Aperçues
Book published by Allemandi Editore
We focus meticulously on the invisible and do so not only by pursuing the paths of phantasmagoria but also that of luminescence. As we strive to make sense of things, to establish what comes first and what afterwards, not only do we have an information overload to manage but also the appearance of something that is there but is not. Our attention is drawn to this unreasonable condition. Every time we seek to lend shape to it and to weave our storylines around the invisible, we pause at a discrepancy – between presence and absence. Our first reference is what exists, and perhaps only partially, on the borderline of clarity. So, our efforts are steered in several phases via the interception of something that falls midway between the arcane and the luminous.
Not of the now. One might say that even this first inadequate reconstruction can only be nothing more than an imperfect attempt to employ words to successfully convey something that naturally escapes us. That is it. However, along with language, in itself one way of doing things, human industriousness also highlights shortcomings and potential. This flawed state underpins the poetic of Nina Carini who wonders as much about the concentration of illusions accompanying the invisible as about the fine threads that naturally reconnect it to the plane of reality and the imaginative susceptibility that distinguishes it.
Implausible
Long before an absence, it is a presence that guides..
Proximity to substance
Long before an absence, it is a presence that guides Carini in the development of her works. The proximity to insubstantiality is simply a fleeting movement within a creative process that demands we bear in mind light and shadow, solids and voids, the concrete and the intangible. Let us take sound, a recurring subject in her work. For Carini this is both a fact determined by the presence of a material accessed via dynamic relations, namely the vibrations received by the hearing organ, and a matter of proximity to substance. There is something. I feel its presence. I can even hear the noise it makes. The two pathways of presence and absence – not at all distant from that primigenial and liminal condition of the invisible – reveal what then becomes the most significant focus of Carini’s investigations: irregular sound. More than distorted, in its language
form sound may encounter levels of alteration that bring out other intermediary ones, characterised at times by shortcomings and other times by possibility. I do not understand. What I am hearing is not clear. These words seem to be telling me something like… We would express ourselves so, because Carini works on sound to try and convey what might be a point of no return that it reaches in the attempt to conserve its form. We understand some of the words but there seems to be no meaningful phrase. Implausible. That buzz ought to mean something but the whole escapes us. It seems so but might be otherwise. There, we are right in the middle of an experience with the presence of sound and more precisely a disconnect that may belong to language, even when it is the fruit of an effort to produce coherent meaning.
Implausible
Long before an absence, it is a presence that guides..
Implausible
Being partial these meanings may be preserved from one word to another but not enable us to obtain a discursive structure that is complete, comprehensible and describable. Something does not work. So do we throw it all away? No. Carini suggests we focus on that intermediate zone, not at all different from the fine line between presence and absence, which for both the invisible and sound enables us to identify unexpected elements, missing vocabulary, unripe images and airy scenarios. She sees that intermediate zone as the place for poetry. The spectre is followed by chaos. The question that recurs with a pressing need for clarification is the same one that steers our relationship with reality: what is there? We endeavour to lend order and steer ourselves towards a meaning. Yet, we should move away from that first achievement as if it were none other than a temporary haven. Let us continue our search. Carini sees this as trying to come as close to the meaning as possible, despite admitting to being steered by outdatedness. That of the sound, the materials and self.
Davide Dal Sasso
Book published by Allemandi Editore, 2023