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Lunario per sonnambuli (Almanac for Sleepwalkers)

A paraphrase for the Lunario dei sonnambuli (Sleepwalkers' Almanac)

Laura Catini by Laura Catini
02/09/2025
in Books, Focus
Lunario per sonnambuli (Almanac for Sleepwalkers)

Lunario per sonnambuli (Almanac for Sleepwalkers) is an editorial project conceived by Zaelia Bishop, edited by Nicoletta Provenzano for the series Traffici d’artista (Artist’s Traffic), curated by Carmelo Cipriani, who also wrote the afterword, for Esperidi editions. The series, launched in 2013, contains pages in which artists and their art meet the printed page.

The artist’s book, the eleventh in the series, following the nine previous books characterised by white covers with black details and text, has a cover dominated by the colour black. It is published in a limited edition of one hundred numbered copies, each personalised with a screen print of slate by the artist. The graphic design is by Zaelia Bishop and Matilda Prisco.

Zaelia Bishop’s Lunario per sonnambuli descends into the sharpest ravines of memory, boundless dispersion between the passable lands of truth and dreamlike digressions in distant islands of memory, now faithfully portrayed in its profile, now altered by steep memorial sensations.

Not coincidentally, there are two voices in a continuous and disjointed dialogue, just like the primary voice of the actor and his chorus, which, however, does not follow the intentionality of the first subject but often detaches itself from it. The language rich in allusions and references to a past that, in order to be examined, requires not only a great willingness to investigate but also a strong cultural knowledge capable of discerning symbols and terms condensed into an unusual and precious imaginative richness, giving rise to a sincere “συμπάθεια” (sympatheia), an emotional impact that transcends reality and involves readers, in a single breath, in a feeling of participation in both positive and negative emotions.

In fact, the short form of the verses and the refined layout seem to bring back the verses of Greek epigrams in capturing significant aspects of both reality and dreams, like biting inscriptions or compositions with the poetic aim of retracing the memory of what has happened.

The artist’s verses are undoubtedly brief incisions of poetic colour, starting from a visual and auditory image of the fall and subsequent shattering of slate into sharp, living fragments, and exploring the roots of the present and the shoots of the past.

The first image that opens the precious little volume, the Pyramidion, symbol of a dialogue between matter and spirit and the beginning of a journey of awakening and discovery between dream and reality, between the lived and the dreamed, between the possessed and the desired, thus appears spontaneous to us. Like slate, granite can also bear inscriptions that are volatile over time. A fragile and variable writing that collects a temporal hierarchy, from childhood to adulthood, between heaven and earth, a continuous rebirth between the earthly and the celestial world, a bridge between the physical and the invisible plane.

Pyramidion

Estrema

Unità

Integra

Thus, a dimension that disperses and, at the same time, protects in its own non-place.

Ovunque [everywhere]

Nascondimi [hide me]

As a propitiatory prayer addressed to a mother faithful to her love, there is a request not to be revealed in the light of Ra but to be supported by the Eye of Horus.

La capanna di felci [The fern hut]

In this second act, the duplicity of the voice begins. Ferns have a resistant texture that gives the shelter all the solidity evoked by the Pyramidion, in a natural and wild environment, so familiar. Although a temporary observation point, it is a stable dwelling in which the narrator affirms:

Qui ricordo il letto di un fiume [Here I remember a riverbed],

oppure un sentiero di rami e pietre [or a path of branches and stones]

While the choral voice pushes towards a second, non-antithetical memory:

Qui ricordi quanto fosse rapido il vento sopra i tetti [Here you remember how fast the wind was above the rooftops]

The editor of the volume, Nicoletta Provenzano, rises to a oneiromancy of the mind that recalls intimate and ancestral places of the past, according to a tectonics of reminiscences. This is certainly a critical reading to be pursued in the conveyance of the artist’s experience. Ferns introduce another element, in their value as lucky charms for many cultures, from which they are associated with propitiatory rituals for protection against evil and for the wish for prosperity, as well as with a strong connection to Nature, with its vital vigour and sense of purification.

The incipit of the book thus appears as a propitiatory and purifying ritual of entry into a world as intimate as it is precipitous, where the wind blows fast over the shelter itself and in the cradle of life itself. And the roof becomes a door, from which one can look down and in the opposite direction and from which one can spy on the pigeons’ nests.

