Rinos Stefani’s journeys and Amacayacu
The “Amacayacu Travellers” were created after Rinos Stefani’s journeys to the Amazon and China in 2005.
Text by poet Caroline Francis, Ohio USA 2008
”From Santiago de Compostela, Spain, to South America, the Caribbean and the Andes to the Amazon River. From Florida to Lake Erie, Ohio and China. This later took Rinos Stefani to the other side of the Atlantic, to South America: from Bogotá to Medellin, from San Agustin in the Andes to Cartagena and Santa Marta in the Caribbean. From there, he journeyed south to the Amazon River, where Colombia meets Peru and Brazil. He catches piranhas while watching trunks float down the river. An adventure and a challenge by the nameless. Then, Stefani arrived in China. He walked on the Great Wall and the Yellow Mountains in Hefei, which made a dent on him.”
Amacayacu travellers and tree trunks
Text by art theorist Antonis Danos, 2008
The naked human figure becomes the symbol and the bearer of the (pan)human condition. Among the pictures of couples and of larger groups, a lone figure stands out – of male gender (the artist’s alter ego?) – as an acrobat, a wayfarer or a dancer. Most often this figure takes on the guise of a traveller, “dressed” only with a gas mask, whose only luggage is a sawed tree trunk – what is left from a destroyed or “developed” (for financial gain) environment.
The piece of tree under his arm often alludes to a human trunk – a body without limbs – inscribed with a little heart! Bitter humour and sarcasm, along with sympathy for the seemingly confident wayfarer. But his destination looms uncertain or unknown: in the caustic Departure (2005), two figures, facing away from each other. It is like two aspects of the same self. The two figures are “departing”, in equally emphatic manner, toward the exact opposite directions. Yet they are holding on to the same piece of wood!
