BRIDGING THE FRAGMENTS


Artist Statement

My work is a tribute to newspapers on the verge of extinction and to the declining good journalism that has been a stalwart in shaping opinions and igniting inquisitive sparks for approximately the past three hundred years.

The culture of careful, accurate, and restrained reporting, layers of editing, and time to reflect, has been replaced by the value of speed and sensationalism. A shrinking news media landscape along with the loss of newspapers and the conversion to on-line content is changing the quality of information individuals consume.

In the past, Newspapers and in-depth journalism, with their depiction of the social structure of our values, beliefs and aesthetics, have been some of the most valid tools used to lucidly look back at ourselves and at the world around us.

Today, on other hand, the excesses of visual and sensory input that characterize the increasingly digital world doesn't stimulate a similar critical analysis or a new philosophical framework, but actually generates disordered cultural conditionings and standards of behavior. The portrait of the modern world is in fact a mental landscape that is less and less defined by moral, spiritual and ecological consideration, but more and more by short term utility and greed.

Printed news has often been seen as politically biased, but its longtime contribution to civic engagement deserves a recognition no matter how significant the transition to the digital media may be.

I am very worried about loosing the lucid analysis often ignited by the printed news' content of who we are and where we might be going that would eventually suggest alternative cultural guidelines.

This is the reason why Newspapers are the Medium and the Subject of my works. Newspaper is an intensely malleable and generous medium that allows me to investigate the dualism of its physical and meaningful essences.

I perceive all aspects of newspaper's content: stories, images, and advertisements as fragmentary manifestations of our social structure; the ensemble of these fragments defines the identity of our society. In my sculpture I reconfigure physically and metaphorically the setting of the fragments and their interconnections within the whole. The envisioned new scheme would give to the entire structure an utopian alternative identity.

My sculpture are entirely made out of newspaper and glue. The paper's authenticity is totally respected and it is not affected by paint or by the use of chemical preservatives; what I have borrowed from Nature will eventually return to it in time.

Riccardo Berlingeri, November 2009