Conversing with Simona Weller
F.M. - First of all, I would like to say that your recent works and the works from a few years ago are strongly consistent in terms of themes and language. The themes are recurrent, and this leads me to believe that you get your inspiration from a well defined environmental context.
S.W. - Of course I do. I in fact believe that living in a natural environment like the countryside, where I live and work, inspires and influences everything I do. It therefore becomes instinctive for me to express myself in a language related to the life cycle as I see it in the countryside: the animals that fight and devour each other to survive, the way they love, the way they die… My eye on nature also gives me a sense of contact with reality which, looked at with the right adjustments, is not very different from what we actually see and breathe in this world.
F.M. - So, what elements of nature are most frequently present on your image repertoire.
S.W. - There was a time in which I was into a pre-natal world made of growing larvae, roots, bulbs, seeds; then, in the following months, this world developed… For example, what excited me the most in the changing of seasons was to find, together with the first crumpled up leaves, the empty shells of snails and crabs, the nymphs or empty skins of the insects, snake sloughs like see-through cortex, or dead toads, dried up in the sun; and even some decomposing flowers looking like animals…
F.M. - Yes, I find that these factors perfectly correspond to the reality of your work, which I would classify within an idea of metamorphosis. In your works, images are never determined, never fixed into a finished and discrete form, but they take up forms that are always different, so I should probably say that your work lives in the idea of cycle: copulation, birth, death, rebirth, so there is, I think, a deep cultural mediation with roots in the far past, and that I would define of alchemic-esoteric nature. Not just violence and death but birth, a strong sense of the cycle of existence.
S.W. - Why not call it vitalism? This feeling life so deeply… I do not agree when you speak of metamorphosis, because I think this word implies a transformation from one form to another, whereas my research is based on an analysis of shapes that modify during their life cycle. I admit that something that's alive is so different from something that's dead to actually give the feeling of a total transformation, almost a metamorphosis. I would also like to object to another word you used (please excuse me): it's the word "alchemic-esoteric", which implies a concept for which I feel a certain suspiciousness and, though it may confer me a suggestive label, it is after all restrictive…
F.M. - I understand and partly share your suspiciousness for labels. It is a bit of a recurring dispute between critics and artists, who generally refuse to be caged in terms that are excessively "closed" and excessively "final": but, on the other hand, I would like to say, more in general, that we always speak within a frame of abstraction and by schemes, just because each word is by itself already a scheme which tries to confine reality in order to share it with others, to communicate.
Therefore, words never have a final character. They are just meant as indications, we shoot to see if we can catch what we are looking for…I agree with you about the fact that the word metamorphosis doesn't perfectly catch the sense of your work because what you are looking for (and you speak of vitalism, which is right, I think) is, rather, a way to develop a sort of organic matrix, in its undifferentiated state, from which anything can originate. Concerning the alchemic-esoteric character, I think that you shouldn't be too suspicious towards such a term because it is just a cultural mediation between you and nature. After all, any reality cannot be observed but through a cultural mediation which makes us part of a certain era, of a certain historical time.
This alchemic-esoteric root is deep rooted in the modern culture that gives origin to your works, i.e. a trend that I would call "organicistic", the trend that fed some of the poetics of surrealism which, from this, have then passed on to the informal domain: I am talking about all the poetics in which the natural element is observed in its undifferentiated matrix state.
In order to place your work in a more precise context, I believe it is appropriate to point out that these themes of death, violence, nature dissolution can take up a precise historical meaning, being the symbol of a wider and more general vital condition.
Naples, November 1968