCO BAGNOLI – ROTAZIONE APPARENTE
@ 2013 Una produzione EMA Canticae – Marco Bagnoli
Apparent rotation / a scenic work
by Giuliano Serafini
In one of the finest books in contemporary literature – Le Roi des Aulnes [The Erl-King] by Michel Tournier – the hero is shown a gyroscope: “It is the key to the absolute”, he is told,“having the power to escape the motion of the earth. And just for this reason, it seems to turn. In reality instead, we are spinning around it …What you feel in your hands is the immobility of the gyroscope opposed by the rotation of the earth in which you are entrained”. Scientifically speaking, apparent rotation does not exist. There exists only stasis, apparent
immobility. Of both paradoxes – which are really only one – Léon Foucault with his pendulum has given, as we know, the ultimate demonstration.
Through empathy that is both mental and mystical, Bagnoli has always operated alongside the hermeneutical processes of science, aware that his field of action remains that of the hypothesis, the empirical visionary, the insinuation of uncertainties there where we could expect truth, achievements to be definitively consigned to mankind. A Wanderer artist by instinct and vocation, Bagnoli is the simulator of obscure laws of physics. He is an agnostic scientist who does not assume the veracity of his cognitive research, but
“demonstrates” it in mythopoeic manner. To science he leaves the part of the Stone Guest, the passive yet vigil presence, ready to step in if needed.
The geographic orientation that is for Bagnoli a ritual of initiation tracing a circular path, attempts here the vaster scale of the astronomical dimension. Here the cardinal points prefigured by the quincunx pattern, according to the mathematical mysticism of the Pythagoreans, are indicated by four fishing-rods set soaring in space by the artist, now become a cosmic fisherman.
A fisher of stars, as has been said; in this case, of the Leonidas comets streaking out of the sidereal abyss to announce the autumn season. The artist raises his fishing-rods to join them in alchemistic combination with a jewel whose vertebral structure is inspired by the ancient sextant of the Polynesian mariners. But this is only a mise-en-scène of orientation. In reality, as written in the Sefer Hechaloth of the Kabbalah, there exist no physical directions to be taken – neither up nor down, east nor west, inside nor outside, “because in the cosmos everything is moving”.