10-POINT INTERVIEW

1. What is your name? Pamela

2. Where were you born? Tivoli in the province of Rome

3. Where do you live? Medolago in the province of Bergamo

4. Your favourite colour ? Blue in all its shades

5. The city where you would live best? I have moved many times and each time it was the right place for me at that time. I have realised over time that there is no place I would live better than in the present. It took me a while to accept my strongly nomadic identity, even though my actions spoke and speak for themselves. Let's say that in a way I have made peace with myself and to this day I can say that here in Medolago, on the island of Bergamo, I am comfortable.

6. The musician who wrote the soundtrack of your life? Undoubtedly Johann Sebastian Bach. As difficult as it may seem to understand, in his music, in addition to analogies with classical geometry, there is a strong connection with fractal geometry. The close connection between Bach's music and Mandelbrot's fractal ensemble reveals not only an extraordinary discovery, but also a poetic connection. 7. The book of the heart and your favourite author ? "Fragments of an Unknown Teaching" by P.D. Ouspensky. As for the author, until a few years ago I would have said G. Deleuze, but lately I'm favouring K.G. Jung again.

8. The film that impressed you the most? Dune

9. Favourite artist and architect? Leonardo da Vinci and Louis Kahn

10. What is the word that best describes you? Lightness

Writing about Pamela Ferri surrounded by her works is a great benefit, but mainly a great exercise in reasoning. Although the themes on which her artistic research is based can basically be traced back to three, geometry, space and the universe, the complexity of these and the wealth of interconnections between them makes it complicated to encapsulate this wealth in a piece of writing. Pamela Ferri's works are alive and pulsating and generate different sensations each time one comes into contact with them, sensations that only after a long process of reflection manage to take the form of words. Paradoxically, it is as if the creative path that generates the work is transferred into the works themselves and they transmit it to the observer, through the dynamism and multiplicity of facets they contain. And so even the path of writing only if it becomes a creative path that is made up of different moments of observation and restitution of a succession of visions, succeeds in giving the idea of Pamela Ferri's artistic production.

The premise serves to introduce us into the world of A step away from the stars , the site-specific installation for SpazioCima in Rome. Already the title recalls one of the themes Pamela Ferri works on, perhaps the first, the one from which her research springs, the universe. The cosmos is the source of her creativity from which she releases the energy necessary for the theorisation and then rationalisation of the poetics behind the installations. Everything stems from a matrix, MatriceMater, conceived by the artist as an umpteenth constellation that she perceives in the universe and materialises on earth. The process of creation, generated by a defined technical procedure, materialises geometric entities that constitute the work in the same way as the myriads of stars form galaxies.

It is a technical process that starts from a "basic code similar to an open five-pointed star rotating counterclockwise along a spiral curve. But that's not all, because its dimensions tend towards infinity thanks to its ability to replicate the initial code in different scales reminiscent of fractal geometry," as Pamela Ferri herself states. And the universe is always present. "From the Universe to its inverse" is Pamela Ferri's first solo exhibition in Rome, at Interno 14, where there is the idea that artistic research is a dynamic act that springs from the artist's gesture that emanates energy in the same way as that generated by the primary expansion of the universe. A contagious energy that activates other people who at any given moment find themselves in this place that Ferri calls a section, which is a gash, a cut between opposite worlds. A cut represented by a thicker line, as is done in architectural drawings, or in another colour, but always in a two-dimensional representation. Spatiality begins to peep out with the first configurations of (Z)n ZERO, the materialisation of the Universal Matrix, according to Pamela Ferri's code. And multiple are the spatial configurations that the (Z)n ZERO structure can take on in the same context or in different contexts as the relationship between the different elementary Matrices that compose it varies, the vision that the artist has, a vision also linked to the suggestions that the place where the installation takes shape suggests.

And this is where the second element comes into play, geometry, Euclidean as well as non-Euclidean. Everything starts with elementary geometric figures, the rhombus. "The matrix is generated by a rhombus in which an ellipse is inscribed and which contains a circle". "The rhombus because it is a dynamic figure with respect to the square and allows the rotation that is necessary to generate the matrix. The ellipse because it has two foci and is therefore more complex than the circle, which, however, includes it. In fact, in the figure I am drawing there is a circle and its diameter is the size of the segment joining the two foci of the ellipse," is how Pamela Ferri describes the geometry at the origin of the matrix. The combination of so many of these original matrices and their rotation generates elements that can be traced back to fractal theory. Thus, from the combination of simple forms, the complex geometric articulations that are the generators of the works are born. And geometry contains within itself a symbolism that leads back to the ancestral archetypes preserved in the depths of each human being.

And so it happens that the work intrigues us, attracts us, and eventually engulfs us. In fact, that space in which Pamela Ferri has moved since the beginning of her research, clear and defined for her and for a few people who were able to grasp the spatial dimension in her drawings, in "A step away from the stars " materialises and involves everyone, it becomes a space of interaction. The definition "artist working in space", coined for her on the occasion of her first solo exhibition at Interno 14 in Rome, becomes tangible for everyone and not only for the few visionaries who were able to grasp the spatiality in the two-dimensionality of the drawing. The third characteristic, the space, full of dynamism and movement, the place where the forces that generate the work move according to the rules of physics, is also populated by visitors. Those sectional signs, traced in the drawings, gradually took shape and, in the same way as they had taken shape in the architectures, night club A Tu x Tu and Casa Artale in Rome, structure in Palermo, became installations that, in different configurations, materialised and lived a life of their own in the places where they found a home.

And to close, a short interview, like the one at the beginning, with the same questions asked ten years ago on the occasion of the exhibition at Interno 14 in Rome. From this comparison, one can understand all the complexity of Pamela Ferri's artistic journey over these ten years.

THE GAME OF OPPOSITES

The straight line or the curved line? The curved line because in itself contains the straight line.

The sphere or the spiral? Spiral

Plato or Aristotle? Plato

Wright or Le Corbusier? Wright

Boccioni or Carrà? Carrà

Text by Anna Baldini