Meet the Artist - Eva Trentin

Eva Trentin is an artist from Marano Vicentino, a tiny commune a few kilometres away from Schio (Veneto, Italy), where I live. Her art is closely linked to the nature and the natural world, such as flowers, leaves, plants and trees. Her works combine the organic world with UV photography and some special techniques of imprinting on paper and clothes, creating designs which look like rain-washed shadows of fossils.

I am always very keen to meet artists and to understand the ideas underlying their artistic evolution. Recently, I had an opportunity to talk to Eva and to visit her art-studio. This article is an introduction to her and her art-world. Let me start it by showing you an artwork called "289" which had a profound impact on me when I had seen it at the Mutazioni exhibition in Schio in 2021.

Meeting Eva

This work "289" was my first real encounter with her at the Mutazioni art exhibition held in Palazzo Fogazzaro, our local venue in Schio for important art events. I was captured by it and in an article about that art event, had described its impact on me with the following words: "I want to close this article with the work I liked most in this exhibition - I absolutely loved the mosaic like works of Eva Trentin from Marano Vicentino, with each piece of the mosaic expressing nature, places and moments of life. I felt that I could look at them for hours, find new points of reflection and at the same time, feel an emotional connection with them."

The image below of her another artwork titled Mare (Sea) is also from the same exhibition.

My second encounter with Eva came during a visit to the fifth Schio Biennale on Paper-art, when I was invited by Valeria Bertesina, the curator of the Biennale, for a special guided tour of the exhibition. Eva was also invited to it. We were together in a small group for a few hours. We spoke briefly but at that time, I didn’t realise that she was the same artist whose work I had liked so much.

Fortunately, some weeks later Eva saw my article on this blog and contacted me. So, recently I went to visit her home and her art studio in Marano Vicentino, where she lives with her husband and twin daughters. It was an opportunity to talk to her about her artistic journey and the ideas underlying her art.

Eva’s Artistic Journey

Her artistic journey started in an art institute when she attended the G. de Fabris artistic school in Nove (VI), which was followed by a degree in interior design at ISAI Academy in Vicenza. For many years Eva worked in a studio of interior designers and architecture, till about 6 years ago when she started a new phase of her life as an artist, after her husband gifted her some plastic art materials, which led her to taking up art more seriously. Soon, she gravitated towards the use of flowers in her art.

During the last couple of years, she has started experimenting with botanical printing inspired by the works of Australian artist India Flint, who uses leaf printing, eucalyptus dyes and botanical alchemy, garment cutting and stitching, paper-folding, bookbinding and a little poetry; and by the Israeli artist Irit Dulman, who makes monochromatic and colour botanical prints on silk and cellulose fabrics.

Thus, Eva started experimenting and combining different techniques which use organic materials such as tree-barks, leaves, flowers and resins for paper-printing and then combined them with photography, cyanotype and fabric-printing.

Art Techniques of Eva Trentin

Eva has developed her own art techniques which I call “delicate imprinting” - it involves organic matter such as leaves and flowers which leave their imprints on paper and tissues such as silk, and which look like fossils drawn in gentle lines and soft colours. These imprinted papers and tissues can then be combined with resins or cut into different shapes, can be placed on different surfaces covered with gold-leaf or cyanotype, sometimes combined in mosaics of hundreds of small pieces, which look like scrolls telling stories like the two works presented above.

I am not sure if these techniques of imprinting organic matter (Botanical Prints on Paper or fabrics) to create art have a specific name.

She explained to me about the Cyanotype technique, as I was not aware of it. Later, I searched for it online to understand it better. Wikipaedia defines it as “is a slow-reacting, economical photographic printing formulation sensitive to a limited near ultraviolet and blue light spectrum, the range 300nm to 400nm known as UVA radiation. It produces a cyan-blue print used for art as monochrome imagery applicable on a range of supports, and for reprography in the form of blueprints. For any purpose, the process usually uses two chemicals: ferric ammonium citrate or ferric ammonium oxalate, and potassium ferricyanide, and only water to develop and fix. Announced in 1842, it is still in use.”

Over the years, Eva has made a conscious choice of moving away from chemical products and using only natural materials in her art. For example, she experiments with the extraction of natural colours from the flowers, barks and leaves for her art. She defines these natural colours as being “multi-vibrational with specific mutating tones, because every colour is composed of different shades whose vibrations combine together, and which transmit a sense of equilibrium and aesthetic pleasure”.

