Arena is an Italian artist who was born in 1978. He considers news report as the reference point for his personal critical reflection and thinks of it as an unchangeable element since it is both part of the past but still open to transformation by memory transmission; according to the artist, news stories lose their tangible characters and become pure concepts, which collective memory elaborates.

For example, this happens with the work Untitled (Bologna), 2001. It stands as a square marble sheet, which is pierced in the middle as if a grenade would have torn it. Actually, the deep cut is due to the 85 names of the victims of the massacre at Bologna train station in August 1980: they are carved repeatedly until they create a central hole that passes through it. It seems that the presence of the sheet as the symbol of collective memory and the continual celebration are not enough to stop the complete abstraction and cancellation of those names. Arena’s work is both charming and moving at the same time: he matches a formal with a perceptual antithesis. While plunging into the historical event, he appropriates it and gives us back a barer though more significant version.

In Genova 2011 (group picture), Arena goes one step further and summons up collective and political conscience to reflect on what has happened. He does so by producing one of his most engaging works. Starting from the official group picture of the ten leaders who were at the Genoa G8 in 2001, he produced ten square molds (40×40 cm) of different height (from 0,5 cm to 22 cm) in a way which, if Carlo Giuliani would have been alive, he might have come up them to look in the leaders’ eyes searching for culpability or maybe only answers.

For 18.900 meters on slate (Pinelli’s way) of 2009, Arena physically became integral part of his creative project. He himself travelled through again anarchist Pinelli’s last way as a free man from the train station to home and then at the bar, anarchist circles and up to the central police station. He walked through an 18.900 meters long way as everyone of us carelessly does every day. The installation is made up of 332 slate sheets of 60x60x1 cm on which Pinelli’s 18.900 meters long way is carved.

The confrontation with these affairs goes through the artist’s very spirit, both from a conceptual and physical point of view, becoming the measurement unit of his own reflection and, hence, of the project itself, as it is for the more recent work Tube of 2013. It is a square box-shaped metal tube, which has been cut and recomposed to become a square. The amount of metal employed corresponds to the artist’s body mass in cubic centimeters when the interior of the tube would be filled up with earth.

Therefore, the news report is no more employed as a medium to reflect upon the flowing of events and the memory depository; instead, it is the Self, our own presence on earth in a specific given moment. The artist becomes himself the question, starting and ending point of the investigation, his own weight and height become the limits and parameters of his works. This centrality and personal calling into question seems to be clarified and expressed in works as Untitled (Eliot), 2013 and Untitled (Agostino), 2012. The first work is made up of two marble plates marquinia on which the artist carved the initial line of the quartet East Coker “In my beginning is my end” which Eliot himself chose for his own epitaph. In the second work, Saint Augustine’s words “I Have Become a Question to Myself” are stamped on two square slate and white Carrara marble molds. In this second work the answer itself becomes another question, actually a flood of questions as much as the beholder’s gazes. Arena leaves the beholders questioning themselves about Saint Augustine’s words while returning the work to collectivity and following an almost inverse path to the one he did in the previously mentioned works.

It is exactly in front of a sometimes distracted collectivity that Arena presented Riduzione di mare (2013) in the spaces of Monitor gallery in Rome. The work included an installation and a performance, which told about the tragedy of emigration. Performers progressively licked a 34 kg block of salt during the days of the exhibition with the aim of overwriting on the block a text translated in Morse code. The document filled up by the Dutch organization United for Intercultural Action (European Network Against Nationalism, Racism, Fascism and in Support of Migrants and Refugees) included the list of the names of those 16136 people who died in the attempt of emigrating to Europe, which mass media told us about from January 1993 to January 2012. At the end of the exhibition, the block seemed eroded and changed by human movement and humors as a fragment of past and at the same time still fluxing in time.

This interesting group of works completely clarifies the coordinates of the artist’s action in creating and producing his works. Arena identifies certain news reports or apparently completely private and personal events with the reading keys to break up the ordinary worldview, which mass media and collective gaze sometimes refer to, establishing a dialogue with American minimalism and carefully rooting all of his projects in a planning scheme working as the conceptual skeleton of every installation and performance.

The square shape, which is present in this selection of works, is the artist’s favorite; indeed, even though it is one of the most elementary polygons, various artists have often chosen the square as the ideal expression of the spatial dimension of their own works. Let’s think about Josef Albers or Donald Judd who have been celebrating square for many years.

Arena’s works, as those by Albers, indeed, show an extreme reduction of forms in a lapidary and geometric style which is rendered through technical perfection. More than other 20^th century artists, Albers gave shape to philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s words, which stated that everything we see can be different and everything we depict can be different in the same way, showing that sometimes the most basic things are the most incompressible ones. As in Albers’ works, Arena’s installations as well might set some traps in which the spectator risks to be repeatedly caught because of the insecurity the work itself instills.

At the same time, Arena’s research formally materializes in tridimensional works, which place the experience of the space at the core in a similar way to Judd’s works. The apparently autonomous installations can’t be perceived without considering the relationship with the space they take up and influence. Formal rendering, instead, although materializes in a geometrical and abstract art, conceptually distances from the cold elegance of Judd’s research, which seemed to be banning any form of subjectivity.

Her artistic practice refers back to the genre of staged photography, a contemporary photography trend which is aimed at presenting constructed scenes as real according to the dynamics of cinematography.

