Creator Vesevo

In love with Naples where he lives, Jean-Noël Schifano organized a great number of exhibitions there when he was the director of the French Cultural Institute. The one the municipality of Herculanum asked him for a few years ago was among the most original: to create a path, an itinerary of ten sculptures on the slopes of the Vesuvius. The book traces the creation of these works, whether figurative or not, commissioned to Mark Brusse, to Berrocal (it was his creation before his death), to Lello Esposito or Icelandic artist Ruri. His originality is the material he used - lava (a word of Neapolitan origin)is so hard that in comparison marble seems "like butter" - as well as from the amazing bureaucratic feat he accomplished: the slopes of the Vesuvius were protected and it is a priori impossible to displace a pebble or cut a single blade of grass. Alain Volut’s photographs in black and white show the epic combat led by the workers to cut the stone according to the wish of the artists, who sometimes pick up the scissors, like Denis Monfleur. The curator baptized this itinerary, inaugurated in 2005, Creator Vesevo, inspired from Leopardi’s famous verse Exterminator Vesevo.

• Creator Vesevo by Jean-Noël Schifano, photographs by Alain Volut, Gallimard, 2008, 128 p., 29 €, ISBN : 9-782070-122929