Valerio Berruti: Udaka, or Drawing Before It Becomes Memory

Valerio Berruti: Udaka, or Drawing Before It Becomes Memory

There is a moment in Valerio Berruti’s work when childhood stops being an image and becomes a threshold. Udaka, whose title means mud in Zulu, belongs precisely to that space. It is not only a video animation. It is a work made of earth, repetition, drawing, time and return. The animation is built from 350 drawings on paper, each made using earth gathered at the Nirox Foundation in Johannesburg, South Africa. That detail matters. The material is not neutral. It does not simply give the work a texture or a warmer tone. It anchors the image to a place, to a ground, to a landscape that enters the work physically before it becomes narrative. In Berruti’s practice, drawing is never only drawing. It often behaves like a fragile form of cinema, as if the line were trying to remember movement before movement fully appears. In Udaka, this process becomes especially clear. The child figure, one of the recurring presences in Berruti’s visual universe, does not act in a conventional story. She appears, moves, returns, almost as if she had been called up from the material itself. This is where Udaka connects to a wider body of work. In my earlier text Valerio Berruti: Modern Master of Neo-Human Tenderness, I described his figures as something more complex than “children”. They are not sentimental icons. They are presences placed before language, before social definition, before the adult world begins to harden the body into identity. That same tension also appears in Valerio Berruti at Fondazione Ferrero: More than Kids, where the child becomes a way to think about memory, community and time. In Udaka, however, the figure is brought back to an even more elementary condition. She is not only drawn. She is made from earth. She seems to belong to a place before belonging to a story. The work also opens onto Berruti’s broader project In Infinity I See You, a series of large-scale land-art interventions conceived to be perceived from above, including through satellite vision and Google Earth. This shift of scale is crucial. Berruti moves from the intimacy of the hand-drawn line to the expanded vision of the planet seen from above. Yet the emotional temperature remains the same: fragile, suspended, human.

There is something quietly radical in this movement between the small and the immense. A child drawn with earth can become an image seen from the sky. A local material can produce a universal figure. A gesture made by hand can enter a technological field without losing its vulnerability. Berruti does not oppose craft and media. He lets them touch each other. What moves me most in Udaka is this encounter between innocence and origin. The child does not stand outside matter. She comes from it. Mud, earth, dust and drawing become part of the same language. The work is tender, but not decorative. It is simple, but not simplistic. Its strength lies in refusing spectacle while still producing an image that stays with you. This is also why Udaka resonates with Berruti’s more recent project The Carousel, presented in New York. In both cases, childhood is not used as nostalgia. It becomes a device for looking at what adults have forgotten: play, fear, trust, exposure, tenderness, dependence, and the need to imagine another relation with the world. By using earth collected in South Africa, Berruti avoids the idea of an image floating without consequence. The work travels, but it does not detach itself from the place that generated it. It becomes international precisely because it remains rooted. This is one of the most interesting aspects of his practice: the image can circulate globally, but its emotional force comes from something almost archaic, almost pre-verbal. Udaka is therefore not only a beautiful animation. It is a meditation on how an image begins. Before the screen, there is paper. Before movement, there is drawing. Before drawing, there is earth. And before every figure, perhaps, there is the fragile possibility of becoming human.

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• Valerio Berruti, Beyond Childhood: The Carousel Arrives in New York
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• Valerio Berruti: Modern Master of Neo-Human Tenderness