ARTE FIERA OBSERVATORY

Elena Pasoli
photo

Elena Pasoli has always promoted culture, working in children’s publishing and illustration for over 20 years. She is the Exhibition Manager of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, the world’s leading fair for the children’s publishing industry, which was awarded an Eric Carle Honor in 2018 for “uniting its heritage of relations with books and publishers throughout the world with strong promotion and support of dialogue among various cultures.” In recent years, after numerous exhibitions of books and illustrations organised in over 20 countries, she has focused on creating new events for BolognaFiere in foreign countries (especially in the United States and in China) and on its partnership with the Moscow International Book Fair. Elena is on the boards of directors of the Centro per il Libro e la Lettura and of IBBY (International Board on Books for Young People), and is an active member of PublisHer, a worldwide network of female professionals in the publishing field.
Elena Pasoli was a protagonist of IN LIBRERIA, the PLAYLIST section of Arte Fiera.


There’s a place in Bologna that fascinates me and attracts me like a magnet, a place I think I know very well but that surprises me every time. If not for something that I hadn’t noticed before, then because of a different nuance of emotion that envelopes me with every encounter. There’s a work inside that speaks to me, that takes me back to the past – my past – and sometimes even takes me into the future, suggesting words and giving me directions. The place is the Library of San Giorgio in Poggiale, and the work is Claudio Parmiggiani’s Campo dei fiori.

The building was originally a Longobard church built in the late 1500s by architect Tommaso Martelli. Over the centuries it was entrusted to the fathers of various religious orders, until it was heavily damaged by Allied bombs in 1943. Like many of the city’s other treasures, it was restored and converted (with Michele De Lucchi’s striking design) by the Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna, and is now a public library devoted mainly to books on history and local art.

It's a very intimate place, ideal for thinking. The books aren’t the only protagonists: they converse with numerous works of art (a timeless dialogue among the architecture of the library/church, the echo of religion, and Piero Pizzi Cannella’s “Cattedrale” cycle), but it’s Campo dei fiori that has always moved me, without fail, every time I see it. The installation towers at the centre of the apse: a pile of burned books crushed by a large bell, as silent and heavy as a tombstone, surrounded by the ashes of pages devoured by the flames: memories, the past, the meaning of everything.

This work digs inside me and takes me back to the enormous libraries of my grandfather and father (both Latin scholars). When I was a child, these libraries seemed alive and gigantic, and I was heartbroken when I had to clear them out because of those stupid but insurmountable problems of everyday life and its spaces, restricted both physically and mentally. My memory dominates those shelves like the heavy bell crushing the remains of those books.

But Parmiggiani’s work also takes me back to those happy times when I was young and helped organize numerous shows for Arte Fiera in the late ‘80s. Spellbound, I first saw his work while preparing the show “The present future – contemporary Italian art from private collections,” curated by Germana Galli for the ’89 edition of the fair. It was entitled Daphnephoria: almost two metres high, a piece of olive wood with laurel branches, a few bronze balls, saffron-coloured cloths, bronze leaves … ’a ceremony of Apollo carrying Daphne, with a choir of maidens.’ It held the memory of my father, the energy of my age, and that poem that can’t be recited.

P.S. A conversation by two workers setting up the exhibit: “And this?! I can do this, what does it take?”; “It takes thought. He did it, you can only copy it.” 
 

Campo de Fiori

Claudio Parmiggiani, Campo dei fiori, 2006, bronze bell and burned books, cm. 290x160x160