Gianni Pettena

Tarshito put us together in the mid-80s at Speciale, the gallery he founded and directed with Shama. He made us converge into a wind of love, at various times and in different ways, in Puglia: Bari, Polignano a Mare, Otranto …Tarshito and Mauro were my students, but we instantly recognized each other as fellow travelers, and the shows at Speciale were our chance to work together…At Speciale, at the openings of shows by Mendini and Marano, I met Agneta, a dear friend of Tarshito’s, and so we all began to collaborate. Tarshito, Marano, Agneta and I got together on various occasions, at Expo Arte in Bari, at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, and at Megalopoli, Agneta’s gallery in Milan, in which she collected many works by her friends.
With her, I made “integrazioni”, a piece where the border between reality and the imaginary can be forced, where you can escape from the real into the immaterial world, but from which you can also return, otherwise it’s…death…and then “poltramaca” (armchair/hammock), which is still in the design phase, in that it still needs to be brought out of a huge African tree-trunk, with the help of a chainsaw: a large sketch was displayed, still half rolled-up, along with the trunk, its bark still on, the chair still inside, waiting to emerge, like the sculpture inside a block of marble. And finally, a piece done with Tarshito and Marano at Megalopoli: I designed a “room” in soft cotton cloth, a curtain that occupied the exhibition space, hanging from the ceiling and anchored to the great room’s four corners. One entered and saw a lit wax column by Tarshito; on the floor, a grand, subtle drawing along the walls, almost immaterial, made of ceramic plates, the drawing going from one plate to the next…
Much of this, and much more, is now contained at “La Collina”, Agneta’s home in the Tuscan hills, where we’re all collected, to keep the discourse going in many rooms, accompanied in our whisperings by the drawings and by Mauro Lovi’s fantastic world which surrounds and accompanies us in our wanderings.

Gianni Pettena