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Interview with Dexi Tian (English/French)

by Derek MF Di Fabio

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It’s funny how some expressions and sounds stick to our minds. In English there is an expression called Earworm, you use to say when you wake up with a song and it doesn’t go away, so every now and then you’ll find yourself sing to it. It can be contagious, and the people with you may sing that same song without really knowing why. Probably that song will influence your rhythm and your moves during the day. With the classes, we went to look for materials on the beach of Fontanamare and in a park in Domusnovas, we had to translate your way-of-seeking, your searching method, to the children: how would you describe it? How would you describe your gaze?

Selon moi l’art est partout. Ca veut dire qu’il faut aimer le penser et garder la curiosité. Je travaille beaucoup avec les objets trouvés. Ou plutôt ce sont eux qui semblent me trouver, par hasard, lors de mes promenades. C’est grâce à notre société : elle nous propose trop de marchandises,partout, tellement qu’elles finissent par déborder et devenir une partie de la nature. Souvent elles se manifestent sous forme de pollution. Dans cette société de surconsommation certains voudraient régler le problème par de multiples réglementations voir dans certains cas par l’interdiction.Mais je pense que c’est mieux de nous changer nous mêmes, changer notre façon de vivre . A chacun de trouver sa façon de vivre, savoir ce dont on a vraiment besoin, ne pas simplement suivre la mode. Trouver son propre sens dans la vie.

C’est alors que la vie deviendra simple et claire. C’est comme lorsqu’un objet semble m’attendre là, au coin d’une rue.

Je réfléchis beaucoup aux relations entre la vie et l’art. Parfois je me dis qu’ils sont pareils, d’autres fois qu’ils sont différents.  

Le plus intéressant pour moi c’est quand l’art se fond dans la vie, c’est alors que l’art se transcende.En fait toutes les choses ont une utilité, ça dépend seulement du regard qu’on leur porte. Tout comme les individus: chacun est utile dans la société. Il faut juste trouver sa bonne place. Tout est possible, il faut juste agir.  

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It was very interesting to bring your practice to the children of four different schools in Sulcis, what do you remember more from these meetings?

Je trouve que les enfants sont très ouverts, ils ont des pensées incroyables, très différentes les unes des autres. Ils sont très intéressants. Surtout ils peuvent les concrétiser très vite avec tout ce qu’on a trouvé, ca c’est incroyable. J’ai passé beaucoup de temps pour réfléchir pour trouver cette façon de travailler, mais pour eux ça a l’air tellement naturel. Malgré la difficulté de la langue, on a bien travaillé. Et on s’est bien amusés. J’en garde un souvenir souriant.

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Every morning we crossed some mountains to reach the Iglesiente area. Some mornings were super sleepy that we couldn’t speak, other mornings were full of clouds and driving-down the hills was like diving into a foamy dream. Sheeps were crawling particular fields, once we catch three identical shepherd dogs, the water of a spring gets out from a plastic pipe on that route, another time we had to slow down following a nails-slow truck, and once we stopped to check a massive hotel-restaurant that was never finished and it sleeps for the last 30 years. One of those mornings we spoke about materials: your work is based on “sought-for objects”, in which objects you are interested to?

Chacun a ses goûts . Le goût des aliments , des vêtements,la vie quotidienne. Chacun est différent. Tout comme il y a différents types de collectionneurs. Moi par exemple ce que je collectionne ce sont les objets .   j’aime bien les objets en bois , en verre, et des   pierres . J’aime bien leur forme, leur matérialité. Mais aussi dans chaque objets, il y a le temps, le passé et les traces. Avec l’espace ,Ça raconte beaucoup d’histoire. J’adore les mélanger et créer des hybridations pour trouver de nouvelles relations entre eux. C’est ça qui m’amuse bien.

