„?“: a container for the stories that will be told by the mosaic
This mosaic and the friendship with the customer grew up together through a deep dialogue.
“?”: Mohamed Chabarik with a intervention of Laura Carraro, 2015. Marble, stone, ceramic, steel, Venetian smalti and gold, 142 x 200 cm.
Contemporary works. The title of this work took inspiration from its shape, which is sinuous, curved and balanced: it consists of one main body and a separate dot, a sort of S-shaped symbol recalling Venice Grand Canal, a proper container for the stories that will be told by the mosaic it enshrines.
Said “stories” come from long ago, from the dawn of time, from the caves where the East and the West probably shared a common past. Soon, however, the two worlds split on the two different sides of the same border, which sometimes is very well-defined and sometimes blurred and vanishing. This is exactly what happened to the history of the those two worlds: sometimes we go, and sometimes they come. Switching lines define areas made up of architectural shapes, which try to represent different ages, telling something about each of them with textures and materials.
The story slowly starts to take colour, until it gets to where the protagonist is placed. Almost at the centre of the composition we find al-Bunduqiyya, which is to say Venice, symbolically represented by the St. Mark’s Basilica, witnessing one of the most beautiful periods of dialogue and exchange. Besides goods, there was also an exchange of science and knowledge, Saints and Gods, stories and tales.
Approaching daylight, we meet other eras along the path, in which the coming and going through the axis continues, with salaams and insults, exchanges and pillages.
We arrive to today’s time, which is abstract, colourful, blurred, exasperated and ambiguous. It’s time for self-questioning, not for judgements. It’s time to wonder “how come?”. “What happened between us?”. “Which shape did the sky have?”. “Will we have two futures?”. “What can I do?”. “And why?”.
And here we get to the final dot, which is the source of light of the whole work, trying to describe the Future with an almost independent search.
It consists of two parts: the whole and solid one – untouched by our intervention – speaks about events we cannot control; the other part, instead, speaks about what we can do and what we can forecast with the development of cognitive abilities such as imagination (the coloured points), logic and deduction.
The stronger our imagination capability, the more likely we will find good solutions for the future.
