Right: Giuseppe Penone, Fleuve (River), 2019 matita e inchiostro di china su carta / pencil and china ink on paper 33 x 48 cm photo © Archivio Penone.
Per la sua apertua la Fondazione Vuslat ha ideato un grande progetto con il noto scultore Giuseppe Penone.
L'evento intitolato "The Listener" presenta una scultura alta nove metri in forma di albero che sarà sommersa nella Laguna di Venezia nell'area delle Gaggiandre all'Arsenale.
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Marking its public launch, Vuslat Foundation presents The Listener, a monumental installation by leading Italian artist, Giuseppe Penone at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, running 22 May to 21 November 2021. Penone’s nine-metre-high sculpture in the form of a tree will be submerged in the Venetian Lagoon at the Gaggiandre in the Arsenale.
Responding to the theme of the Biennale Architettura 2021, How will we live together?, Vuslat Foundation’s presentation, in close collaboration with Chus Martínez, opens a global conversation about how we can create spaces for listening in 21st century society. The Listener is a new edition of Penone’s widely celebrated series of works Idee di Pietra - Olmo (Ideas of Stone - Elm), a sculpture formed of an elm tree cradling a heavy stone between its branches.
Hashim Sarkis, curator of Biennale Architettura 2021, who invited Vuslat Foundation to present the Special Event of this year’s exhibition says: ‘Vuslat Foundation is truly inspiring. A project that highlights the need for our conception of space to change from a space of seeing, to a space for listening.’
Artist, Giuseppe Penone explains, ‘The thoughts contained within a human brain are like the countless crystals within a stone, suspended between the branches of a tree. The veins of water that spring from the ground flow into the bodies of living beings, in the streams that flow into rivers, which then flow into the sea. A tree that rises from the water evokes the fluidity of which we find ourselves a part.’
‘Why then a tree?’ Chus Martínez, curator-at-large at Vuslat Foundation, commented: ‘Because a tree reveals to us the fundamental aspects of nature and its consciousness, since a tree is all attention. Its life depends on ‘listening’ to all the elements, to taking them in. It is a dynamic of mutuality. We would like to work with artists, storytellers, but also educators and designers to strengthen the many different bonds that will be the foundation of a transformative process towards equality and a non-binary world.’
The Listener will be activated in the months ahead through a series of public events and performances that reflect and expand on Vuslat Foundation’s research about the potential of listening for global recovery. Vuslat Doğan Sabancı, founder of Vuslat Foundation, comments ‘The world does not need more platforms for expression. We need to start creating initiatives for listening where we feel authentically connected to each other and ourselves.” In line with Vuslat Foundation’s mission to create awareness of and spread the skill of ‘Generous Listening’, beyond engaging with our minds and more with our hearts empathetically, - the Penone installation is presented as a symbolic prompt of the potential generous listener within each of us. A cultural intervention to stop us in our tracks, it is a rallying call for new, expanded definitions of what listening might be or look like - whether listening to ourselves, others or nature.
In parallel with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, Vuslat Doğan Sabancı, former Chairwoman of Turkey’s leading news organisation, Hürriyet, is establishing the new Vuslat Foundation as a platform to place Generous Listening at the very core of human connections by 2030. The focus on the potential of listening as a tool to catalyse change in response to the most pressing issues of the 21st century, is the outcome of Doğan Sabancı’s career in media and publishing. In early 2020, Doğan Sabancı convened international thought-leaders, artists, storytellers and scientists to discuss the key question: can listening make a fundamental and positive difference in the way we live? A strong consensus was reached that generous listening is an overlooked tool that has the potential to engage with root causes rather than surface symptoms. This will be the first of Vuslat Foundation's many planned global programmes reaching diverse constituencies in dialogue with the foundation’s Advisory Circle and partnership with artists, storytellers, change-makers and thought-leaders
Vuslat Doğan Sabancı comments, ‘It is an honour to be invited to place the concept of Generous Listening at the heart of this renowned global stage with so many world-leading collaborators. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into stark relief significant and urgent global challenges that have been long simmering in the background: worsening climate change, ballooning income inequality, polarised political discourse, identity-based violence, mental health – all epidemics in their own right. To make true progress, we need not only the rights of free speech and expression but also the right for the root causes to be listened to and understood on a deeper level. We invite anyone serious about change to join us in elevating this new, deeper form of listening as the much-needed step to find courageous, new responses to our biggest challenges.’
