Equorea – 11/12. Jaya Cozzani Chandra

From October 28th to November 27th 2023, BUILDINGBOX presents the artworks Soffia dove vuole and Angela by the artist Jaya Cozzani Chandra (Mumbai, 1982).

Water is incessant, flowing and moving over the Earth, accompanying the multiple transformations of life. In this continuous flow, human existence is affirmed, and its changes, its variations, its folds are observed, according to a cycle that is potentially infinite in spirit, but perishable in form. The site-specific work presented by Jaya Cozzani Chandra for the Equorea (di mari, ghiacci, nuvole e altre acque ancora) project in BUILDINGBOX is a place of meditation that welcomes a thought, a way of walking one’s own inner path. The installation consists of a five-panel screen; gold leaf has been applied in some places and watercolours with the colour cerulean have been added. Reminiscent of the artist’s childhood in India and Lerici, this colour is also a reminder of the divine, which makes being in the world “a certain number of gentle inaccuracies”; while the spiral shape and the depth of the various layers of colour refer to the elliptical orbits of the solar system and more generally to infinity. In an added space, the everyday gestures, the watercolours that the artist creates not only as a sign but also as a meditative practice, are proposed as forms of prayer. The unfired white clay sculpture placed in front of the screen carries the human experience, in an elastic posture of breathing.

The exhibition is the eleventh appointment of Equorea (of seas, ice, clouds and other waters), a project curated by Giulia Bortoluzzi, which involves, from January 7h, 2023 to January 9th, 2024, twelve Italian contemporary artists invited to explore the topic of water in twelve monthly solo shows, scheduled in a sequence that follows the lunar calendar.

The title references Eugenio Montale’s poem Falsetto (1923), published in the collection Ossi di Seppia (1925). The poem revolves around a girl called Esterina, described as an ocean creature (“equorea creatura”), and frames the sea as a metaphor for life and the wonder of living without worrying about the future: “The power that tempers you is water, in water you find and renew yourself.” Montale’s work picks up on the way we habitually associate water with life, a notion echoed by Mircea Eliade in A History of Religious Ideas (1949), which describes it as the total of all “virtualities”, the matrix for all potential life, the foundation of the whole world. Water is at the origin of all cosmic manifestation, symbolizing the primordial substance from which all forms arise, and to which they return, by regression or cataclysm. Water lies at the beginning and end of every historical or cosmic cycle. It will always exist, and never be alone, because it is germinative, encompassing the virtualities of all forms in its own undivided unity. In cosmogony, mythology, ritual, and iconography, water performs the same function: it precedes all forms and sustains all of creation. A symbol of life, it gives universal becoming a cyclical structure.

Following the cyclical pattern of the astronomical tides (which occur when the Moon, Earth and Sun are in alignment), at each full moon in the year 2023, BUILDINGBOX will play host to the work of twelve Italian contemporary artists, who have been asked to explore the theme of water: Ludovico Bomben (Pordenone, 1982), Jaya Cozzani (Mumbai/Kanchipuram, 1982),  Barbara De Ponti (Milano, 1975), Gaspare (Terlizzi, 1983), Michele Guido (Aradeo, 1976), Silvia Mariotti (Fano, 1980), Fabio Marullo (Catania, 1973), Elena Mazzi (Reggio Emilia, 1984), Ignazio Mortellaro (Palermo, 1978), Fabio Roncato (Rimini, 1982), Michele Spanghero (Gorizia, 1979), Virginia Zanetti (Fiesole, 1981).

The works presented in Equorea (of seas, ice, clouds and other waters) are site-specific (some are being exhibited for the first time, others are reworkings of previous pieces) and conceive of water as an emblem of all natural elements, and more generally as a form of life and creative potential. As a topic, water not only intrigues and inspires, but also elicits specific reflections on the future of our planet. Indeed, the life of all organisms on Earth depends on the presence of water and is shaped by its mutations: when it deteriorates, life becomes unsustainable.

There is as yet no proven scientific explanation of the origin of water on our planet. Whether generated by comets or meteorites crashing to earth, or volcanic eruptions in distant millennia, in the collective imagination it is associated with the mythological moment of creation, which contains the potential existence of all forms of life.