Fragility becomes strength and a vantage point from which to observe the fantastic. And the chorus intervenes again as a mother, both for the postcard sent and torn, and for the apple described in the first person, in that “planet of giant islands”, a place that appeared to the narrator. And again, in the lightness and elegance that assimilate an oriental ideogram to a snowflake, the memory of a private and profound gesture flows, the union of the stars in oracles or archipelagos.

Then emerges the detachment of the chorus, which admits the error of the distance of a summer, during which the narrator’s paths diverge. However, the reminiscences continue in the figure of a tree, where the narrator and the chorus went to steal cherries, the same tree from which the narrator had fallen. A fall that was perhaps physical and, at the same time, symbolic, like the cherries.

The cherry is blood and heart, a fruit that does not betray the reader’s arrival at this particular point in the libretto but, on the contrary, endows them with full awareness of the moment. If the reading evolves into a climax in terms of intensity, it is necessary to remember the warning to the Eastern world that Sakura are equivalent to rebirth, vanitas and ephemeral beauty. Thus, we can glimpse the flower of the invisible, the rebirth of πάντα ῥεῖ, of “everything flows”. The author will forgive me for referring to The Cherry Orchard, Chekhov‘s last play, whose melancholic text strikes the reader with the immediacy of the emotions it evokes. Above all, the cherry trees are characterised by their symbolic meaning in the verses that recall how in May they are in bloom, but it is still cold in the garden. The arrival of these verses expresses that part of ourselves that time tends to diminish, even if it goes against our dreams. It is a metaphor for the nostalgic surrender to a world of desires and illusions, harpooned by the passing of time and a renewed reality. Memories of games unfold, such as pretending to have swallow’s eyes and puma’s teeth.

Queste sono le rovine dove si impigliano [These are the ruins where]

le mute dei serpenti [snake skins get caught]

Dietro quelle cortecce covano [Behind that bark],

larve di falena [moth larvae]

Shedding skin is also individual change. Under the bark, that liminal layer, the buds of rebirth are hidden. The end of summer and the call of the owl are unconscious and authentic consequences, in their being symbols of wisdom and mystery. One sees beyond the darkness, beyond the darkness frozen in the room and fallen to pieces, just like the metamorphic rock that has fallen to the ground and broken into several parts that now transmute and place themselves at the centre of the “story” in verse.

Dal fondo di questo pozzo si risale cambiati (…) [From the bottom of this well, one rises changed (…)]

Io sono per te le ore di veglia e l’ascia bipenne [I am for you the waking hours and the double-headed axe]

The chorus links the “I” to reflection, to a time when one can distance oneself from the chaos of everyday life for introspection, for spiritual quests, when the veil between the material-earthly world and the spiritual world is thinned, and to the double-headed axe which, for some ancient cultures, is a symbol of power, royalty, divine strength and the duality of life and death. It is often associated with the phases of the moon. Towards the end, there is an allusion to dialogue. The Lunario now appears clear to us, expressing all the volatility of life through a feminine and maternal face.

Cos’altro c’è stato?[What else was there?]

Più niente, [Nothing else],

la polvere della polvere [dust of dust],

nebbia di calce [lime fog],

pulviscolo d’ossa [bone dust]

In questa grotta dove finisce il fiume [In this cave where the river ends]

restano le carcasse di ogni cosa che è stata [remain the carcasses of everything that has been]

Questo è un letto, e adesso dormiamo. [This is a bed, and now we sleep].

The volume closes in the placid calm of a riverbed in the lime mist. A parenthesis of high poetry that tightly binds the life of then and the life of now, metamorphosing those fragments into new units of meaning.

Lunario per sonnambuli (Almanac for Sleepwalkers), 2025, artist’s book conceived by Zaelia Bishop, project curated by Nicoletta Provenzano for the series Traffici d’artista (Artist’s Traffics), curated by Carmelo Cipriani

images: (cover 1) Zaelia Bishop, «Lunario per sonnambuli», Edizioni Esperidi, Collana Traffici d’artista (inside), photo Ludovica Annes (2) Zaelia Bishop and Nicoletta Provenzano at the book’s presentation, Curva Pura, Rome, Courtesy Curva Pura, photo Ludovica Annes (3) Zaelia Bishop, «Lunario per sonnambuli», Esperidi Editions, Series Traffici d’artista (inside), photo Ludovica Annes

 

 

Tags: Laura CatiniNicoletta ProvenzanoZaelia Bishop
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