Punta Tagliamento Lighthouse
Bibione, Venice

On the occasion of the Festival Calma Piatta. Pensieri per smuovere le acque, from April 10th to 14th, 2024, in Bibione, the association Menti Libere is pleased to present to the public Perdere di vista la riva and Land Unfolds, two unpublished works by artist Laura Pugno, invited to this inaugural edition.

The works are the result of research that the artist developed during the residency week in March. Laura Pugno was invited to engage with the coastal landscape of Bibione and investigate the urgencies of the climate crisis, focusing her lens and listening to the sea.

In the work "Losing Sight of the Shore" (2024), the artist carves into a concretion of clay emerged from the erosive action of the sea, freeing ancient encoded correspondences from the material. An homage to the sand dune grass, a typical plant of the coastal dunes of Bibione, whose dense root system consolidates the sandy soil, protecting it from erosion; and a reference, in the cuneiform traits of the drawing, to the semaphore alphabet used in the past in the navy for communications between land and sea. A warning not to "lose sight of the shore," a metaphor for human beings and the anthropic footprint of climate upheavals on natural ecosystems, simultaneously an invitation to abandon it, to consciously orient listening to the sea, educating ourselves to live in balance with the Planet Ocean.

The work "Land Unfolds" (2024) evokes the historical memory of the lighthouse with a flag in which the subject portrayed, a marine horizon, undergoes a physical and symbolic cut, creating space for a new terrestrial dwelling capable of assuming the fluid and transient traits of the sea.

Climate change is interpreted by the artist as the possibility for a new beginning and a new reality in which the human being becomes the point of contact between sky and sea, a part of a single, universal, narrative.