Grazia Toderi and Orhan Pamuk: Words and Stars

"I decided to project video because its material is light, which travels and appears when it encounters a surface, and also because it can be simultaneously transmitted around the world... I would like the writing to also be a sensitive and human sign, like cities seen from above are sensitive and human signs. All handwriting is the same and different from all others. All handwriting is also an involuntary secret portrait.”
–Grazia Toderi about Words and Stars project
 

Words and Stars (2013–16) is a project born in 2013, when the Nobel prize-winner Orhan Pamuk, fascinated by the work of Grazia Toderi, invited the artist to create a work for his Museum of Innocence in Istanbul. The research and the exchange of words, sources and images that underpin the project focus on humanity’s inclination to explore space and its innate propensity to investigate the stars.

More than three years of conversations, encounters and correspondence have resulted in the realization of a project that hybridizes languages. A continuous process, in search of the affinities between the complexity of metaphysical questions and the simplicity of the joy of gazing at the stars. Against the background of Istanbul at night, the love of Füsun and Kemal, protagonists of The Museum of Innocence, evokes constellations and words.

Presented for the first time at the Mart, the work takes the form of a trilogy divided into a monologue, a dialogue and a conversation on the stars: three large and immersive multi-screen installations composed of eight video projections, in which images and writings are fused. Thus the cosmological predilection that is an integral part of the project finds expression in a single visual and literary corpus.