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All your sculptures are composed by usedobjects, objects that humans had touched, scrubbed, eaten, thrown, lost or forgot.I was looking online a sculpture you were telling us about, but I couldn’t found it: some human phalanxes made out in some metal, you had found them in a burnt house therefore those finger partly fused together. Or you produced for us two sculptures, we walked with you to collect some of their elements you had seen before during a walk: some animal-jaws and some ceramic parts were soaked in the dirty water of a little canal, under a bridge, in the periphery of the small village where we are based, Perdaxius. It seems that most of your elements came from a twilight zone, although they had been passed and dance under the spotlights. You came from a big Chinese city, and then you moved to Paris and recently you moved to the woods outside the French capital: what is a periphery and what is its role?

Pourquoi m’intéresser à la banlieue. Car je trouve que les banlieues sont les lignes entre la société et la nature. Sur cette ligne, on voit les relations des hommes avec la nature. Parfois c’est la guerre, parfois il y a une harmonie sensible. Et c’est cela qui a posé beaucoup de questions. La question de pollution bien sur, la question de vivre ensemble, comment améliorer la relation ?Là c’est le   point qui m’intéresse.

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Then these elements are composed: as we were setting up in the school, all the different tools and instruments are tidily ordered and then you operate. “Le cadavre exquis” jumps to my mind but also some notions of Chinese language you presented to the classes: how a number of ideograms next to each other means an object, or how, if repeated together, the same ideogram can shift its meaning and become multitude / an abstract idea…. is it connected to your work or I’m just making it up?

Oui , bien sur. Il y a ce sens, mais pas seulement. L’écriture chinoise est une ancienne culture, qui perdure jusqu’à présent. C’est la plus ancienne écriture qui   est utilisée jusqu’à maintenant. En tout il y a plus de dix mille caractères. C’est une richesse inimaginable. Il est   comme une ligne qui relie le présent et le passé. On peut voir la vie des anciens et leurs évolutions . Et ça va évoluer en continu. Les écritures c’est comme les racines ,ça sort naturellement dans ma pensée et dans mes travaux. Les objets je les vois comme des mots, et les installations comme des poésies, une poésie visuelle en dimension.  

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…and to conclude: can you tell us few things about the association you are part of?

L’association VIA est une association d’ art contemporain qui a été créé par plusieurs artistes et commissaires. L’Idée c’est un chemin pour l’art. Son esprit est dans la pratique. C’est comme s’il n’y avait pas de route au début, ce sont les gens qui marchent dessus, qui, avec le temps, ont créé un chemin. L’art a besoin de curiosité et de  courage.et  les pratiques dans la vie. Parfois , les vies des artistes ne sont pas toujours faciles, surtout à la sortie de l’école. l’esprit de l’association c’était d’aider les jeunes artiste à trouver leurs chemins, pour encourager et avancer . Par exemple trouver des endroits et des opportunités pour exposer , montrer leurs travaux, et parfois organiser des courtes résidences etc …Mais maintenant, la route s’est un peu perdue dans des méandres. Il faut beaucoup de travail, continuer d’avancer, trouver la bonne route.  

Enfin merci à l’association cheremus, qui m’a donné cette chance de travailler avec les enfants. C’est un super projet. J’ai passé des moments inoubliables en Sardaigne. J’espère que l’association va continuer, et grandir. Merci encore, à bientôt.  

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Per il terzo appuntamento con i laboratori dei Giardini Possibili, Cherimus collaborerà con l’artista Dexi Tian, selezionato da Martina Köppel-Yang, co-curatrice della biennale d’arte di Sichuan 2018 (Cina).

L’artista nelle prossime due settimane lavorerà con i bambini delle scuole elementari di Villamassargia, Domusnovas, Musei e Iglesias, affiancato dagli artisti Derek MF Di Fabio e Carlo Spiga.

Il giorno 18 di gennaio è prevista una presentazione del lavoro di Dexi Tian aperta a tutti presso la Casa Occheddu di Domusnovas.

