05/07/2025 - 4 July 1987, the First Plexus International Ar Slaves Market Art Co-Opera Gavoi n.4, Sardinia

 

On July 4, USA Independence Day, the remote Gavoi  became worldwide connected through many artists exchanges coming from Kassel, Sidney, Vancouver, Wien, Wales, New York, and many other places in the world, all celebrating and interpreting free deconstructions of metaphor of the Serpent of Stone, as a communal performance of art freedom and independence.

As scales of the Serpent broadcast slow-scam graphic interpretations of the theme linked artists and scientists around the world. Bruce Breland and Robert Dunn of the DAX Group in Pittsburgh established an interactive text/network, with Franco Meloni of the Department of Physics of the State University of Cagliari, bridging across the IP Sharp, Bitnet, E.A.R.N. Networks, connecting Gavoi, in Sardinia with the rest of the world. The DAX Group was represented in Gavoi by Philip and Marcia Rostek. In Pittsburgh, DAX acted as an editorial node for a text – images exchange, over computer communications links, weaving any converging international art contribution and forwarding it to the remote Sardinia event site during the co-opera.

In the night, in a ritualistic performance, Lorenzo Pace as the shaman moved around all installations followed by a serpentine artists parade to awake the spirit of art, then Willem Brugman read Miguel Algarin’s Body Bee Calling (from 21st Century) poem, with Alessandro Figurelli ,as second voice, translating it in Italian for the audience, while an old masquerade Sardinian sheep man, holding in his hand the green nuraghic warrior statuette, from the 1986 mythological attack at the EveArt Opera in New York, was moving around following a ritual Sardinian path.

As in a modern rite, dedicated to the Bruce Richard Nuggent’s Fire of Harlem 1926 and to the bronze mutant of Sardinia, Sandro Dernini, who was just arrived from being away for two days by a car breakdown, with Paolo Maltese and Assane M’Baye, who was chosen by Kre MBaye and Langouste Mbow in Dakar as their representative, ritually burned his clothes as ending of his image of Plexus artistic director, that he had played until then.

Il Serpente di Pietra was presented as four days of art and science, connected via a computer network by the Bruce Breland and Robert Dunn of the Dax Group of Carnegie Mellon and Franco Meloni of the University of Cagliari, as a multi-media fractal show dedicated to the Heinrich Hertz’s  100 years electromagnetic celebration and to Bruce Richard Nuggent, the black pope of the 1986 art slaves ship,  who died few months before.

 

 

 

As a modern sacrifice, Sandro Dernini performed the elimination of the artistic director in Plexus, against the pyramidal structure of the star system of the artworld, creating new contemporary form of slavery.  Assane MBaye invited all artists to go to Dakar-Goree in 1988 as continuation of the Plexus art journey, and as closing act Arturo Lindsay as the ancestral messenger set on fire a box containing all participants’ signatures.

 

Over a week long period, from 1-4 July, 160 artists from various art fields  and cultures, 

coming from 23 different nationalities, answered to the 1986 Plexus International Call 

sent out from  New York City in 1986. They paid their own travelling and  worked together

 as guests of the Municipality of Gavoi, interacting with community and with the magic panorama 

of the wild mountains of the Barbagia of Sardinia,  within the environmental time-space of the 

megalithic menhir of Sa Itria, in which so many artists speaking different

 languages and codes, were free to express themselves in the first person without curators,  

mediators and critics.