PERFORMANCE:Giovanni Casu-Drawing The Horizon with The Sun
On September 23th 2019, during autumn equinox at 7.05 am, a photographic pinhole analogical midsize camera, (a Mamiya RB67) is positioned on a natural tripod in the beach of Vilchada in the South of Thira Island in Greece. It is fixed facing West about 50 cm from the surface of the water.
A mirror about 250 centimeters in diameter is placed on board of a local 12 mt fisherman boat. The mirror faces East (and the rising sun) while the boat start crossing the horizon line viewed from the beach side and projected in the pin-hole film camera. The boat and the mirror travels for 6 hours, from the dawn to the zenith, (from 7.05 am until 1.05 pm) along the horizon line (3 kilometres off the coast). The mirrors mounted on the boat refl ect the rising sun light during the 6 hours journey along the horizon line. The mirror transmit to the fi lm thousand of little fl ashes in the purpose to draw the horizon line with the sunrays refl ected by the mirror. The mirror need to be adjusted to follow the rising sun and continue to project the sun-rays to the film.
This light movement is recorded by the film through the reflex of the sun into the mirror. Given the terrestrial curvature the boat-mirror path is about 3-6 kilometres long. The result for the human eye from the beach is a small luminous point slowly flashing and crossing the horizon line. This creates a diachronic line of light along the west horizon. With the sun rising to its zenith behind the camera the warm light of dawn reflected in the mirror is increasingly white.
“Drawing the horizon with the sun” is an art project based on the idea of non-authorship linked to the Land Art cultural heritage. The possibility of conceiving an artwork disconnected from the identity of the author is an old one. Roland Barthes presents this idea in his text “Le degré zero de l´ecriture” and he develops it further in his essay “The death of the author” published in the experimental magazine Aspen (1968). Barthes suggests the death of the author as a pre-requisite for the birth of the reader. The work would thus exist independently of its creator and would belong to a more generic and universal realm in the sense of “humanity has created”, “humanity has produced”.
The series “this_is_not_the_present_” is a dynamic of production that contemplates the possibility that in a specific moment of contemporary art history, some artworks could have been realized, but for some reasons never were. Given a numbers of discourses, concepts, problems, subjects and materials at the centre of the creative research of several authors and artists in a given historical moment, gaps seem to emerge. “this_is_not_the_present_” brings together a series of works created to fill those gaps. In the specific case of “Drawing the horizon with the sun” the artistic historical references are numerous: for example the work of Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, Giovanni Anselmo, Robert Morris, Walter De Maria in the late ’60 beginning of the ’70.-Giovanni Casu
CV: Giovanni Casu is a Berlin based artist. He was born in Sardinia in 1975, after a degrees in Political Science he moved to Paris in 2002 where he lived and exhibited his artworks for the next 7 years. In 2007 he participate to Nuit Blanche Paris with the installation “Le Puit”. After Culturia.de residency in 2009 he relocated to Berlin where, along with producing solo and collective exhibitions, he has developed a work based on verification procedures typical of empirical discourse. The Ecke Project (2010-2012) is based on the relationship between art and neuroscience and Empirical Survey on a heritage (2010-2014) is a project on the consistency of Sardinian cultural identity verified through contemporary art practices. Between 2015 and 2020 his work focused on processes, archeology, memory, entropy and aura.
Giovanni Casu, Drawing the horizon with the sun from the series: This_is_not_the_present_, Thira_September 23th 2019, Ephemeral light sculpture, © Giovanni Casu, Courtesy the artist