Dexi Tian, nato in Cina nel 1979, vive e lavora a Parigi. Poeta dei materiali, Dexi sviluppa un rigoroso lavoro di ricostruzione della realtà partendo da elementi recuperati. Per lui, gli oggetti sono come parole: riassemblati e installati in nuovi spazi, danno loro un’altra risonanza. .Nel tentativo di conciliare arte e vita, è anche interessato a trovare un posto alla permacultura nella sua arte.
Dexi Tian ha partecipato a numerose mostre e festival in Europa e in Asia: Museum Liu Haisu, Shanghai (CINA), Gallery LIUSA WANG (FR), the 6B, Paris (FR), Gallery PARIS HORIZON, Paris (FR), Abbatiale Saint-Ouen, Rouen (FR), CIGE, Beijing, (CHINA), Kunstverein Nurtingen (DE), La Papeterie de Seine, Parc du chemin de l’Ile, Nanterre (FR), Gallery IEFO, Paris (FR), Gallery AREA, Paris (FR), Gallery Tamtam Art Taipei (TAIWAN), Gallery Espace des Arts Sans Frontières, Paris (FR), gallery International City of Arts, personal exhibition, Paris (FR), Castel Liversan, Haut Médoc, Bordeaux (FR). Dexi Tian lavora anche al di fuori degli spazi istituzionali, con workshop e altre forme ibride.

Amy Sow, visual artist and activist of Nouakchott, has closed the four-workshop series of the project The Possible Gardens.
The story of her commitment to the fight against violence against women, and of the central role that the protection of children through education in art and self-expression plays in her work, was a precious gift for us and for all the children who warmly welcomed her during her two weeks in Sardinia.

For Amy, art is an indispensable tool for the empowerment and emancipation of the individual in the fight against inequality and injustice. Being an artist in Mauritania is very difficult, she told us; being a woman and an artist even more so. Her dream is to give access to arts education for everyone, especially for children and for youth who do not have this possibility. Art Gallé was born this way, from a dream. A home for art built with recycled materials, especially wood, which welcomes everyone, which encourages people to meet, to exchange ideas and experiences. During the first meetings with the children of the Iglesiente, Amy Sow talked about her beautiful dream and all the difficulties encountered along the way, answered their thousand questions, and listened to the dreams of the children for their gardens. She also talked about the early marriages that girls still suffer, how gender discrimination is unfortunately still a relevant issue all over the world, how important it is to struggle, and how art is a tool to convey messages and to imagine and build a different world.

In the second week the children returned to their gardens, and together with Amy they built their dreams with their hands. For a week the spirit of Art Gallé, Amy’s dream, has animated Cherimus and all the children. With Arundo Donax rods and waste materials from the Iglesias ecological platform, tempera paint and brushes, the children have given concrete form to their ideas developed during three months of workshops.

See, here: the “sound wall” of Domusnovas that transforms the class into a great musical instrument made of colorful suspended pipes.
The goals / sculptures of the fantastical playground of Villamassargia are built on a 1: 1 scale, and immediately used to invent new games.
The dream of drawing in one’s own park and organizing an annual exhibition among the trees becomes reality in Musei: each student chooses a companion to portray and to be portrayed by; here is a row of faces, a real gallery of portraits en plein air appear from tree to tree, becoming the heart of a little morning party.
Iglesias’s children give form to an important person, a woman who has struggled to be free to be and to think: a giant Hypatia more than 5 meters tall, stylized like a constellation, miraculously walks through the park of Iglesias and allows us to see over the houses thanks to a camera positioned on her eyes.
For a brief moment the kid’s dreams are realized: the possible gardens have become real, thanks to the children and to Amy Sow of the little real utopias.

Amy Sow

  “Oscillant entre le figuratif et l’abstrait, j’adore les sujets relatifs au vécu de la femme. Je dénonce les violences faites à ces dernières. Ce phénomène est toujours d’actualité, même dans les lieux où les gens sont plus émancipés la femme est toujours violentée. Peindre pour moi est la meilleure façon d’exprimer ma liberté. Une liberté que voudrais vivre pleinement et que je souhaiterais à toutes les femmes qui peuplent ses contrés.”

