Ivana Spinelli

Designing the future through the origin. V. Waves that come from afar. v ^ v ^ v
A sharply clear encounter.
The moment when seeing means falling, backwards and inside and before, recognizing and remaining.

Not “in-cluding”, blocking, captivating the meaning, but letting the encounter with sign bring about a third one. Something you recognize by slipping. The rolling of the sign along the profile of the mountains, in the river bends, up to the hand that draws, to the throat that calls. Mmmm
x To let the text be tesserae. x
^. ^. ^.

To let it turn into a refuge.
The text of the mountain, of the wave, of the vagina. The corner, the knee, the tip of the arrow, the bird’s beak. All the universal resound repeating itself in time and space.
And it repeats. And it repeats.
III A game. |/|

The wrong way
The eddy of the sea is a meander. It was written on the containing vases. On the bodies. (.)
The value of two. II The power of three. III Lake above the earth. =
The third that arises is the text. The text is relationship. Making kin, not children
A contemporary Gilania.
But I-I-I-I-I don’t wanna be your cheerleader no more

Sending bright drawings to one another, from one chat to another, emoticons without a human face,
postanthropomorphic communication. v ^ v ^ v Leave writing to the tamed pet, nearing but not tired of his tooth yet. A tooth with which he nibbles a table,
the nail that scratches and writes.
v ^ v ^ v Gimbutas brought me back to the beginning. Archy. Matri-archy. Matri-linear. Being generated from language. Can it be done on Instagram? >>> Re-post.

To let the mountain move, crumble. Dance. Kālī’s hands and feet. What do we do with the codes?
Can you really keep an order?
Life, death, regeneration. @

The selfie. My face before. A colorful shoe. A limping sculpture. To laugh.
To look for a home.
To look at the face of a person who is moving his/her mouth and one eyebrow. Entropy.

v ^ v ^ v Incarnated Proto-Philosophy. We’ll talk about it again later, kisskuss, iv. v ^ v ^ v

Ivana Spinelli

Ivana Spinelli
(Ascoli Piceno, 1972. She lives and works in Bologna.)

In The Language of the Goddess, published in 1989, but continuing the research begun in the mid-1950s, the archaeologist and linguistic expert Marija Gimbutas finds out in a specific type of engravings on terracotta objects and sculptures from the Neolithic age a form of writing preceding the cuneiform alphabet, which would testify to the existence of a matrifocal, sedentary civilization based on agriculture, probably peaceful and devoted to the cult of the goddess.

An ancient European society that was swept away by the impact of the Indo-European peoples. These signs, whose meaning we are unable to read, have the angular shapes of a V, M and W and are mostly associated with a powerful and at times terrible life-giving female, central to the social construction of this lost civilization.

According to Gimbutas, they are everywhere, but we can’t recognize them.

Ivana Spinelli’s work focuses on the analysis of codes, signs and languages and on the way in which they circulate, shape us, connect us. The artist masters them and then subjects them to some sort of testing, translating them into different media such as drawing, video, installation, sculpture. Spinelli speculated that this lost writing had to be learned again.

Even if we cannot understand the meaning of this language, in the meantime we can put it back into circulation: through the Zig Zag Protofilosofia series (2017–18) the artist has begun to disseminate these signs on posters and flags on the occasion of public art interventions. She has translated them into a series of movable sculptures and finally developed an app for WhatsApp.

By installing it on your mobile phone you can communicate through icons that restore the language of the goddess to our time. It is not a question of a philological or nostalgic operation, but of interrogating the past in view of the present and at the present time, to provoke a small revolution through an interference: an icon is a threshold, from which another world can perhaps resurface and change ours.

Cecilia Canziani