The act and art of deep, galactic listening

A brown immigrant finds herself at the foot of a circular totem, one member of an assembly of sculptural ‘beings’. A sensation of awe creeps up on her, stealing into her body’s pores, arousing in her bloodstream the peculiar gush usually evoked by the quietly colossal: imprints of nectar on an unfurling leaf; the raging solitude of snow-covered Alpine peaks; a gathering of magnolia trees in a state of ecstatic bloom—that once-a-year vision that suspends disbelief; chestnut forests in spring, bursting forth fresh chlorophyll; the trunks of oak trees downplaying their majesticity; the earthy resilience of moss-covered rocks. Instances of the ordinary-everyday miraculous.

Some minutes earlier, she had been catching up with a curator friend in the neighbouring cafe. They had been exchanging stories about their individual research as well as the maternal mundane that grounds their lives. They proceeded towards the Museion Passage after settling their dues. She had hoped to ‘come upon’ or actively ‘visit’ Vallazza’s sculptures, amble around them intentionally, thus exercising agency over works that were, until then, unknown to her. This had always been her sure-shot strategy for wrestling with the unfamiliar—rambling gingerly around, allowing impressions to accrue. But there was no side-stepping Vallazza’s totems, menhirs and bird-like forms. They towered over the vestibular expanse of the Museion Passage. On the one hand, they seemed to diminish her frame, on the other, they greeted her at eye level, as if rising up to meet her gaze.

Later, she tried to make sense of the lingering sensation by learning more about Vallazza’s practice. Despite her growing ability to navigate two languages that were, until her arrival here four years ago, equally foreign to her, she unintentionally produced a dyslexic glitch. She misread scultura as scriptura. ‘Can sculpture be scriptural?’ she wondered. Could this lie at the heart of the un-summoned awe?

Through the course of her itinerant life, she had encountered numerous artworks that demanded a spectatorial attentiveness in order for their meaning to be unleashed; an act of durational looking that could tease out significance. Vallazza’s sculptures seemed not to belong to such a category. They felt astonishingly immediate, as if the nature of the artistic intervention had transformed the raw material while still retaining its essence. No, transformed wasn’t the right word. They felt astonishingly immediate, as if Vallazza had excavated something crucial and molecular that lay dormant within the salvaged wood that is his base ingredient. His technique seemed to involve working both with and against the grain of the wood. The works did not feel ‘polished’ or ‘smoothed over’. In a documentary film about his practice, she watched him stroke the wooden slabs leaning upright in an area of his studio. His fingers grazed over the grain, as if he were divining the secrets of their future-past lives.

Upon her third visit, she felt drawn to the area immediately surrounding the sculptural assemblage in his 1987 drawing Totem. The encompassing energetic white strokes cause the fringes to pulsate while the contrasting red strokes that occupy the floor of sculptures’ base add to the illumination. During this moment of contact and connect she began to consider the semantic connotations of the word ‘grain’ and the plurality of its implications and applications across artistic mediums. The graininess of paper that either impeded or enabled the flow of her ink pen and the subsequent cadence of her handwriting; the granular quality of sand and its ability to irritate the host body of a marine oyster to produce pearls; the salinity encoded in a grain of sea salt formed when salt water evaporates; grains of mustard, wheat or rice that suggest fecundity; the graininess of a photographic print in response to light saturations… Grain as an aspect of surface. Grain as a facet of texture. Grain as a constituent of illumination. Grain as a member of a shadowy void. Grain as a speckle. Grain as density. Grain as singular only in relation to an assembly. Grain as the base unit of her awe.

She wondered if Vallazza intentionally exposed the grains of the salvaged wood that form his sculptures. He somehow makes manifest their surface as a repository of the wood’s lived experience; an archive of its existence as a functional object that had historical contact with numerous agents before ending up as his raw material. Vallazza seems to have worked with each slab intuitively, allowing its unique form to dictate what it could encompass, accordingly carving out patterns or arranging decorative components to create anthropomorphic beings that seem on the verge of mobility despite their state of stasis.

Stationed across the Museion Passage, these totems, menhirs and bird-like forms assert their presence through the museum’s everyday routine while refusing to ever ‘settle’ into the background. These scriptural sculptures reject or defy categorisation, straddling the parameters of multiple genres, being at once landscape, figurative drawing, abstraction and conceptual art while positioning themselves on an axis point between the epic, the folkloric and the mundane. The act and art of deep, galactic listening that clearly steered all the processual aspects of their creation continues to enhance their collective porousness. Their graininess feels epidermal, sentient, like the pores of her brown immigrant skin.

Rosalyn D’Mello (she/her/they) is an intersectional feminist writer, art critic, columnist, essayist, editor, educator, and researcher. She is the author of A Handbook for My Lover (HarperCollins India 2015 / Hardie Grant Australia 2016), provocative book of erotic memoirs. D’Mello contributes to major international art magazines, including STIR, as well as editing a weekly feminist column for the Indian newspaper mid-day. Having grown up in Mumbai, Rosalyn is now based in South Tyrol, Italy, where she “braves harsh alpine winters by harnessing her sensual memories of Goan sunshine”.