Amy Sow

“Oscillating between the figurative and the abstract, I love subjects relating to the lived experiences of women; I denounce the violence done to them. This phenomenon is still relevant, even in places where people are more emancipated. Women are always abused.Painting for me is the best way to express my freedom, a freedom that I would like to live fully and that I wish for all the women of the world.”

Amy Sow

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In 2017, she built and opened Art Gallé, a space made entirely of wood dedicated to the promotion of art and artists from all over Mauritania. The aim of the project is to offer a space where all can express themselves through art, learn, exchange ideas, and grow. Art Gallé is a space for youth arts education in a context in which such spaces are often lacking. In the pular language, its name means “come home.”

Sow’s work, which is mainly pictorial, is addressed above all to the most marginalized and helpless women: victims of violence. Her work speaks directly to these women and aims to sensitize society and institutions that do not yet fight episodes of violence and discrimination toward the weakest.

In 2019, the Arts et Culture section of New African Magazine declared Sow one of the 100 personalities of the year in the entire continent of Africa. To learn more, click here.

ph. Marco Colombaioni

We were in Nairobi, at night time always in Riruta Satellite, at daytime often in Kibera, in Ndugu Mdogo. Cherimus was hosted by the NGO Amani, who works with street children, while running different rescue centres. We were there thanks to Marco Colombaioni’s visionary  idea. He came here several times as a volunteer and wrote a project for an international program of art residences based in these centres, Darajart. In the Swahili language, Daraja means ‘bridge’. He wanted to build a bridge for unlikely encounters between the art world and the pulsating life of Kibera in Nairobi, by inviting every year artists working with different media (music, writing, cinema and visual arts) to live and work in the largest slum of Sub-Saharan Africa.

We decided to put together the first Darajart pilot edition. This zero edition was meant to help us come into contact with the context and understand it better. We had just started to work there and we already had three projects.

The first one was a wall painting made on the facade of the centre. All the children hosted in Ndugu Mdogo contributed to its realisation. During a three-day workshop we asked them to draw their favourite objects on the wall and then to paint them. The wall got populated by an incredible number of fantasy inventions, which all together composed a puzzle of enormous animals, absurd signals and tiny unusual tangled characters, often overlapping with each other. You need to take your time to discover all the details hidden in this painting. The children realised their wall together with the artists: they had only left the street one month earlier, and now Ndugu Mdogo was their home, and the community their family. It was essential that they felt as the owner of their space. Above all, the wall is beautiful!

The second project we did with the children in Ndugu Mdogo was a sort of big Chinese dragon, made of 27 roundish metal panels (two of which were bigger than the others and represented the head). During a workshop, we asked the children to think about their dreams, about how they imagine themselves in the future. Each of them drew and painted their dreams on the metal panels. Then we went with the children to the famous train-rails of Kibera, where you can enjoy a unique perspective on the slum. There they set up the panels and held them up,showing their dreams to the slum. Once we were back in Ndugu Mdogo, we tied up all the boards together, hanging them from the facade that they had painted. When the children will leave Ndugu Mdogo, this Dragon will follow them to Kivuli, another center run by Amani.

The third project was Santu Jacu, a wooden sculpture of St James, the patron saint of Perdaxius, realized in collaboration with the Kenyan wood carver Charles Nshimiyimana.

Darajart Artist in residence

Curated by Cherimus, in collaboration with AMANI NGO

Darajart is a residence for internationally-renowned artists, curators and writers, which takes place in the heart of Nairobi’s slums.

The aim of residency is to explore the ‘peripheral’ context of the slums; to enter ‘on tiptoe’ into the daily life of the people who live there; to observe and seize those inputs that could be appropriated by artistic and curatorial research.

Darajart is a site of artistic research and encounters where new projects and ideas can be realized and experimented. It is organized with the collaboration of FARE and its international network of residences (‘artinreisdence.it’) and it is curated by Cherimus.

The project is born from a visionary idea by Marco Colambaioni, co-funder of Cherimus. After working in Africa as a volunteer for Amani, Marco’s artistic production was profoundly influenced by the energy of this continent.

