Submergé, je jette l’éponge solaire
2021, photos, speakers, audio recording, cables, amplifier boards, dried flowers and leaves, molded plastic, raw river clay, lo-fi hydrophones, vynil, common milkweed spreading seeds

 Submergé, je jette l’éponge solaire refers to a fluid space related to memory. The concept of familiarity is explored collecting human traces, in order to recreate a tissue of small fragments of memory without a precise place or time that can be lived – rewritten – again. Symbolically, visual and sound memory is extracted from materials and places, in the search of the conditions in which bodies and the surrounding environment influence the way an experience is recorded. By so, a hybrid landscape is recreated where the information that is lost and that which is gained is re-proposed to explore what arises from new relationships. “Solar sponge” is the first name attributed to the Barite (or the Bologna Stone) around 1602 by Vincenzo Casciarolo, an amateur alchemist, who, referring to the phosphorescent properties of the mineral, claimed that it soaked in sunlight and re-emitted that light in the dark. 

The project is a collaboration by Daniele Di Girolamo and Carlo Lombardi, it begun during a residency at La Chambre Blanche (Québec, CA) and was produced by the Rad’Art center ( Emilia Romagna, IT ) in 2021.