A fundamental character in her works since 2008 is literature, which inspires the artist to create shots with imaginary and suggestive settings, though still in a very traditional fashion.

Every shot portrays the mise-en-scene of a key fragment which is taken from famous literary works and  interpreted in a very personal way. These works speak about her life: the favorite setting is Tolfa, a small city in the province of Rome where Valentina grew up, the characters participating in the reenactment of the story are her friends, relatives and other inhabitants of the town (the newsagent, the postman, the school janitor), while the composition of the mise-en-scene is strongly influenced by Asian cinematography and scenic design, which Valentina studied in-depth during her academic career.

The result is a photographic production which is coherent, touching, and able to catch the viewers’ attention to guide them through a completely personal reconstruction of the recreated event.

Photography is then for the artist a creative necessity: by using this tool, she is able to give life to literary  images. And she does so with the very same knowledge of those who are  fully aware of how to make a movie: this happens in one of her first series “The Princess and the Pea” (2009). With the employment of seven images, Valentina Vannicola brings us back to the main sequences of Andersen’s  fable. The story is set in the Maremma Laziale and characters interpreting the different roles are her friends and relatives. The artist took care of the entire project, starting from the reading of the fable and following with the draft of a “storyboard” made up of preliminary sketches which hold the idea of the final shot composition. The collective participation of those who volunteer to be shot is extremely important: as a real work team, everyone strives to find “scenic” materials and to choose the most apt location, offering their viewpoints on the project, which turn out to be fundamental for the artist herself.

Hence, every photographic shot comes from an intimate and personal  study and creation stage, followed by the practical collective stage of the mise-en-scene. The photographic narrative summarizes with seven sequences the story of a princess who was able to prove her “regality” by realizing the presence of a pod hidden in her bed under a pile of twenty mattresses. Coming from the same period, the series Escape (2009) is inspired by Cervantes’ “Don Quixote de la Mancha”. The operational rules of personal study and active group participation are the same. In this case, the ironic element of the images is stronger than before, thanks also  to the protagonist of the shots, who is a bored housewife captured while reading the picaresque novel while having a hot bath or riding her exercise bike, plunged into the protagonists’ bizarre adventures.  The reference to Monicelli’s irreverent atmospheres in “L’Armata Brancaleone” is immediate: the woman imagines a scruffy hero confronting a flock of sheep, a fantasy which is in a way attached to her everyday life in a small town in the countryside.

In “Alice nel paese delle meraviglie”(Alice in Wonderland) (2009), the protagonist is a mature woman, closer to the “mom” model we all hold inside, and different from the character imagined by Carroll. The characters’ grotesque quality is very strong and always ironic, so that the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter as well are embodied by adult inhabitants of Tolfa, who play along with Valentina Vannicola, allowing her to tell us something about her life, introducing to us characters and places she grew up with. The atmosphere, which is at times comical, sometimes clouds, making the setting more grotesque.

The series ”Inferno”(Hell) stands for Valentina Vannicola as a great challenge: in 2011 she decided that Dante’s masterpiece, a cornerstone of Italian culture, would work as a source of inspiration for her shots. Her study was long and strongly in-depth; the artist’s operational scheme is the same as for her previous series: analytical study of the text, draft of a storyboard during which her imagination takes shape, search for the right setting, characters and materials. Once more, Tolfa and its inhabitants are the protagonists of the shots: the chosen areas are those of the Maremma laziale, Santa Severa coast and the striking caldara in Manziana. There will be fifteen shots which the artist has been thinking about for a while, there are images and thoughts that little by little are taking shape from her mind in the form of sketches which almost spontaneously gather among her personal papers and which only after one year would finally come to light in such a complex project.

The beholder’s viewpoint takes Dante’s place, the narrator who guides us in the discovery of the afterlife waiting for sinners: we then find again the door to hell with damned souls resigned to their fate, the limbo, the indolent, glutton, avaricious, wrathful, apathetic souls, other than famous characters such as Farinata degli Uberti, condemned in the circle of heretics, and Paolo and Francesca in that of lust. Every image is always accompanied by Dante’s tercet from the poem which inspires the shot.

“Living Layers III” is the first project realized by Valentina Vannicola which does not refer back to literature. It was born in collaboration with Marco museum and the Roman gallery Wunderkammern and it does not portray the artist’s native town as its setting; rather,  it focuses on the working-class neighborhood Torpignattara. Although the starting point and the setting constitute a novelty to confront with, the artist’s planning scheme stays almost the same.

The first step is then an in-depth study of the area and neighborhood, both from a urban-planimetric and human point of view, made up of walks to discover people inhabiting Torpignattara every day.  The discovery step generates in Valentina Vannicola’s mind paradoxical images according to which a tree might grow from the tiles of a terrace, a whale  might plunge into the depths of earth, opening asphalt as if it was a dense and dark sea, a boat might navigate a sea of grass  and so on. This dreamlike element  is associated to a strong emotional element, which is expressed by the characters portrayed: everyone is profoundly lonely. Isolation, apathy, resignation are all part of the anxiety coming from city life, especially in a big city such as Rome which presents scenarios of marginalization in the outskirts.

