STIAMO FACENDO DAVVERO CIÒ CHE CONVIENE? 2022
In the fall of 2010, the artist wrote a message to Erwin Brugger, the man who discovered the writer's lifeless body at age 12 with a playmate. A few weeks later, Rovaldi is in Herisau, retracing with Brugger the path along which Robert Walser walked daily and where, suddenly, he found death. An end foretold, mysteriously, in the pages of The Tanners (1907), the writer's first novel, where the young poet Sebastian dies in the same way.
He returns to Herisau on December 24, 2012. He spends Christmas Eve night at the Hotel Markplatz, looking forward to seeing Brugger again the following day and walking with him, fifty-six years later, on the same date, on the same day of the week (Tuesday) and at the same time, along Walser's last route. This second encounter is narrated by a short silent film.
The encounter with Robert Walser, mediated by Erwin Brugger, allows Rovaldi to trigger the engine of his own poetics: the physical crossing of the landscape. It is the walk, rather than the camera or film camera, that is the medium of the research. It is a performative gesture, first and foremost. But this would have no particular artistic relevance were it not for the conviction that it is within the landscape that the identity and destiny of humans are at stake. But neither one nor the other can be traced except by setting one's body in motion. What remains etched on the film first and then on the photographic paper is the subtle precipitate of an intense but delicate emotional and psychological reaction. As delicate are the grays, intense the blacks. Memory. Longing. Melancholy.
“Are we really doing what's right?” are the words spoken to his sister Lisa before the writer voluntarily retired to the psychiatric clinic where he would spend the rest of his life. And they are the words that, at every step of any walk, each person addresses to himself.
Walser's last walk, a new Sisyphus pushing the burden of existence along the Herisau path, is a metaphor not only for Rovaldi's tireless photographic walking, but for the lives of us all.
Luca Fiore
