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Woman and Mother |
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Written by Ugo Collu
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Above all, it is to the woman and mother that Nivola gives the most sublime consideration, developing them until they become the absolute form, pure idea. She is the rule and the governing principle, she is the secret of life. The male is multifaceted and complex because he lacks this primordial virtue. To express the male’s tortuosity, Nivola turned to cubism. But the forms that represent the mother are so rarified, they verge on the metaphysical. Materiality is as if sublimated in them; only hints of her pregnant belly, her breasts, and the opening of her whole being in a reassuring embrace remain. She is a warm reception, protection and deliverance: She has wings for the flight of her children and a nest for their return. She is the one, the simple origin. There remains only one term to define her: superhuman. And superhuman is the vision that represents her. An heavy material that becomes a wafer of light. She is your mother—the archetype of the Mediterranean mother and the mother of us all.
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Orani Pergolato |
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Here Costantino speaks not only of the architectural aspect of the project he proposed for his home town, but also the cultural and social aspects:
"Stone has a temper, it does not accept peremptory orders ... (the idea is to) ... whitewash the houses and let pergolas weave liberally throughout the streets, to rebuild benches on which the elderly and young children can sit ... to close off traffic to the town center, leaving cars on the outskirts of town."
In Giovanni Columbu (1998) Lollas. The Intangible City CUEC p. 6
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The Graffito on Sa Itria's Façade |
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To the villagers who asked Nivola what the graffiti on the facade represented, he used to say that it depicted the battle of Lepanto (the 1571 battle in which a Christian fleet stopped the advance of Turkish Muslims in Europe). Recently, this explanation has been confirmed by the discovery of a sketch - never realized - in which the cross is superimposed on a group of figures on one side and the Turkish crescent is superimposed on those on the other. It is hard to say why Nivola decided to devote his decoration of the facade to this historic event, and to the contrast between East and West to which it refers. Nevertheless, in the period in which Nivola worked on the project, there was occasion to rethink the relationship between the two cultures. The years of decolonization and of the Cold War were years in which there was a spread of activism in support of strengthening the international role of the Arab and Asian countries, generating fears about the possible resurgence of the old conflict between East and the West. In fact, in 1957, the year before Nivola executed the graffito, UNESCO responded to these concerns with the launch of an ambitious project of cross-cultural dialogue was to last a decade. Maybe Nivola had thought to turn the memory of the Battle of Lepanto, a crucial episode of the struggle between the two worlds, into a proposal for reconciliation and peaceful coexistence. In the end, however, all that remains on the facade are the two symbolic figures, incised in the white stucco, sparsely marked by hints of chairoscuro These symbols transform the architecture--in itself very simple and lacking in architectural relief--into a drawing, a great page on which the mythic story told by the artist is offered perpetually for his country men's contemplation.
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