The Sun is also a star
by Agata Polizzi
Stefania Galegati Shines’ research has always left me with a feeling that she looks at the world the same way children do — with a mixture of curiosity and purity.
Like them, not without fear yet with much respect, she also recounts incredibly great stories, always choosing to step one foot outside of it, so that she can take a better look at it. Whether the focus is on single individuals, human rights or contemporary history, Galegati Shines never searches for the truth — she rather asks questions and looks for answers. Having lived in many places and probably many lives, she remains completely detached and is able to look at obvious facts with the same depth used for things that shatter your existence.
Modalità Aereo (“Airplane Mode”), her latest personal exhibition at Francesco Pantaleone arts gallery, brings her back to Milan allowing for a moment of reflection on the Italian artist’s poetics, also with regards to her twenty-year international career.
She keeps casting a critical eye over our society and its cultural practices — her narrative is often deprived of the facts, and returned with brilliant, unconventional solutions, from a perspective that looks “through the back door”, as she likes to describe it.
She lingers on details that nobody can see or wants to see, and on the inconvenience of confronting yourself with situations in their minor aspects or in their grey zones.
The artworks on display in Modalità Aereo are very different one from another; each one is a trace of the artist’s past: her long stay in a complex city such as Palermo, her recent experience with the Caffè Internazionale, cultural battles, the maturity of a forty-year-old woman, the motherhood, the relationship with her students, her all-time doubts.
Hers is a complex and somewhat sad story that is being narrated with irony, but also with an awareness that makes it more consistent.
In Torno subito (I’ll be right back) — the sculpture made of recovered materials — she synthesizes a pretty common bad habit among southern Italians, namely their claim to use public spaces for private purposes. Galegati Shines re-uses these materials that everyday occupy the streets of the city’s working-class areas and serve as barricades to reclaim non-existing properties. And she does it only to highlight the beauty of a creative act that reverses the urban decay.
It’s an invitation not to stop, but to go on and keep dreaming.
The sculpture is echoed by Palermo Scupltures #1 -7, drawings on food-wrapping paper, which illustrate unlikely sculptures thrown together by the people as preparatory notes. Years of observation and image collections resulted in an archival work that is not only made of visual elements but especially of common tales of ordinary anarchy.
Foro Italico is the perfect “postcard” for Palermo — a powerful, visionary and poetic work. Galegati Shines chooses one of the city’s most historic trees which grow on the seafront — a mighty rubber fig (Ficus elastica) — and cuts a light hole out of its green and lightweight foliage, without hurting it, thus creating a round window through which you can catch a glimpse of the sky.
From this imaginary window, you can see the harbour, shipyard cranes, church roofs; you can hear the city buzz, and then there is the majestic, impressive Mount Pellegrino, overlooking the sea since ever.
In this view there is hope and disenchantment, there is love and anger. There is humanity.
Her works in Milan are also influenced by her experience with the Caffè Internazionale, an international café that was created by Stefania Galegati Shines and Darrell Shines, and that livened up the city atmosphere for two years, giving artists, musicians, intellectuals and friends an underground place of cultural production — totally free but also fragile and uncontaminated. After closing it because of her own free will last July, she revived its memory through an installation of objects from the café, as physical evidence of a place in her soul.
Last but not least, Palette#1 (Sofonisba), the work that more than any other expresses the meaning of being a woman and her personal maturity. Stefania Galegati Shines reduces the hatching lines to single pixels, which in this particular case are based on the colour palette used in Santa Maria dell’Itria (a Baroque-style church in Ragusa, Sicily) and created by the painter Sofonisba Anguissola early in the XVII century.
This minimal line art enshrines all the urgency of a choice, a gesture made by someone who does not need to show off but rather for the sake of reaching higher states of beingness.
An infinitesimal tile that generates a bigger mosaic — minimal yet powerful enough to define itself.
But who was Sofonisba? Born in Cremona, she was a renowned painter, a well-educated, determined and unscrupulous person, admired by men, beloved by Van Dyck. In 1573 she married the nobleman Fabrizio Moncada — this is how she discovered Sicily, where she remained for a long time despite the vicissitudes, and where she eventually died.
From a very far past with pretty difficult times, her unique story retraces the history of everlasting gender equality claims, as well as the women’s need of self-determination and the possibility to be faithful to themselves, always.
With “Modalità Aereo” (Airplane Mode), Galegati Shines deliberately chooses to be detached, and finds space to take time for herself, to disconnect, to step back. A disposition that allows you to observe and listen, it’s a voluntary exile from the enormous overexposure to media, it’s a research study that investigates the weaknesses which we’re used to living with, it’s a way of addressing a precarious condition, but on a plan that is facing outwards.
The result is an intimate, intense, unexpected narration that brings you back to that original feeling, that same feeling that makes Stefania draw the Sun when everybody else is drawing the stars — because even if you don’t think about it, the Sun is also a star.
