Published by Elisa Zadi at 15 November 2020

Pensiero-Azione-Destino

Pensiero-Azione-Destino, 2017, performance, 20' variabile

The performance is conceived as an initiatory-purifying ritual

ritual that will connect a natural element, an olive tree, with the artist's body. Colors, shapes and actions will follow one another in a mutability of symbolic and symbiotic events between the woman and the tree, to which the public will be invited to participate by unfolding scroll-woodcuts containing messages that will assume the rituality of the gift understood as a gesture of offering.

"Thought-Action-Destiny" is inspired by the homonymous text by Marco Ferrini, philosopher and director of the Bhaktivedanta Study Center in Pisa. In this essay the importance and power of thought is claimed as the primary action of our being and of our will on the fulfillment of destiny. The performance is experienced as a decisive and cathartic moment of Elisa Zadi's spiritual and artistic will. The artist questions herself in a work where art and life merge and in which the actions of one determine and establish the existence of the other. In the present in which performance is achieved, the principles of one's future are established.

The performative actions determine the choices made by Zadi that manifest themselves through acts performed at a precise moment, hic et nunc, and that generate ritual-actions that will establish the principle of one's being and the fulfillment of one's destiny. The scene opens around an olive tree. The elements involved transmit a measured and symmetrical sensation, harmonized in the environment by colors and positions that give a decisive and essential structure. The tree, the water, the earth, the wind, the song are elements that actively participate in the actions, creating suggestions with an archaic reverberation that lead back to the strength of a bond between man and nature, in which sharing is made deep and initiatory.

The strong ideological motivation that pushes Elisa Zadi to confront and question herself in a versatility of expressive languages, from painting, to installation, to performance, never excludes the importance that practical work and aesthetic rendering play in her modus operands. The artist personally created the clothes worn during the performance, both in the modeling and in the dyeing of the fabrics, in order to “graft” into the work from its genesis the modalities of the ritual, in which each gesture has a symbolic value. The pigments, normally used in the colors with which Zadi paints, become here the coloring principle of the fabrics and the cathartic key of turning between blood and pain, represented by red, and the new life, represented by white and the transparency of clear water. Like many of Zadi's performative works, “Thought-Action-Destiny” also makes use of the participation of the public.

Elisa Zadi explains: “I started to want the public to become an active part of my works, I no longer wanted it to be just a spectator. I wanted to involve him so that he would become a living part and complete the meaning of my work in a communion that has the power of sharing and passion ”. "These works", he continues, "can only be accomplished with the participation of the public: only in this way do I feel that the work can truly end".

Elisa Zadi: the union of the fragment

Critical text by Erika Lacava

The performance "Thought-Action-Destiny" by Elisa Zadi reveals the sacredness and rituality inherent in everyday life through the very high symbolic value and the solemnity that characterizes all her work, from the portraits with severe and haughty faces, to the slow and reflective movements of his performative actions. Figures and gestures become essential, the bodies and objects involved become essences, symbols to represent absolute entities. Elisa Zadi draws heavily from ancient and popular tradition on the one hand and from the legacy of pictorial representation of the past on the other. We find again Velasquez, to whom he dedicates, for the Pecci Museum in Prato, an update of "Las Meninas", and Piero della Francesca, whose frescoes of the "Stories of the True Cross" in Arezzo seem to have left traces in the artist's works, which in the Tuscan city he studied Fashion and Theatrical Costume before specializing in Sacred Art at the European University of Rome: two disciplines which he treasures in his art. Pierfranciscan influences are evident in Zadi's work not only in the personalization and updating of the Maestro's works, as in the installation-performative work "Blu Guado" inspired by the Madonna del Parto preserved in Monterchi, but also and above all in the fragmented vision and then recomposed typical of his works. If in Piero della Francesca this vision was reserved for the landscapes behind the main representations, in the Zadi the portioned vision is a constant stylistic code of the whole work, from the partial self-portraits, in which the artist agrees to get naked with the honesty of a soul in search of itself, showing a truth that is revealed only in parts, to polyptychs made up of fragments of different materials, unified a posteriori by the viewer's gaze. And it is thanks to the viewer, in a mechanism similar to that of Gestalt psychology, that fragmentation is resolved into a conceptual and metaphorical unity.The viewer in the performance plays even more the role of unifying principle: between different actions, gestures and objects he slowly rediscovers that meaning that gradually becomes manifest to him. And it is no coincidence that the spectator of "Thought-Action-Destiny" is left with a scroll with a symbolic message to decipher, which will accompany him on his future path as a wish. Zadi's performances are made up of simple and strongly symbolic gestures. We rediscover in “Thought-Action-Destiny” the fundamental link between man and nature, and the more specific one between art and life. Each devised and then carried out action is resolved in the destiny that was already present in a nutshell in that action. An agricultural regenerative action such as cutting a tree branch is here revived in art and personified by the cutting of a lock of the artist's hair. The woman becomes a tree and a new beginning in that part of herself that dies to give rise to new life, in a path in which, to reach joy, one necessarily passes by pain. And the audience is theatrically, ritually and cathartically made part of the process. It is no coincidence that the colors used in Zadi's clothes are fundamental in every generative phase: vegetable green, from which the performance begins, white, red and black. The cut is symbolized by the red of the blood, the new life by the clear water that purifies and regenerates. The black earth that welcomes both the branch and the lock of buried hair becomes a tomb and sowing ground together, signing a pact between the end and the beginning, death and life.