Unpredictable, changeable, and unruly, water has inspired the work of countless artists, from classical to contemporary, and since the late 1990s it has been a recurring subject of reflection within Galleria Raffaella Cortese’s exhibition program. Its symbolism permeates the spiritual life of innumerable civilizations: water signifies rebirth and purification, fertile nourishment and an emblem of the feminine principle, yet it is also a potential source of danger to existence and, today, an element itself threatened by human action.
Within this framework, Galleria Raffaella Cortese in Albisola Superiore presents Saying Water by Roni Horn. Each evening at 6 pm, a light turns on, inviting passersby to pause and listen to the artist’s own voice. Visitors are welcomed to sit on Halte, the bench designed by young designer Thibault Malavieille, and to drift into an intimate and contemplative space shaped by thoughts on water.
Saying Water belongs to a body of work that, taken as a whole, forms a true ode to water: an intense and deeply personal investigation of its multiple contents, meanings, and metaphors. As a complex and ever-changing element upon which life depends, water determines the climatic conditions we inhabit, constitutes the greater part of our bodies, and profoundly shapes identity and imagination. As Horn herself writes, “We cannot talk about water without talking about ourselves.”
Roni Horn began collecting the reflections that resonate in Saying Water in the 1990s. These are phrases written by the artist as well as quotations drawn from diverse sources—ranging from the poetry of Emily Dickinson to a novel by William Faulkner, from a film by Michelangelo Antonioni to the songs of Aretha Franklin. These reflections also appear in an earlier, seminal work, the suite of fifteen photographs Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) (1997–1999). Each image captures a small fragment of the Thames’s surface, distinguished by shifting colors, light, and ripples. On closer inspection, a second, deeper layer emerges: small numbers appear on the water’s surface, directing the viewer’s gaze toward the lower edge of each print, where a series of footnotes unfolds, extending the act of looking into one of reading, interpretation, and immersion.
What do you know about water? Only that it’s everywhere differently.
(When you see your reflection in water, do you recognize the water in you?)
It’s so easy to project yourself onto water. Its violence, calmness, changeableness are mine (or yours). I can’t separate its moods from my own. But then I don’t really believe they’re separate anyway.
Water is always an intimate experience; you can’t separate yourself from it.
Indivisible continuity is intrinsic to water. This continuity exceeds us even while being the biggest part of us. It’s this continuity that makes our effect on water an effect on us. That is to say: “I am the Thames!” or “The Thames is me”
Can the river dissolve your identity just standing near it, just standing nearby and watching it?
Confused? Lost? Large expanses of water are like desert; no landmarks, no differences to distinguish here from there. (If you don’t know where you are, can you know who you are?) Just tumult everywhere, endlessly. Tumult modulating into another tumult, allover and without end. The chance is so constant, so pervasive, so relentless that identity, place, scale – all measure lessen, weaken – eventually disappear. The more time you spend around this water – the more faint your memories of measure become.
Water is sexy. It’s the purity of it, the transparency, the passivity, the aggression of it.
When I look at water, especially this water, I find myself wondering about it: its mechanics, its poetics, and so on. I wander in my thoughts. I go places. Water is lubricant to other places.
Water is tolerant. It accepts everything that comes to it, and all the things we put into it.
In the River Thames, in an Artic iceberg, in your drinking glass, in that drop of rain, on that frosty window pane in your eyes, and in every other microscopic, microcosmic part of you (and me), all waters converge.
Water is lubricant to other places. It dilutes gravity when you’re in it; it reduces friction when you’re around it. Almost any form of water: rivers, lakes, oceans, even sinks will do. My mind roams freely, breezily near it. My thoughts take me backward and forward; time has no direction near water.
Watching rain fall on water calms and quiets me. I feel the space of the river changed; it becomes more a part of the things around it: a part of the weather, a part of the sky, and somehow more a part of me.
Watching the water, I am stricken with vertigo of meaning.
Water is the final conjugations: an infinity of form, relation, and content. (I never know where I’m standing when I’m standing by the river.)
This water confuses me. When I’m by the river I wonder: Who am I? Where am I? What is this?
Have you ever looked at the river and had the idea that the water is tricky? (Not just the currents but the lure of it, the spell it casts when you come too close?)
A boatman described the tendency of jumpers to stand on the parapet of the bridge and stare down at the water for a while and then let go—face down into the river.
Roni Horn, selected footnotes from Still Water (The River Thames, for Example)
Images courtesy the artist and Galleria Raffaella Cortese. Photo: Andrea Rossetti
You stand back and see the photograph from some distance and have that visual experience. Then you move in on the photograph to see the detail and at that point you start to see the numbers floating in the water and you’re able to read the footnotes. In this moment you’re going from a horizontal to a vertical view. In going vertical, it’s like going into a well, going into something. And in this case the footnotes provided a precise metaphor of entering that space in a vertical sense. That’s how I was thinking of “Still Water” - what happens when you can just stand there and effectively go into deep space.
I began writing the notes for Still Water a year before I started photographing the Thames... Much of it was written as reverie, my reverie, evolving quickly into a manic, obsessive, endless flow of consciousness, and finally becoming a litany with chorus-like elements... I wrote these notes in the solitude of myself but I did so anticipating your arrival. A triangle is formed between you, me (the voice in the footnotes) and the photographs. All three elements are inextricably bound together in the act of experiencing the work.
Roni Horn
Installation view of Still Water (The River Thames, for Example) at Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel