On the occasion of the VI edition of Arte all’Arte, curator Emanuela de Cecco invited Mirosław Bałka to participate in the courtyard of the former San Domenico prison in San Gimignano.
"The work of Miroslaw Balka (Otwock, Poland, 1958) originates, like all of the Polish artist’s works, from a deep relationship with the connotations of the place that hosts it. If the walls of the courtyard of the former San Domenico prison in San Gimignano could speak, they would tell stories of every kind—the compressed desires, the anxieties, the daily thoughts of the inmates who, over the centuries, spent their outdoor hours there, all the same, for years.
With 12 x (ø 100 x 44) / time servants, the artist on one hand evokes the presence of the inhabitants who, confined to this place, experienced a time in which days, months, and years were marked by indifferent repetition—where the ghosts of the past and the future inevitably became their most faithful companions. On the other hand, he stages a broader discourse that transcends the relationship with the place and its historical connotations, transforming into a poetic reflection on the passage of time and the existential dimension implicit within it.
Bałka’s work is composed of 12 seats made from reclaimed wood, each placed on a circular base that slowly rotates around the pre-existing central well. Next to each seat—none of which are particularly comfortable—is an alabaster vase, white like the base, containing a nettle plant. The silence of the space is broken by the hypnotic background sound produced by the flow of water from a shower reactivated by the artist. The public is implicitly invited to sit on the chairs and surrender to the slow rhythm of rotation: anyone who approaches becomes the missing presence, ready to be welcomed on the empty seat.
By emphasizing the emptiness produced by absence, the artist highlights the perception of subjective time. Thus, being free or imprisoned does not solely concern the explicit condition experienced by inmates, but takes on a meaning that every human being faces daily—one that, for example, becomes fully evident each time we are faced with a choice and enter into a confrontation, often painful, with the walls we ourselves build from within.
The tendency to rework personal memories, the relationship with the body, and the attention to the connections between the artwork and the space that contains it have been central elements in the artist’s work since the very beginning. (…)"
Emanuela de Cecco, “Arte all’Arte VII”, 2002
