Richard Nonas e Camillo Sbarbaro
Lichens. A Sample Kit of the World is the title of the last book written by poet Camillo Sbarbaro. As a teenager fascinated by herbaria and then as an internationally renowned lichenologist, Sbarbaro collected 2754 lichen samples, stored in yellow paper envelopes on which he noted down their scientific name, place and date of collection, and relative folder number. Today the collection is held by the Natural History Museum in Genoa.
Sbarbaro developed a passion for lichens as a child, on his walks in Liguria with his father, whose passing instilled in him the grief that pervades his second anthology, Pianissimo, from 1914. The sense of his pointwise verse seems to reach into the deeper meaning of commentary as a note on the world, the key to the possible: “I wrote far too much on lichens,” he told Montale, “with no specific knowledge, just curiosity, visual delight, sympathy—the same sympathy that draws me to all that is inconspicuous, to what for others is unimportant, or paltry.” Lichens—“a mold plus a fungus, two weaknesses that together make a strength”—seem to mirror the antithetical and existential fragmentariness of his poetry, a conscious living on the margins that insightfully cleaves apart modernity and future, and which perhaps verily finds its synthesis in his method for cataloguing and conserving lichens: “To stay young is to forget.”
Richard Nonas’ work retains a constant tension with his training as an anthropologist: “Anthropology gave me doubt as the definition of human life. It gave me doubt as its own justification: a ringing, all-encompassing, energizing, positive doubt as the ongoing justification of life. Anthropology gave me the gift of continual doubt. But sculpture forced me to use it.”
In Nonas’ sculptures, doubt becomes authentic perspective—per, through, forward, specto, to look at or contemplate—transcending the visual or perceptive dimension to become empathic and emotive sight. In Grey Garden, the metal and stone objects seem to rewrite, in the space of the hall, the paths and trajectories of a symbolic garden that does not change for the nature of its elements, but in its relationship with it, in its journeys, its routes, in its imaginary pathways that play on difference, on “the ingrained habit of positive and powerful uncertainty that the actualities of other people’s lives forced upon me.”
Le travail de Richard Nonas conserve une tension constante avec sa formation d’anthropologue : « L’anthropologie m’a fait le don du doute permanent. Mais la sculpture m’a obligé à l’utiliser. »
Dans Grey Garden, les formes de métal et de pierre semblent réécrire les chemins et les trajectoires d’un jardin symbolique qui ne change pas par la nature de ses éléments, mais par la relation avec celui-ci, par ses parcours, ses routes, ses sentiers imaginaires joués sur la différence, « sur le sentiment, fort et positif, d’incertitude que la réalité des vies d’autrui m’a insufflé. »
La passion pour les herbiers, qui fera de lui un lichénologue de renommée internationale, est née chez le poète Camillo Sbarbaro lorsqu’il était enfant, lors de ses promenades en Ligurie avec son père.
« Sur les lichens, j’ai écrit bien trop — dit-il à Montale — aucune connaissance spécifique, seulement de la curiosité, du plaisir visuel, de la sympathie : la même qui me pousse vers tout ce qui n’est pas voyant, ce qui est sans importance pour les autres… Les lichens semblent être le miroir d’une poétique fragmentaire, antithétique et existentielle, d’une marginalité consciente… »
