Giuseppe Stampone: Why the sky above belongs to everyone, and the earth below doesn’t?

The sky belongs to every eye,
and if it likes, each and every one,
can view the moon entirely,
the stars, the comets and the sun.

Every eye can view everything
and nothing is ever lacking there:
the last one who looks at the sky
does not find it less shining.

So please explain to me,
in prose or even verses,
why the sky is only one
and the Earth is all in pieces.

The nursery rhyme “The sky belongs to everyone” by Gianni Rodari inspires Giuseppe Stampone’s solo exhibition at THE POOL NYC gallery in Milan.

Why the sky above belongs to everyone, and the earth below doesn’t?, ironic title, stresses on a view of the sky, imagined as a free space compared to the earth, inhabited by man and therefore divided into private lots. In fact, the sky, which in a less poetic way is called airspace, belongs to the states and is managed accordingly. Dominus soli est dominus usque ad sidera et usque ad inferos (the owner of the land is owner to the underworld and up to the stars) is stated in a Roman Law maxim, slightly mitigated in article 840 of the Italian Civil Code.

If you look in a more attentive way, perhaps with a telescope, you realize that the sky goes even beyond the air routes and that includes the orbits of the satellites, that are occupied, in the sense of occupatio rei nullius (occupation of the nobody’s thing: nobody’s or everybody’s?) of Roman law, by rich countries to the detriment of the poorest ones. The latter, as of today, do not have the technologies to exploit them. Certainly they will soon have no more available sky.

With this exhibition, Giuseppe Stampone revolutionizes the sky, regenerates it, creates a new one, without political constraints, boundaries, rules: he frees the oil on the foam, chases and lets the blue flow, creator, make up of a new independent firmament. Stampone gives dimension, length, width, density, gives shape to the desire for freedom of man.

The artist shows us another sky, allowing us to buy some of the freedom we see when we look upwards, allowing the viewer to take home a fragment.

The freedom of the great spaces, of the deserts that are not only those of sand but also of water, the oceans, and of air, the sky.

In Giuseppe Stampone’s sky you can abandon yourself without asking for permissions, protocols, or authorizations. You do not need passports to travel in the Stampone’s skies that are free from geopolitical canons.

Man by right is the owner of the sky, but he does not notice that it is taken away from him. Thanks to art we make a sky that belongs to us, a swish of wings that are freed in the painted blue, an absence of borders, walls, customs, absolute freedom, infinite possibilities.

Stampone underlines the importance of the performative gesture with oil painting, intended as a liberating act that allows us to reflect on the current issue of spatial georeferencing.

If it is true that the earth tends to lose its diversity, we risk that the sky reflects the earth more and more.

As in every new project, the artist creates the architecture of intelligence, a participatory platform, where he unites mind, body and space, mind, body and network. In this case his network, as he has been doing for years, is made up of artists who share their work and participate in a common project. In a globalized and homologated era the uniqueness of each identity becomes indispensable to recreate a world that is both shared and unique.

For Why the sky above belongs to everyone, and the earth below doesn’t? Giuseppe Stampone asked Paola Angelini, Luigi Carboni, Fabrizio Cotognini, Matteo Fato, Ugo La Pietra, Maria Morgagni, Marco Neri, Paolo Parisi, Alfredo Pirri, Eugenio Tibaldi, Gian Maria Tosatti, giving spatial coordinates (30x40 cm), to create a possible sky.

Giuseppe Stampone (1974, Cluses, France) lives and works between Bruxelles and Rome.

Giuseppe Stampone alternates drawings made with BIC ballpoint pen and multimedia installations. His art is a form of political protest and invites the public to reflect on fundamental issues such as immigration, water shortage and war. He established solstizio.org, co-funded by the European Union and developed in various countries, based on artistic interventions in which the new generations deal with global contemporary issues such as environment, social conflicts and sustainable economies. In Solstizio Stampone realized several installations in public spaces with the participation of 30,000 citizens of ten different nations. He collaborates with a number of universities such as the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino, IULM in Milan, the Federico II University of Naples and the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology in Toronto. From 2017 he is an Affiliated Fellow of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation of New York and from 2013 of the American Academy of Rome. His work has been exhibited in several Biennials, museums and international foundations including: Architecture Biennial of Seoul, South Korea (2017); Triennale of Ostend, Belgium (2017); 56th International Art Biennale of Venice, Cuban National Pavilion (2015); Biennale of Kochi-Muziris, Kerala, India (2012); 11th Biennial of Havana, Cuba (2012); Liverpool Biennial, UK (2010); 14th and 15th Rome Quadrennial (2004–08); Fuori Uso, Pescara; Kunsthalle Museum of Art in Gwangju, South Korea; BASE, Florence; Wilfredo Lam Contemporary Art Center in Havana, Cuba; MAXXI, Rome; MACRO, Rome; Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin; Triennale Bovisa, Milan; The Invisible Dog Art Center, Brooklyn, NYC.

Giuseppe Stampone’s solo exhibitions in museums include: CIAC, Foligno (2018); GAMeC, Bergamo (2014), National Institute for Graphics, Rome (2015), Palazzo Reale, Milan (2014).

Since 2014 THE POOL NYC has presented his work in several group exhibitions, and this is the first solo show with the gallery.

#cielostampone / #stamponesky