In her most recent project (2012), Valentina Vannicola goes back and imagines a completely personal version of great novels, this time confronting herself with a work coming from Italian contemporary literature by Stefano Benni (1976) and titled “Bar Sport”. The cornerstones of the narrative are the characters embodying the Italian stereotype of the habitué at the provincial bar, including card players, the beautiful cashier, old wives, the playboy and the “attractions” of the bar, such as the pinball machine, the billiard table, the telephone and the raffle. This series is made up of the episodes told by the clients at Bar Sport, stories which always  oscillate between fantasy and reality and which are once more played by the “actors” from Tolfa. Valentina Vannicola is represented by OnOff Picture agency and Wunderkammern gallery in Rome.

The personal element is fundamental to her work: this, together with universally recognized themes, is one of the various research fields of her artistic production. One of the most important among these is certainly the case of body, which is at the same time fertile research field and active tool to develop different projects: in “La viola e un poco nervosamente” (2010), the body of the artist abandons its social identity representation to play the role of a musical instrument: Silvia disappears, the artist disappears and gets replaced by an object which has a specific function, that is playing music. In this performance the heartbeat rhythm becomes the arrangement for an improvised melody underlining how our society gets actually influenced by the context where things appear and by labels they get. Silvia Giambrone shows us that a half-naked body is not necessarily an object of desire, something which is instead always maintained by today’s media bombing of images.
Following this, the performance “Eredità” (2008) is based on the analysis of seduction techniques and especially on the everyday habit of make-up: the artist attaches fake metal eyelashes on her eyes, symbols of the cosmetic habits to which women are forced from time immemorial because of the cultural legacy imposing on them to be pleasant to men’s eyes.
Silvia Giambrone’s body is then the target of a laser which is drawn on her naked skin in “Sotto tiro” (2013): the artist is subject of an unknown and unmotivated threat, that is the actual being within reach of a laser which turns her into a convicted victim. Such intrusive light signal might also represent the harassing gaze which is impossible to escape from and which violates personal intimacy causing discomfort.
“Teatro anatomico” (2012) is a performance presented on the occasion of the collective exhibition “Re-generation”: an embroidered collar is sewed on the artist’s neck. The brutality of the needle piercing her flesh contrasts with the simplicity of the artist’s reaction: she shows off her collar as an accessory which at the end of the performance has made her more beautiful, pleasant and feminine. This performance conveys a strongly symbolic message: the collar represents both religious and political authority (priests’ white collars, but even more the collars of those well-pressed shirts underneath powerful men’s coats), as well as rigor, recalling girls’ school uniforms and smocks. The fact that the collar is being sewed by hand inevitably refers back to feminist artistic production and culture, as well as to Italian women’s past condition which regarded to sewing as one of the few activities allowed.
Silvia Giambrone appropriates this technique and one of the first works where she employs it is “Il Pizzo” (2012): tiny fragments of blue lace cover the faces of female figures in her parents’ wedding pictures. Lace turns into a mask which hides these women’s identity: on the one hand, times has now changed them so much that they cannot even recognize themselves in those pictures anymore, on the other hand, this also implies the paradoxical possibility of preserving them from fading paper, which will make them completely disappear. Also, the artist leaves only the faces of male attendants in order to better underline how the theme of female beauty is again indelibly tied to the dictates of male culture.
Lace as the proof of an old female tradition tied to Southern Italy and to those female ancestors who spent their time sewing: these are the key concepts of the work “Made in Italy”. Our country is still strongly anchored to its past and this cultural weight, which is both a dead weight and a treasure to pass on posterity, is represented by a plaster block with stamped molds of collars. Giambrone’s “Made in Italy” is a mirror of nowadays society which once again portrays women in a condition dependent on men.
However, sewing is not useful to only create pretty and decorative clothes ornaments: proof of this is “Eroina” (2012), the hooked reproduction of the molecular structure of heroin. There is both a strong contrast between the concept of crochet hook itself and the final result, as well as a subtle meaning game around the title of the work: heroin, indeed, might be associated both with the drug and a powerful female figure come to rescue society.
One of her favorite communications media is writing. Language is the tool which allows Silvia Giambrone to create her “Autoritratto – Io nel settembre 2009 all’altezza di un universo senza risposte” (2010), where everything revolves around the concept of subtraction: there is, indeed, physical subtraction when she gets rid of all the letters which make up the title of the work from moving sheets with the letters of the alphabet. Inspiration for this piece comes from Carla Lonzi’s “Sputiamo su Hegel” which deals with the theme of the actual possibility for the subject to exist regardless of the dialectic condition which defines him, that is out of a definite context where he exists unwillingly.
Words meet the body in “Translation” (2009), a performance which investigates the relationship between language and reality: the language we speak is considered just like Law, a code which defines everything; however, someone’s hands simultaneously writing the same sentence in different languages help showing the illusion of the idea that there exists a correspondence between words and real objects. In the same way, the commandment “You shall have no other gods before me” is translated into another language and simultaneously written in two different ways by the same person, showing how the concept present in those words gets actually betrayed.
Attention to words is found also in “No Enemy” (2008), an installation with big and heavy wooden letters covered with lead which invade the foyer space of the third level of MART in Rovereto. The absence of space between the words “no” and “enemy” initially confuses the beholder who hardly understands the meaning of those words. Once again the artist unmasks the ambiguousness of language and the meanings attached to it.

Silvia Giambrone has been collaborating with various galleries: Il ponte contemporanea, Roma; Galleria Bonomo, Bari; Galleria Deanesi, Rovereto; Galleria Biagiotti, Firenze and starting from 2012 Galleria Doppelgaenger, Bari.

She has recently won the Main Prize at Kaunas Biennial.

