Alpi Marittime

Alpi Marittime is a series of six photographs documenting actions performed by the artist in the family woods in Garessio, near Cuneo in Piedmont, in 1967-68: ‘I Braided Three Young Trees; It Will Continue to Grow Except at That Point (gripping a trunk and then replacing the imprint with an iron hand); The Tree Will Remember the Contact (inscribing the silhouette of his body on it by embracing it, covered in spikes); My Years Linked by a Copper Wire (placing twenty-one lead weights, corresponding to the artist’s age, along a line formed by his handprint); When Growing, It Will Raise the Net (placing objects on a metal cage atop a tree, the added weight contrasting with the plant’s growth); My Height, the Length of My Arms, My Girth in a Brook (forming a pool in a stream with a frame bearing the imprint of his body)’. Each of these actions aims to alter the growth of a tree or the shape of water through a simple gesture, seeking to merge the artist’s body with that of the vegetal, like an encounter. It is also a reflection on sculpture: here, human action is never definitive but is inserted within the cycle of symbiosis between human and plant, with the tree having started growing before and continuing its course bearing the traces of the artist’s passage. The work exists as a photographic series with the description of the action or title handwritten on it in several copies.Three of these trees have become sculptures in their own right: Alpi Marittime: Alpi Marittime - Ho intrecciato fra loro tre alberelli; Alpi Marittime - Albero, filo di zinco, piombo and Alpi Marittime - Mi sono aggrappato a un albero, namely the three entwined saplings, the tree bearing the lead weights corresponding to the artist’s age, and the one that Penone embraced, his body covered in spikes. These trees, whose evolution Penone photographed over time, had to be cut down in 1985 independently of the artist’s will, and up until then, bore the mark of the artist’s body in their flesh. Removed from the forest and exhibited in a museum, their identity hovers between vegetal and human, both tree and sculpture, simultaneously traces of Penone and remnants of vegetal energy