Eva’s Studio

Her studio is a workshop where she keeps her collections of leaves, flowers, tree-barks and their extracts. “I am not very orderly, sometimes, I forget to label the things and then I have to throw them away”, she confesses candidly, while showing off a box full of barks of different trees which her father had collected for her.

Actually, her studio, located in the attic of her home, seemed to be in perfect order, everything was labelled and placed in boxes, though the fridge was kind of overflowing with them. A microwave oven and a couple of steam baths are part of her art equipment as she needs to keep her leaves and flowers wrapped in the paper for many hours at a time, while they leave their imprints.

Eva is also experimenting with other ways to use her art for making daily use objects. She is collaborating with a jeweller for making ear-rings while her imprints on silk are being used for making unique kimono-like jackets (image above).

For learning more about Eva’s art and for buying her art works, ear-rings, textiles and kimonos, you can check her Facebook page, Instagram Page and her website.

Conclusions

Meeting Eva and learning more about her artistic process was like opening a door and discovering a new world of conceptualising and experimenting with art. It was a world where nature and natural processes, some what similar to the those which lead to the making of fossils, are used to create art. It also made me think of the prehistoric artists who had left their hand-prints and drawings in the caverns and rocks in different parts of the world.

Every encounter with a new artist is a journey for discovering new ways of expressing artistic impulses, sometimes through new materials and/or techniques. That artistic expression can be seen as a continuum on a spectrum, which goes from sparse lines drawn on sand or rock, to paintings using different materials, to sculptures of stones and metals, to new ways of combining emerging technologies. Eva's work are located on that spectrum close to nature where dream like delicate figures in soft colours become manifest through her imagination.

I love meeting artists and trying to understand their specific gaze and thinking which underlies their creative expressions. Meeting Eva was a wonderful part of that journey.

The Kashmir Story

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been reading about the film “The Kashmir Files”, its box-office success, its impact and the heated discussions it has generated. Perhaps, after a few weeks, it might become available on some streaming platform and then I will be able to watch it, though I am not sure that I will – from what I have read, it has some very graphic violence and I have no stomach for watching violence.

However, reading about “The Kashmir Files” has reminded me of another film about Kashmir and the Kashmiri Pandits – the film was “I Am” (2010), and it was directed by Onir. I think that it was a good film that merited greater attention. I had translated its subtitles into Italian, when it was shown at the River-to-River film festival in Florence.

The Kashmir Story in “I Am”

“I Am” was an anthology of four short films, loosely connected with each other. Among those four stories, the Kashmir short film was the second story of the film. It had beautiful performances by Juhi Chawla as Megha, a Kashmiri Pandit, and Manisha Koirala as Rubina, as her childhood Kashmiri Muslim friend.

This part of the film started with Megha’s journey to Srinagar to sell her house. Rubina comes to the airport to pick her up and is happy to see her old friend. Megha is by turns, angry and anguished, at the memories the return has brought back. She is unwilling to give in to romantic nostalgia about the city, and maintains some distance from her friend.

During the 24 hours of Megha’s stay in Srinagar, there are only a few scattered moments of nostalgia for her childhood home. A visit to the ruins of her uncle’s home who was killed by neighbours, brings back the memories of her terror of those days when they had abandoned their home and ran away to the refugee camp.

An encounter with a group of youth on the road, brings out that the story of the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits has been changed and retold by the locals. In this new retelling, they were the cowards and villains, who had run away from the valley.

At the same time, Megha’s dispersion of her father’s ashes in the river, brings out the attachment of older generations for Kashmir and their dreams about the day when they will return to their original homes.

Those 24 hours also show Rubina’s changed life in the Kashmir valley – she is lonely, living closed at home and is unmarried, while the guy she used to love has left India. Her brother, who had become a militant, has repented and come home, but is disabled and a shell of his former self. Police comes to their home frequently to check because they are a militant family. The city is divided by barbed wires and check-points, which gets deserted as the evening falls and people rush to their homes.