Among her personal exhibitions: L’impero libero degli schiavi, Galleria Doppelgaenger, Bari (2012); Parallel Borders, Roma, curated by Mark Mangion (2012); Sotto falso nome, Fondazione Spazio13, Warsaw (2011); Fuori di me, Spazio Ferramenta, Torino, curated by Susanna Sara Mandice (2011); Invito all’opera, Galleria Il ponte contemporanea, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva (2010); More to come, Upload Art Project, curated by Silvia Conta, Federico Mazzonelli, Julia Trolp (2010); Speaking your language I learnt how to hate you, Galleria NextDoor, Roma, curated by L. Benedetti (2008).

Among her main collectives, the most recent ones are: KAUNAS BIENNAL UNITEXT ’13, National Museum of M. K. Čiurlionis (20013); Refuse, Ex Mattatoio di Testaccio, La Pelanda, Roma, curated by Roberto D’Onorio (2013); SUBJECTIVE MAPS/ DISAPPEARENCES, Parallel Borders 1 / Monuments & Shrines to Capitalism curated by Mark Mangion for Malta Contemporary Art, National Gallery of Iceland (2013); MEDITERRANEA 16, Biennial of Young Artists from Europe and the Mediterranean (BJCEM), Ancona (2013); Autoritratti. Iscrizioni del femminile nell’arte italiana contemporanea, MAMbo, curted by Uliana Zanetti, Bologna (2013); Vetrinale, Roma, curated by Cecilia Casorati, Micol di Veroli e Yuri Elena (2012); Re-Generation, MACRO Testaccio, Roma, curated by Maria Alicata e Ilaria Gianni (2012).

www.silviagiambrone.com

Her first contacts with street art date back to the first years of 2000, though she prefers avoiding this term to identify her art, which she instead considers “contextual” because down the street you are not alone with your framework. Many other factors linked to the context, indeed, stimulate creativity and revive the act of painting: first of all, the colors of the walls and light, especially sun light; the history of that wall and what is behind that wall, people passing and stopping, talking to you and telling something about themselves, those spray cans you have in your bag and brought there with you that day; and finally adrenaline, since although spaces are chosen with minimal art-historical awareness, you are anyway painting with no permission and the police could stop you anytime. However, differently from many of her colleagues who for this reason prefer remaining anonymous, Alice signs her works and works during the day open-face accepting the risks of the “trade” to fight her way against the misconception of vandalism which is still associated with street art.

This implies a certain operating speed which unfailingly makes her style more instinctive and immediately recognizable: the stroke is lively, sketched and dirty; colors are natural and play on contrasts between warm and cool hues. The color choice is driven by the moment, though certainly the tones of Rome, her city (where she still lives and works when she is in Italy), are part of her past and are indelibly embedded on her palette: that salmon pink, the colors of Rome’s buildings, contrasting with that aqua green sky, create the atmosphere reflecting a wonderful light unique to Rome. She firmly states that Rome is the work of art which has influenced her artistic research the most because it is a city where everything is designed by artists and it is possible to see so much history just walking around incredible alleys.

Chance is, hence, integral part of her work, mistakes and imperfections characterize her style, as well as her temperament, which is chaotic and messy: “During my artistic research I realized that, as Dalì used to say, your mistakes and defects are there to be sublimated: when you sublimate your defects, you have your style. I found my style and I accepted myself with all my defects: the need to completely dirty myself with color, let the drops fall down, splashing and dripping.” After all, this is an extemporary technique, working on preexisting frameworks, which are exposed to further alterations in time going beyond the artist’s will. Therefore, the finished piece lose importance in favor of first the artistic action and then the surprise effect on pedestrians. Differently from museum or gallery visitors, indeed, pedestrians do not expect to see art in those unimaginable corners; therefore, the impact with the view produces wonder which magically introduces the beholder into Alice’s narrative around the world. A universal language made of human feelings and moving images which capture little stories, everyday intimate moments that are for Alice the real magic of life.

Unaware protagonists of these spray and acrylic paint snap-shots are women far from any social stereotype and plunged into the everyday carefree, though at the same time resolute. No perfect dolls, sexy heroines or Cindarellas of the hearth, but women who are simply sleeping, reading, smoking or drinking a coffee. In April 2012, the artist decided to seal this favored theme in her first important personal exhibition at 999 Contemporary gallery in Rome and titled Cinderella, pissed me off. In this occasion, Alice had fun decorating the exhibition spaces with old shelves, wall units, and flaps which were enriched by her intervention making the location an intimate and narrative dimension with old pictures, writings and brushes. The external court is not missing, reinforcing the bond with the street: doors, shutters for light and gas counters, traffic signals

In spite of the difficulty to bring the street into the gallery, Alice masterly succeeded in transforming different recyclable frameworks into charming object-trouvé rich in memories. During her constant trips around the world, indeed, she loves picking up and collecting objects found by accident or bought at different markets. Just like the wall, these frameworks as well are not virgin as a white canvas is, but carry with them stories, offering always fresh ideas to the artist. For example, the exhibition Into the great wild open at Tri-Mission Art Gallery in Rome American Embassy, old maps convey the theme of the journey and the concept of border, from the crossing perspective and discovery of the Self.

