“L’erba Cattiva (l’an mor mai)” is a group performance that draws inspiration from some timeless images and words, for their subversive charge, from Aeschylus’ Oresteia and especially from the figure of the Furious Furies, “that baleful offspring of the night” that also symbolizes the indomitability of wild nature. Rebellious figures that are difficult to pin down. Enigmatic and mysterious presences as were the parade performers who burst into the center of the 2015 Santarcangelo Festival on Saturday, July 18.

Pasolini in “Appunti per un’ Orestiade africana” associates the Furies or Erinyes with the huge trees, shaken by the wind, of the African forest.

“The Furies are unrepresentable under the human aspect and so I would decide to represent them under a non-human aspect. These trees, for example, lost in the silence of the forest, monstrous, somehow, and terrible. The terribleness of Africa is its solitude, the monstrous forms that nature can take there, the deep, fearful silences. The irrationality is animal.  The Furies are the goddesses of man’s animal moment. “*

Starting from this metaphor, Andreco designed the symbols and the entire iconography of the parade “L’erba cativa,” which was entirely staged during the Go Deep workshop, coordinated with Motus, at the former Astoria cinema in Rimini, in late June. Go deep was an intense participatory journey, articulated in ten days of collective work, which involved thirty-five boys and girls mostly belonging to the Romagnolo territory and coming from various artistic backgrounds. An indelible experience that generated the birth of a new collective of artists “Godeepers,” who will continue to act independently in the territory, also in view of the reopening of the former Cinema in Rimini, closed for 10 years.

The parade began in the Capuchin Park, with the shaking of the foliage of trees and bushes (spontaneous hawthorns and poplars) to end in the Sferisterio of the city of Santarcangelo after passing through the entire historic center. The parade creates an imaginary link between the natural space (the grove of the Capuchin Park) and the center of the city (the pavement of Ganganelli Square). The whole route was accompanied by an experimental noise soundtrack, alternating with various cut-ups of texts and recordings of nature sounds, composed by the musicians of the collective and broadcast by 4 self-made portable speakers. There were several stops, with lightning-fast performances: among them the “taking of the City Bell” on which were hoisted two banners depicting black bush branches and a leaf crossed with a knife, as “new natural weapons.” The mysterious procession reached Ganganelli Square to create a powerful collective image connected to the “Illegal Hawthorn” installation: a tripod suspending in the air a green cloud formed by some hawthorn plants, a native plant for which planting has recently been strictly forbidden because it carries a virus called “firestorm” that damages fruit plants (pear, apple, peach) for which an exemption on the law was obtained for only the 10 days of the festival. In this way, the parade symbolically united this illegal and banned plant with its sisters, which, paradoxically, grow wild a short distance away in the Capuchin forest. Upon arrival at the ballpark, the final act of performer Ondina Quadri was to burn a flag of the twenty painted by Andreco, depicting a cloud. The burning cloud, amid rising sounds, accompanied the last words of the parade: a quote from the Oresteia translated by Pasolini.

How to explain that we have broken the chain that makes the Past a source of certainty,

The certainty with which we are satiated and insatiable.

The certainty that from the depths of the centuries gives reason to every moment act of the city;

The certainty that saves us from scandal….

A certainty that feeds on cowardice, mediocrity and ferocity.

But what good is a certainty based on terror? “**

“You will never have us!”

Participating in Godeep were: Damiano Bagli, Simona Baro, Emiliano Battistini, Lucia Benegiamo, Carlotta Borasco, Iolanda Di Bonaventura, Viola Domeniconi, Julia Filippo, Francesca Fioraso, Diego Giannettoni, Francesca Giuliani, Kage, Biagio Laponte, Ileana Longo Goffo, Mattia Guerra, Valentina Marini, Francesca Macrelli, Federico Magli, Beatrice Monti, Filippo Moretti, Lucia Mussoni, Sara Oliva, Gianluca Panareo, Ondina Quadri, Caterina Paolinelli, Elena Ramilli, Sofia Rossi, Maria Giulia Terenzi, Michela Tiddia, Valentina Zangheri, Martina Zena.

The audio of the parade produced by the musicians in the workshop is a ‘combination of experimental sound research, concrete music and recordings of voices and sounds of nature made to resonate in the city. The audio was broadcast through self-built experimental portable systems. The audio was later narrated in an online album named [ GoDEEP [WHERE LIGHT AND DARKNESS CLASH] – Original Soundtrack.

*12. P.P. PASOLINI, Appunti per un’Orestiade africana, in Pasolini per il Cinema, cit, vol. I, p.1183.

** P.PASOLINI ORESTEA of ESCHILO.

Andreco is a Roman artist living in Bologna. PhD in Environmental Engineering, he has conducted post-doctoral research on the environmental benefits of green technologies in urban areas (University of Bologna and Columbia University, New York). Since 2000, in parallel with his scientific training, he has been pursuing his artistic research, using different techniques and media, installations, murals and public art, developing the central theme of the relationship between urban space and natural landscape, and between man and the environment in all its forms. Andreco has participated in exhibitions and festivals internationally. In the last year (2014-2015) Andreco made the Vecchione of Bologna, the twelve-meter sculpture that burns in the square to usher in the New Year, the solo exhibition “From Clouds to Rocks” at Traffic Gallery in Bergamo, participated in the exhibition “Urban Legends” at the MACRO Testaccio Museum in Rome, the exhibition “the Collapse of Entropy” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lissone (MI) curated by Alberto Zanchetta, at the Public Art Festival “Nuart” in Norway, at Artefiera in Bologna, at the project investigations on Extreme Lands in Leuca curated by GAP and Ramdom, was selected for Videoart Year Book of the Visual Arts Department of the University of Bologna and the symbolic image of Bolognaestate 2015 the summer cultural program of the municipality. In 2013 Andreco participated in “Open in Painting” curated by Gianluca D’inca Levis for Dolomiti Contemporanee, made a permanent sculpture at the Wilhelmsburg park in Hamburg for the “Unkraut, Dockville Kunst Camp” and a permanent mural painting in Piedmont for “Fermenti Musei.” he made the mural painting “The Philosophycal tree” for the “Frontier” festival organized by the Municipality of Bologna, sponsored by the MamBo museum and curated by Claudio Musso and Fabiola Naldi. In 2011 he exhibited at the “Nosphere gallery” in New York with the solo exhibition “Contemporary alchemy, the relations between the humans and the nature.”

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