The Vagabond Tree is a wandering tree: it walks and travels.

The Vagabond tree, also on Facebook, is the Keeper of the mountains and asks the people not to destroy the country; and here in Irpinia and in Campania, it implores us to stop mistreating the land. The Vagabond Tree is an installation made up of "polluting" material (polyurethane), waste matter, virdigris, natural material (brushwood, branches, shrubs, leale). Imagine all this stuff scattered in the small unauthorized rubbish dumps in the mountains. Imagine them taking shape, merged into a hybrid one hold together by the poisonous foam of polyurethane. Imagine, then, the virdigris, this age-old element used by the ancient Romans, that fossilizes the sky and the hope in the Tree eyes making it kinder; and, the "semina del colore" ("colour seeding") technique, linked to the old gesture of fertilizing the soil, that covers the Tree underlining its traces and nervations. The vagabond tree is among the Irpinia mountains, from 2008, asking for stopping pollution in the Irpinia woods.
The Vagabond Tree's journey is starting...

Social art in Giovanni's opinion

"Being an artist (o working as an artist; o working in visual arts) to me, is not an ongoing solipsistic quest after the relationship between art and social issues, but it represents the fusion of laboratory research and social activity. From this viewpoint, all the interventions of graphics and popular didactics take their shape and gain the value of identification, because their loci are the depressed and always forgotten innermost places of Hirpinia or the farmyards; places where, for thousands of years, the concrete and real living has belonged to farmers who, suspiciously, look at me trying to offer them brushes, colours and rollers. Later on, the children are the ones who firstly break the ice and they enthusiastically start painting everything, they detect the traces of the drains, which are both poor elements and pure geometric composition. They paint the soil, the trees, the benches and even the cars. Their involvement is total and the result of these actions (their aesthetics) does not lie in a good picture anymore, but it lies in the fact that those children, who are neglected or for whom the street is their most present teacher, can see more while raising their eyes because other perspectives have been given them. They glimpse the posters I had put up saying: "Private Property: no access to culture", they are edged in black; a child asks me: "Is the Private Property dead?" The answer is in the question. The farmyard or the square get a different dimension and it is the colour which gives them this new dimension. The colour gains the value of identification and the will to delete the greyness forever. I believe in the real and practical research, in the laboratory activity, just like the farmers' work in their fields, but I state that whatever conquest we might get in our own study (as regards me, in graphics), it must not become a Private Property (just for authorized personnel): in my opinion, this is the most dangerous aspect nowadays. My coloured monocalcografie remind me the fossils of the modern man's freedom. They derive from different graphic experiences (etching, aquatint, lithography, photography). Unlike the traditional etching, which has got precise rules and procedures from the preparation of the plate to the etching or the printing of the copper matrix, and where is the artist himself who decides the number of the copies; the monocalcografie are unique copies and they do not have any matrix. I paint any element and transfer it on the paper by pressure, so I get the fossil imprints of the object composition arranged on the surface of the press. The press operation goes on as if it were a sort of existential action up to the extinction of the colour. The chromatic and composition harmony of the monocalcografie, moreover, gains the value of suggesting one's own experiences and the dichotomy man-nature which more and more approaches the dramatic situation of a poisoned and polluted land (both as regards environment and politics), that is a representation of the self-destruction of one's own human identity. From this comes the need to impress any object which will prove the dimension of one's own endless experience, the need to enhance the graphic language, the innermost wish to communicate that is impossible to encode and determine in an area with its limits and boundaries. The choice of the object is not random, because unconsciously there is a sort of appropriation of the aesthetic value of the fossil object, with which I always communicate in a sign and alchemic way."

Giovanni Spiniello Avellino, september 1977