Hence, small sketches on remote corners or entire gigantic walls, personal and collective exhibitions all over Europe, illustrations for comics and ads contributed to expand Alice’s fame: according to the classification published by Urban Painting, she is in the top ten most beloved artists in the world with more than 42.000 people following her page on social networks. Indeed, the relationship with the public is fundamental for her, since nowadays the Internet makes it much closer to rock and roll than contemporary art, becoming more enjoyable and immediate:

“You are not in front of a canvas, you don’t need to train yourself. Any interpretation is fine, especially this attitude is good because it means: open, touch and enjoy art because art is good!”

Click here for the video interview.

www.alicepasquini.com

Photo credits: Giorgio de Finis; Lorenzo Gallitto; Jessica Stewart – RomePhotoBlog.

]]> https://www.almostcurators.org/en/lui-chi-e-alice-pasquini/feed/ 0 https://www.almostcurators.org/en/lui-chi-e-marco-raparelli/ https://www.almostcurators.org/en/lui-chi-e-marco-raparelli/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 12:38:52 +0000 http://www.almostcurators.org/?p=655 Marco Raparelli’s work focuses on drawing freed from any academic scheme.

Born in Rome in 1975, after the studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, he specialized in video animation at the Loughborough College of Art (U.K.) and in painting at the Académie des Beaux Arts in Brussels.

Marco Raparelli’s style is almost instinctive, because it does not cover the use of drafts or preliminary tests, so the error becomes a natural consequence and an integral part of his work.

Everyday life is the main source of inspiration for the creation of the characters’ world designed by the artist, where funny situations and unreal scenes contrast with the reality of daily life. These characters come to life in short films of video animation such as “Everything changes” of 2010, where the artist ironically deals with the changes made by the passing of time, or as in “Abandoned Dog” of 2008, a surreal tale of a day lived by an abandoned dog.

In 2006 Marco Raparelli opens himself to the wall-drawing, working directly on the walls of the “BastArt” gallery of Bratislava, within the exhibition “Growing City”; this work, entitled “Bef Kitchen”, represents a home environment in which lives Bef, first character spread from the imagination of the author: Bef is a ungraceful rude woman who represents a kind of character the artists is particularly fond of; she’s not “physically” present in the scene, but we’re able to perceive her presence, imagining her in the kitchen, or while she comes out from the door. The only single real item consists of a small television with a video-animation in loop. The technique of wall-drawing is also represented in “The Wall”, an installation made in 2010 and presented at the “Fondazione Giuliani” of Rome where the artist creates a large hole in the wall with acrylic colors and accompanies it with a heap of ruins of plaster on the floor, simulating a real break in the wall: it’s up to the viewer to determine whether it’s fiction or reality. The drawing finds his perfect location on paper and Raparelli chooses a 20 meters long one for his “My Social Awareness” of 2008, there he anthropologically represents a countless specimens of the humankind.

In 2010 Raparelli goes back working on spaces, reshaping them at the “Nomas Foundation” in Rome: he operates in a “Reading Room” creating the container which guests other authors’ works, in a large collective installation. “Non familiar idea of Rome” was born during the period spent by the artist at the American Academy in Rome: the idea was to portrait all the people who at that time funneled through the Academy, setting up the images in the spaces of the bar, which is a mandatory stop for guests and not, according to the type of the ancient “quadrerie”, in a strong connection between past and present.

The artist’s passion for video once again meets wall-drawing in “The only thing that moved next to us was the wind”, an installation made in 2011, in which the animation follows the different stages of the daily light, from the rising of the sun to the night, with a large and round moon framed by a window drawn on the wall: stargazing, we could face an imaginary space crossing the threshold of reality to observe a parallel one, similar but unreal, made up of black lines drawn by the author’s hand.

Raparelli’s characters assume human dimensions in the installation “Nudist Area”, made in 2011 for a collective exhibition titled “Made in Filanda”, realized in a former cotton mill in the countryside around Arezzo; the interaction between the characters of Raparelli’s fantasy and the reality is total; the cardboard shapes are placed into the real space, as they’re emerging from the borders of the paper, the wall or the video.

Always interested in the analysis of the “people of the art’s world”, which he studied and observed with an almost scientific attention, Marco Raparelli in collaboration with the artist Giuseppe Pietroniro, achieve this investigation creating a sort of parallel museum, made of false works of art, false information tags and even false services such as a bar and a bookshop. The irony of this operation owns a deeper reflection on the art’s situation and on the museums’ nowadays conditions; title of the installation is “Neither here, nor elsewhere”, hosted in 2012 in the spaces of the Andersen Museum in Rome.

The drawing leaves its space to the paper, conceived as a pure form in the opera “The disappeared elephant”, presented in 2012 at Palazzo Baldassini in Rome; retro-lighted shapes of paper hidden by a white cloth tell us about the historical story of the albino elephant, who lived in this palace, gift of the king of Portugal to Pope Leo X. The atmosphere generated by lights and shadows leads us into a dreamy and fairy dimension, bringing us back to our childhood.

2012 is again a very important year for Marco Raparelli, engaged in important exhibitions such as the collective “RE-GENERATION”, presented in the spaces of Macro Testaccio, in which are exhibited his “unnamed” characters made by a synthetic black line; while the gallery “Ex-Elettrofonica” reserves him a solo show titled “Look Mommy, I scribbled”, which takes cue from the homonymous book published by “cura.books’, with an site-specific installation focused on the differences of mankind that each character invented by Raparelli represents.

