The water has receded and Sweet Home has resumed its prone position. As I approach, I hear someone calling me. It is Gino, an eighty-six-year-old pensioner who often wanders around the floodplain.
He immediately shows me a boat anchor cable with signs of being crushed. Together we notice the clearly visible line that water mixed with mud has left around the perimeter of the work. It is the waterline.
On the ground, we observe the traces that the silhouette of the ark has imprinted after two years of quiet positioning in immobility. We then share some questions, exchange impressions, doubts and amazement. Of course we know something about Archimedes' principle, but fourteen tonnes of CorTen raised to a water level of less than a metre is still quite a discovery.
I remind him that Cavenago's work was born from the sharing of several skills: the study of a naval engineer, a cut and assembly of the material, corten, at a specialised workshop with extraordinary craftsmen welders that I have seen at work. All people who, thanks to Umberto Cavenago, I had the pleasure of meeting.
Never as in our times, since art can be made with everything, as Angela Vettese says, there are so many artists who make use of collaborations. So much nonsense would not be said if one realised the processes and operations that are interwoven in the formation of an idea through to the realisation of a work of art.
Gino tells me that he only went to primary schools, but he understands these things well after having worked a lifetime, a farmer and then a worker in a forklift company. He tells me that alone one accomplishes little; he gives me some examples of teachings he has received on several occasions in his work and of many things achieved through collaborations.
At the end he comes up with a proverb that absorbs all our discussions and raises many more questions in my head.
Gino says: 'Ad vün as pöl fa sensa, ad töti no'*.
We reaffirm the plural coexistence, the enrichment that encounter and exchange promote. Either we are all saved or nobody is saved.
Isn't that the meaning of Sweet Home?
(*) You can do without one, not all. (Literal translation)
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