Megha’s righteous anger and resentment at the fate of Kashmiri Pandits, has one final moment of push back from Rubina. A brief exchange between the two friends, brings out the tragedy of changed lives of Kashmiri Muslims, especially those of the women and youth. The awareness that in the end there were no victors among the ordinary persons on the two sides plants a little seed of mutual understanding.
Impact of “I Am”

“I Am” was a film dealing with other difficult themes along with the Kashmir story. Perhaps that is why its Kashmiri section did not receive proper attention. It had a strong impact on me because in the process of doing its Italian subtitles, I had spent a lot of time with each of its scenes.

This part of the film gave precedence to the view-point a Kashmiri Pandit. It was shot in dark and drab colours. It showed a Srinagar of barbed wires, road-blocks and sad people, and not the romantic town of lake and gardens from 1980’s Bollywood.

The whole sequence of Megha visiting the ruins of her killed uncle’s house, had a very strong impact on me. Its background score was filled with the shouts of slogans by angry people asking all kaffirs to leave Kashmir or be killed. I could identify with her refusal of Rubina’s sympathy, when she responds, “Don’t worry, I am not going to cry”.

The film also shows the impact of the events on the other side, through Rubina’s family. They have also suffered and continue to suffer due to the militants on one hand and Indian army on the other. However, I felt that it was more difficult to empathise with them, because their pain was closely linked to issues related to militancy and its violence.

For example, there was a sequence when Megha is accompanied by Rubina’s mother to a neighbourhood shop for buying saffron. The elderly shop-owner remembers that he had accompanied Megha’s pregnant mother to the hospital when she was born. However, their discussion also brings out that it was that same person’s son who had killed Megha’s uncle and later, died as a militant. Megha comes back from the shop full of indignation – “You only had that shop to take me, whose son had killed my uncle?” she asks bitterly.

While I could see the dismay, regret and frustration on the faces of the local Kashmiris, I also had a feeling at the back of my mind that “it was their sons and families who did it”! I think that is the biggest difficulty when we look at victims of Islamic terror, that we are less willing to acknowledge the pain of its Muslim victims.

The Elephant in the Room

I remember talking to Onir in Florence about the Kashmir portion of the film, expressing my appreciation and saying that it was a great pity that this episode of our recent history had been allowed to be forgotten.

To write this post, I watched again the Kashmir portion of “I Am”. I think that there is an aspect of the Kashmir situation which had remained untouched in the film – the rise of more conservative Islam which was linked with militancy. Traditionally, the Kashmiri Islam has been moderate and open, and it had a history of a peaceful co-existence with Hinduism. Over the past couple of decades, the more conservative version of Islam has become more common, but its role and significance in the Kashmiri Pandits' exodus was never mentioned in the film.

Whose sufferings need acknowledgement?

As far as I understand about the events in Kashmir, the problems worsened with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979. To counter that the Americans started supplying money and arms to Mujahideen through Pakistan, which contributed to strengthening of the more conservative ideas of Islam in the region and reached Kashmir through Pakistani militants in the 1980s. Apart from the militants, it impacted different groups of persons, such as -Militants from Pakistan along with radicalised Kashmiri youth killed many Kashmiri Pandits and provoked their mass exodus in late 1980s and early 1990s.

Militants and hardliners from Pakistan along with their companions in Kashmir started killing moderate Kashmiri Muslims and those seen as sympathetic or collaborating with India, starting from early 1990s and continuing even now. Around 7000 Kashmiri “political opponents” have been killed, though some say that the Kashmiri victims have been many times more. They specifically target the intellectuals and they can abduct or rape their families.

Since the 1990s, Indian army has been fighting the Kashmiri separatists and militants and once again, a large number of victims have been reported, not only among the militants, but also among the civilians. The army rule has also affected general life.

Each of these groups have their own stories to share. I have read of Kashmiri Pandit families weeping at the shows of The Kashmir File - they are happy that finally their sufferings have been acknowledged through cinema. Onir’s film “I Am” did not show that violence directly, it focused on its aftermath.

I think that one of the good films about the impact of army in Kashmir was Shaurya (2008), which touched upon the human right abuses.

Stories about the situation in Kashmir involve different and complex issues. The views of the Islamic hardliners and militants may not be acceptable or understandable for most of us. However, I think that our cinema needs to explore these different areas and view-points so much more. For example, little is known about the violence against moderate Muslims in Kashmir and it would also benefit from a greater exploration in literature and cinema.