]]> https://www.almostcurators.org/en/lui-chi-e-marco-raparelli/feed/ 0 https://www.almostcurators.org/en/valerio-rocco-orlando/ https://www.almostcurators.org/en/valerio-rocco-orlando/#comments Thu, 28 Feb 2013 21:11:29 +0000 http://www.almostcurators.org/?p=477 Valerio Rocco Orlando, born in Milan in 1978, received a BA in Dramaturgy from Università Cattolica in Milan and a MA in Film Directing from Queen Mary, University of London. Constantly balancing between an intimate portrait and a choral dialogue, through film, photography and installation, Valerio Rocco Orlando’s community-based projects focus on the relation between individual and collective identity in order to explore and enhance the complexity of human relationships in contemporary society. Conceived as a gift, as an enriching element of interchange, Valerio Rocco Orlando’s art can be considered as the realm of reciprocity, multiculturality, knowledge of the other as knowledge of the self. His art is strictly linked to education and interweaved to daily life and society. It’s a poetic which becomes politics, (“personal is political”,says his green neon light), but not just according to ideological criteria that simply divide right from left wing. It’s a policy of emotions, of shared experiences, of different cultures that meet and mingle on the ring of artistic expression, the best mean to express individuality through community and vice versa. That’s how personal becomes political, recalling the slogan women used to spread in the 70s. “I talk about personal in order to talk about the whole social system”, Valerio asserts.
Achieved for his first solo show in an art gallery, the seven-channel video installation “The Sentimental Glance” by Valerio Rocco Orlando is an outstanding mosaic of feminine voices and glances, and elegant plot composed by six stories which represent the artist’s sentimental education through a deeply intimate approach, reflecting on tensions and connections between childhood and adulthood, passion and loneliness, maternity and androgyny. Six women tell their own stories, giving the title to every single video: Celeste (2002); Rita (2003); Eva (2004); Dobrochna (2005); Amalia (2006); Eleonora (2006). Six heroines to focus the gaze on; six women whose voices and stories darken any redundant detail, any possible out-field. Sounds merge in moving images, accompanying without invading, in a never-ending osmosis with these intense feminine existences.
Bisiàc (2007) is a two-channel video installation, a timeless short story which takes place on the shore of Isonzo river, in Northern Italy. It’s the first chapter of a cycle about the relations between new generations and the local dying languages and traditions. Two aged five twins, a boy and a girl, are the main characters of the video, paddling across the river and playing with stones along the shore. Dressed un traditional local clothes, the two children declaim nursery rhymes in their own language, the old venetian dialect, as in contrast with the evolution of contemporary society, establishing an osmotic and sinesthetic relationship with water.
Dialogue, listening, other’s awareness, sharing and reciprocity are just some of the main themes in Valerio Rocco Orlando’s work. That’s where the video project “Lover’s Discourse” starts from. It began in 2010, when the artist posted flyers round Brooklyn, in New York, asking for “couples and lovers” to collaborate in his new video installation. Along with his website and email address, Valerio made the short message even more charming, including a quote by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy: “There is no being without being-with and there is no existence without co-existence.” Then he chose the most enthralling stories he felt would best contribute to the project, creating narratives that become a visual web of relationships, through interchange and sense of community.

“Coexistence” is a neon light produced by Valerio Rocco Orlando in 2010,
the artwork that gave the title to the artist’s first solo show at Tiziana Di Caro Gallery in Salerno (Southern Italy), two years ago. Love, reciprocity, sharing and interweaving of stories, lives and experiences (themes Valerio is particularly fond of) come back in this neon artwork through the quote “Il n’y a pas d’existence sans coexistence”, from an essay of the famous French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, handwritten by the artist’s partner. Coexistence represents a focus on individuality and collectivity, a light pointed on the value of sharing, as in a mirror game, and traces an artistic and social poetic based on the sublimation of existence, between personal experience and its amplification through community.
“Endless” is an open artwork, without any end, actually. It’s an artist’s book in limited edition, published in its first two volumes by Valerio Rocco Orlando. It’s a full spectrum piece of art that is composed over time through sharing and comparison. A collaborative project, which starts from the question “What forms of relationship do you think can improve society?”, posed by Valerio to internationally renowned writers and artists who have influenced his own artistic research. The first answers are those by Maria Paola Fimiani, Gilbert&George, Liam Gillick, Corrado Levi, Jean-Luc Nancy, Mario Perniola, Ugo Rondinone and Luigi Zoja, through a methodology which is not that far from the making of a video or an installation.
“Education” is, without any doubt, an other leading keyword in Valerio Rocco Orlando’s artistic production. Through a series of workshops conducted in some high schools in Italy in 2011 with the support of Nomas Foundation and in Cuba in 2012 as part of the XI Bienal de la Habana, the artist gave birth to an interesting and kaleidoscopic community-based project, through a comparison between different educational international systems and an artistic approach to alternative models of knowledge’s transmission. As the philosopher Bruno Latour, in his book “Laboratory Life” analyzes scientific discoveries through the study of the relationships between the scientists and their families, in the same way Valerio leads a survey on different public school-system through interviews to students themselves. Being sure that educating means constructing the self in relationship with others, projecting the self in space and community that surround us.

Engraving is the very origin of Gaia Scaramella’s work. Her encounter with engraving occurred during the years at the Rome Fine Arts Academy. This technique allows Gaia to express herself at best through what is the main feature of her work: the serial production, which is conceived as a creative need rather than a production modality. Incisions are indeed produced as monotypes, which Gaia has always printed in a few pieces.