In the Kiswaili language, Daraja means ‘bridge’: a bridge for a possible encounter between the art world and the pulsating life of Kibera in Nairobi, Kenia.

He was planning to invite artists working with different media (music, writing, cinema and visual arts) to live and work in the largest slum of Sub-Saharan Africa, as art was the ‘key’ he used to build bridges. This key allowed him to imagine a dialogue that would go beyond mutual knowledge and sharing and that would transform these values into a vision – an image capable to add an unforeseen, new voice to an ongoing dialogue; something that would grow wildly, propagate and seek to unite and multiply. In this respect, Darajart does not have the characteristics peculiar to most art residencies, but looks more like an unexpected encounter.

Darajart has a yearly programme articulated in two or three residencies.

Two artists – one of which is Kenyan or African – take part in the project and live in one of Amani’s centres for two periods of up to three months each in the space of one year. During their stay, they experiment and explore the work of Amani and the characteristics of the local territory, possibly with the collaboration of other cultural centres in Nairobi.

Niniendi su pippieddu cun sant’Anna e santu Iacu

Il presepe di Perdaxius torna alla chiesa medievale di san Giacomo, grazie alla collaborazione tra artisti, musicisti e scuola del paese.

Perdaxius, 22 dicembre 2009

L’associazione Cherimus e il gruppo folk Maria Munserrara di Tratalias, realizzano il presepe di Natale nella chiesa romanico-pisana di San Giacomo, antica chiesetta nel centro storico del comune di Perdaxius (CI), che per varie vicissitudini è rimasta chiusa e inutilizzata per anni.

L’associazione Cherimus ha invitato per l’occasione alcuni artisti a lavorare insieme ai bambini della scuola primaria, per realizzare i personaggi, gli elementi e gli scenari classici del presepe, con materiali di recupero procurati dagli stessi bambini.
Gli artisti, attivi in ambito internazionale, sono entrati a contatto con la comunità locale in un momento importante nella vita del paese, cioè i preparativi per i festeggiamenti del Natale.
Per instaurare un rapporto reale tra gli artisti e il paese, l’associazione Cherimus ha chiesto la collaborazione di istituzioni, associazioni e attività del territorio, tra cui la scuola primaria e diversi esercizi artigianali e commerciali. Gli artisti hanno così costruito il presepe grazie al contributo dei bambini della scuola primaria nel corso di due settimane di laboratori. Gli animali, i personaggi, il cielo e le stelle sono stati immaginati e costruiti da zero nella scuola. Gli interventi degli artisti, realizzati in un’atmosfera corale, spaziano dal cielo stellato, che riproduce le costellazioni presenti la notte di Natale dell’anno zero nel cielo di Perdaxius, alla realizzazione di un cielo composto da un puzzle di carta di 12 metri quadri, colorato con pastelli e pennarelli, dall’arrivo della stella cometa, che sarà interpretato dai bambini in una performance prevista al momento dell’apertura, alla realizzazione delle orecchie dei personaggi fatte di dolce.
spy cell phoneIl gruppo folk Maria Munserrara di Tratalias allieterà l’apertura del presepe con un repertorio di canti sacri tipici della musica tradizionale sarda.
Nella ex biblioteca del paese, situata nella piazza principale saranno esposti i disegni realizzati dai bambini durante i laboratori e verranno offerti dolci tipici preparati da alcune signore del paese.

Il progetto è parte di un percorso più ampio promosso dall’associazione Cherimus che mira ad integrare l’arte contemporanea internazionale con le principali occasioni di festa del paese al fine di valorizzare la cultura locale.
L’associazione Cherimus, attiva da diversi anni, ha al suo attivo numerose iniziative di livello internazionale realizzate con l’obiettivo di integrare territorio e arte contemporanea nel Sulcis-Iglesiente.

L’evento è realizzato con il contributo del comune di Perdaxius.
Info:cherimus@gmail.com