LUANA WOJACZEK PERILLI #19

AL
The mountain has always been present within your research, as well as in your private life. A proximity as much physical as emotional. Can you tell me what is the imagery that – starting from the link with this place – has emerged and what are the boundaries that characterise your personal artistic research?

LWP
Among my various more or less distant origins (Neapolitan, German, Polish, Abruzzese..) there are also Amatrician roots on my maternal grandfather’s side. My mother’s tales of freedom and discovery, sent during the summer months by my grandmother and aunts to the mountains, are part of a family narrative about freedom and alliance between women and between generations of women.
My parents chose a holiday place in the mountains to take up residence and in the 1980s I too grew up having my share of freedom in the woods in the Monti Simbruini Park.
The smell of the beech forest is something that speaks deeply about me, my freedom and my identity as a woman. I have returned to that park many times over the last few years, there I can do my own little physical cultural transhumance and where I can pass on to my daughter, a great sense of beauty and resilience but also of respect for the mystery of wild nature and its non-human populations.
I spent many months in the mountains during the period of the pandemic, I took students there many times to walk. I have always had an interest in the collective forms of memory, aggregation and elaboration of public and private space. I have worked extensively with the collective intelligences of eusocial insects, with collective appropriations in crafts, language (pidgin, creoles and languages of resistance such as ‘polar’) and architecture. Interacting with forests and mountain communities is fully part of this space of attention to the collective, to language, to transversal relations between living communities.

VL
Recently, you started a project between ethnozoology and ethnobotany of the Apennines, which also includes a part related to forest crossings and – equally interesting – to language and memory. Can you tell us about it?

LWP
The Cantalamissa project is the result of a collaboration with the Catanzaro Academy of Fine Arts started in 2022 and the curator Simona Caramia. The project is a mapping, with no claim to scientificity, of the communities of the Apennines, starting with their relations with the fauna and the collective intelligence of the forests.
The idea is to deal in parallel with a series of narratives of the people interviewed in the various localities, which will flow into an audiovisual. My starting point is the story of the diurnal moth “Amata phegea”, an object of attention and sometimes cruel capture by children, but also of immaterial appropriation through dialectal names and nicknames. In addition to collecting tales of relationships between humans and animals, we take walks in the local woods. Each participant chooses a stick, renewing in a simple and ancient gesture the alliance between man and land. We incorporate a plant prosthesis to rediscover an animal stability in walking with more than two legs. In that moment we are a sum of the living, an alliance of animal and plant worlds.
Following this, the sticks are paired with the handprint of the person who held them and the possible images of pareidolia that result in a collective sculptural work. Our ability to generate images is in fact also an animal and automatic fact that resides in the oldest parts of the brain. This instinct allows us to see physiognomies in spots and abstract shapes in order to react as prey-predator.

AL
The forest appears (therefore) as a highly symbolic place in your thinking. A place of ‘activation’, in which the human merges with the ‘biological maelstrom’ to become ‘other than human’. You are interested in animal imagery and the concept of collective intelligence. Can you tell me why and how these themes fit into Cantalamissa?

LWP
I started working with ants in 2011 in large installations housing colonies of live ants and researching 19th century entomology texts for narratives and images.
Sociobiology had deeply influenced me, as had the concept of ‘Superorganism’. An ant colony is thus the fascinating paradox of the one-to-many coincidence that then brings with it political, sociological, mystical digressions.
Sociobiology hypothesises that eusocial insect colonies as a superorganism represent patterns based on radical generosity and sisterly care. This had incredibly tickled my imagination from every angle. Insects are the great alien and different ‘other’ but also the proximity of childhood discoveries, and in this tension for me they represent, in a vital, complex and uneducated way, the relations between man and nature, or rather, since I do not see a division, the relations between living beings.