In Annunciazione – Icone Familiari, Gaia merges tradition and innovation, sacred art and everyday life, combining the sacredness of the religious theme together with the family theme, in a way substituting herself to the divine. The actualization of the subject, without being trivial, allows for the discovery of the Self and the identification with the iconography portrayed, grasping the more real and concrete aspects of an earthly sacredness.

To live the life of someone else: sometimes people think about it. In “Essere, apparire e divenire”, Gaia Scaramella decided to be someone else, actually someone dead. This was not a provocation, but rather an opportunity to talk about the sacredness of the dead, between memory and folklore. The funeral tributes,  found in her grandmother’s drawer and placed one next to the other, tell us how the memory of the dead often blurs into sanctification. Each one only tells unexceptionable earthly lives. With this work, Gaia performs a real appropriation of texts, words and thoughts, which are dedicated to the dead close to her. As in the relationship between actor and character, Gaia and her everyday saints become one thing, allowing her to be virtuous and sanctified.

With the artworks produced for the show “God and I” in 2007, Gaia Scaramella distances herself from the family themes and starts focusing on a more public iconography. The geography of the ecclesiastical institution is utterly reconsidered and read through a critical but at the same time ironic approach.

On a technical level, Gaia goes beyond the physical limits of the prints: she carves her sign on doors and wardrobe shutters and paints them with varnish. These big sectional plates allow her to employ the engraving and painting techniques in a more experimental way, producing a series of installations.

The recent process of emancipation and evolution of Gaia Scaramella’s engraving technique had explicit concrete consequences for the creation of the series Calco Trito Mix of 2008. In the creative process of the works, the desire and need to shred both the paper and the creative process itself are clear, leading to a new level of artistic production and self-awareness. After going through the printing press, the prints undergo a further mechanical step by passing through the paper-shredding machine. The images are broken and fragmented becoming unreadable and waiting to be recomposed  again according to a new vision. The only readable symbols are those of the three great monotheistic religions overlaying  the ” sign tapes.”

A panorama of negatives, made up of impressions from shaped molds, form the two-dimensional installation “Ex-Vuoto” (2008). The so called ex-voto – the object generally used by different religions to thank the deity for a saving grace – displays different but precise forms, including lungs, liver, brain and ovaries – mixed with images of a variegated humanity, including men, women and lovers. The ex-voto, fixed on the wall with nails that encumber movement, portrays images which are deeply significant for Gaia. This intense mix of strong emotions and light spontaneity clearly represents the two dichotomies which characterize Gaia Scaramella’s work: formal/impersonal and personal/inner.

With “Capasanta” – shown during the exhibition “Sant’Elena, la seduzione nel segno”, side event of the 2009 Venice Biennale – Gaia Scaramella decided to offer the molds of the prints which formed the installation “Ex-Vuoto” to Saint Elena, as a real ex-voto. The work, conceived exclusively for the space in which it was set up, involved a geodetic ball which hung from a crane and rotated around its own axis. Inside the ball there were the zinc ex-voto which, because of the passing of time, fell into the water below, giving the votive element back to the sea and to the Saint. The process of emancipation of the engraving technique comes to an end with this last installation, where Gaia decided to symbolically and physically distance herself from her origins, offering them to another dimension.

Geometrically arranged and placed at about one meter from one another, Gaia Scaramella’s 300 pinwheels remind us of a platoon, an army of brave soldiers ready to attack, or perhaps packing the defense. The installation, designed for the coverage plan for the tower of Anfonsino Castle in Brindisi, involves three hundred black monochrome pinwheels which spin constantly dialoguing with the incessant air currents around the tower, returning to the wind the sound of the wind. The pinwheels lose their primary purpose, that is the ludic lightness, and become mourning symbols imposed by war.

“Legami o legami”… request or complaint? Gaia Scaremella’s installation is made up of two walls closed at an angle where hands made of epoxy resin cling. This work deals with the theme of close emotional relationships that sometimes might become binding. Colored woollen yarns branch out from the hands similar to veins, arteries, capillaries and ligaments, conceptually illustrating the inner extension of the pulsating casing of the human body. The yarns go from wall to wall closing and crosslinking the corner as a hug or grip, and physically define an immobilizing state of anguish.

The holocaust is in this work portrayed as an interruption of the human and social thought, life and dignity. There is a white and sky blue old formica-coated table with metal legs and wooden structure, surrounded by four chairs. Also, ten little monochrome white man are placed on the floor. On the head of each little man there is a memory card. Inside the drawer of the table one can find an Ipad displaying the pictures stored in the memory cards.

“Memorie dell’altro ieri, memorie di dopodomani” is Gaia Scaramella’s work dedicated to the tragedy of the holocaust. The memory of the past melts with a clear look towards future. Gaia focuses on the before and after of the massacre, without showing the darkest moments, creating an interactive work. While inviting the viewer to remember, the artist searches for a shared elaboration of the grief, providing a positive perspective, which excludes a mere denunciation.

Gaia Scaramella’s articulated itinerary about the relationship between life and death leads us to “Nepenthes”. This work is made up of large pods which contain male and female profiles. The pods, ideally connected one to the other by thin branches, are actually separated through black or white frames, which symbolize in turn bereavement or heavenly candor. The human presences, connected as in a family tree, but separated by frames in closed areas that evoke either urns or shrines, stay peacefully in their pods, as if it is right the dying plant which gives them life. It is the death of one thing for the life of another.

Ruffo’s art is essentially linked to the basic elements of his architectural training: design, paper and drawing. All his works actually are the result of a meticulous planning close to details, and take shape on the sheet through a delicate but incisive sign. However, they don’t retain the two-dimensionality of a table because paper, carved, gains the third dimension. The result is a stratified work, with multiple visual and semantic readings that investigate the great themes of universal history, in particular individual freedom and dignity constantly threatened by massification underway in contemporary society.

With the installation Das Chinesische Reich (2007), the artist put the attention on what that he defines “ Chinese empire”: an impressive pyramid composed by boxes of goods from China represents the power of commercial dynamics that crush workers under the weight of exploitation. Inside the pyramid, infact, was made a niche wherein a video shows the condition of displaced persons and refugees attempting to cross the frontier to escape. Complete the title a quote from the book “Gomorra” by Roberto Saviano: “Goods have all the rights of movement that no human being may ever have”.

In artworks like Youth of the Hills (2008) he expresses, instead, the contradiction that you breathe in the territories of the Middle East conflict: a swarm of beetles covers a Second World War German panzer reproduced on scale. Insects have been carved on pages of Jewish prayers without destroying the integrity of the texts, sacred in the Jewish culture, and emerge from the work as if they were released from the sand, their natural habitat. The beetle is a symbol of strong religious affiliation of the people, because of the dramatic territorial dispute.

The same theme is tackled in the exhibition Un istante complesso (2009), curated by Ludovico Pratesi, at the Centro Arti Visive Pescheria of Pesaro. Protagonists are six large flags of the states in perennial conflicts: Israel, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hamas. The flag, Pop symbol par excellence, was deprived of color that leaves its place to a graphic texture, dense overlapping of animal skulls: aggression, violence and death, but also stratification of people in their territory.

In his last works acquires great importance the theme of freedom, becomed almost a constant in his research.
During his residence in New York in 2010, Pietro Ruffo had the opportunity to meet young philosophers and artists from all over the world, and ask them questions about the notion of liberty. In this way was born Atlas of the various freedoms (2010-2011), a real geographic atlas wherein territories and faces overlap to form an audio-visual mapping of this universal concept, inspired by the thought of Isaiah Berlin.The installation is so composed by graphite portraits of this people and their interviews that can be listened through headphones that hang from above.
In other artworks the ideal of liberty is embodied by the dragonfly, insect carved and repeated on the intere installations’ surface. Is the case with Negative Liberty (2011) and Liberty House (2011), site specific installations that, as in a baroque trompe l’oeil, transform close locations in forests, finely drawed by pencil or painted in ink wherein the observer is immersed, almost like in a secret garden.
In Revolution Globe (2011) the dragonflies are carved, instead, on a large world map in paper, evoking the individual’s liberty to move without boundaries or restrictions: a direct reference to the revolutionaries episodes of the Arab Spring, caused by the absence of individual freedoms and human rights violations.
In World Spring (2012) the artist inserts on a geographical world map, single Arabic words (democracy, tyranny, peace, blood, etc.) extracted from the slogans used by protesters during the Arab Spring. Every word, painted in gold leaf, cut and placed in relief, is framed in a geometric pattern inspired by Islamic tiles. The result is an abstract network that covers the globe and symbolically connects distant and different regions and countries. A visual and conceptual metaphor of the web, the communication tool through which new generations of Egyptians, Tunisians, Libyans, Yemenis, Syrians, have been in contact to organize and disseminate the revolutionary events.

He got his degree in Political Sciences from Federico II University of Naples. He began his career as a photographer working for theater: his aim was to investigate artistic contents through the camera. Crucial points for his career were the experiences in Rome and New York. In 2010 he took the postgraduate course of multidisciplinary specialization in photography at the ICP- International Center of Photography in NY. There, he also worked as assistant teacher. Today he is working on the project Ubiquity, which will come out in the next few weeks!

Ubiquity is a study on spatial relationships which allows Alessandro Giuliano to investigate quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity. This latter claims that space is not three-dimensional and time is not a separated entity: together they form a new dimension, referred to as space-time.

Alessandro identified maps that plot the lines of air routes from all over the world, a tangible sign of the temporary movements of people, the possible figuration of four-dimensionality. Indeed, the rapid spread of a global perception of space and time creates a new subjective dimension, where places, services, and language lose their roles as objective points of reference.

In the first part of the project Ubiquity (Winter 2011) Alessandro Giuliano involved a group of individuals belonging to his personal sphere, including friends, curators and art dealers. The intent was to collect data related to their beloved places through the system of geo-location for mobiles. The system employs spots to indicate the places in which people take their photographs, redesigning new subjective maps, based on individual factors. Photography, when conceived as a voluntary action of interaction with the surroundings, becomes a reference parameter to trace a map following our own passage in a given space-time area.

For the second part of Ubiquity (6 February – 18 March 2012), Alessandro thought about Damien Hirst and the Gagosian Gallery challenge, and how this experience resembled his own project. Different countries, different languages and different experiences with the same questions: How do people move? What makes people move? And what happens if you ask people about it?

Then the artist started the performative action by visiting the exhibition The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011 at the Gagosian galleries and created a series of spots, producing his personal map, conditioned in time by the actual duration of the exhibitions. Completing the circumnavigation of the globe from West to East, Alessandro used the time machine, that is the extra day that is created by crossing the meridian 180, performing a space-time action out of his presence on the physical terrestrial space.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB1LmfwZjjs