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Seeds of identity – almost CURATORS @ Set Up Art Fair 2015

almostcurators — Sat, 17 Jan 2015 21:36:24 +0000

almost CURATORS is pleased to present Seeds of identity, a talk focusing on the theme of cultural identity-building in relation with produced and consumed food, in the occasion of the project Art Mise en Place – sponsored by Expo 2015 – at Set Up Art Fair 2015.

The growing seasons and the related rituals have influenced the development and habits of the greatest societies since antiquity. Starting from the work Nutrice (Cradle) by Maria Lucrezia Schiavarelli, we will try to understand how the relationship between humans and nature has changed over the centuries and how this produced different outcomes from a cultural, philosophical and social point of view. Founder and manager of almost CURATORS Pia Lauro will be presenting the talk – in close collaboration with the artist -; also, Rosanna Figna (Agugiaro & Figna Research and Development) will be attending the talk to enhance the debate over modern cereal production.

During the fair, the talk area will be hosting the work Nutrice (Cradle) by Maria Lucrezia Schiavarelli. The work is inspired by the artist’s autobiography and employs ritualism to evoke the bond and connection existing between man and nature through culture and food. Rousing from Steiner’s anthroposophy, the installation portrays the tradition of rural societies and their foundation on the cyclic nature of the days of the week, the planetary motion and the growing seasons to mark the rhythm of life since antiquity. The seven most important seeds for human nutrition are sewn on large cloths and represent astronomical, astrological and mythological symbols.

The project was born in collaboration with Villa Contemporanea as a double exhibition at both Atelierhof Kreuzberg in Berlin and Villa Contemporanea in Monza to present the work of the Italian artist in Germany.

Seeds of identity

a talk in the framework of Art Mise en Place

January 25 2015, 3 p.m.

Set Up Art Fair

Autostazione delle Corriere

Piazza XX Settembre, 6 – Bologna

un-existing body: Stefano Ciannella and Keaton Fox @ Rialto

almostcurators — Sat, 25 Oct 2014 12:53:37 +0000

Body is the first inhabited place, it is the beginning of experimentation and knowledge, it is the proof for our own existence and our own being; it is also the first known and perceived limit. Hence, it is the first space hosting the interaction and clash in the research and self-assertion of identity. In Stefano Ciannella and Keaton Fox’s works, physical presence is sublimated by non-presences, which at the same time mark its transit. Both works, by employing different perspectives, investigate inner intimate universes, as past transitions, through the absence of body. The misplacement of the tangible reference point of the physical limit of the body does not undermine the perception of existence. The essence of the past, of what the body perceived, experienced and assimilated is not left outside from this analysis; rather, it is enhanced by the continuous reference back to a bodily identity.
On display: Stefanno Ciannella’s photo series I luoghi del corpo (2002) and Keaton Fox’s video Like a Jellyfish in January (2012).

Stefano Ciannella, I luoghi del corpo, Angel top, 2002

In Stefano Ciannella’s work, places, human beings, and relations are all parts of an articulated investigation process, which springs from a personal intimate research to later merge with a macroscopic analysis of social relationships and relations. According to Ciannella, it is exactly by means of the body and its movement that it is possible to combine emotions, memory and action. In the photo series I luoghi del corpo, human presence is replaced by body parts which inhabit space and interact with it, while getting bound to it as fragments from the past which has left a mark. The mannequins portrayed in the photos got their arms chopped off: the physical means allowing for the meeting with the others. Hence, the denial of the arms stands for both physical impossibility to interact with the others and refusal of lightness.

Keaton Fox, Like a Jellyfish in January, 2012

Keaton Fox employs video as the primary tool for exploring the themes of identity and perception through technology, which allows her to recognize the possible future effects of this process on civic consciousness. A non-presence, a non-place, messages on the edge of time from an answering machine, and which become meaningless and unworthy when compared with the slow movement of a jellyfish, this is what Keaton Fox is proposing in her video Like a Jellyfish in January. This animal, which is lacking cerebral mass, muscles and blood, and has been living on earth undisturbed since 650 million years ago, waves while the messages recorded by the answering machine tell us about a moment on the edge of an individual’s life because of a conscious escape from relationships.

un-existing body
Stefano Ciannella
Keaton Fox
curated by Pia Lauro
31 october – 1 november 2014 – 8-4 p.m.
Rialto Sant’Ambrogio, via di Sant’Ambrogio 18, Rome
facebook: G H E T T O :: RIALTO, Roma

Video star – Yasmin Fedda

Pia Lauro — Thu, 16 May 2013 09:19:35 +0000

To find the place of inspiration and work’s beginning of Yasmin Fedda we must go to Tell Brak, an archaeological site in the North-East Syria, where were found some votive deposits offered to Eye Temples. These idols – made of clay, inspired by the human figure and with big eyes – are for Yasmin the representation of see and watch, and therefore of film and record people, lives, community, subjects captured by her camera. Tell Brak was also an international thoroughfare and home to several civilisations over the centuries, I wonder why if this is not even a symbolic place, suggesting to interpret her films as of middle earth, where different worlds, ferments and cultures can meet: «I suppose I do aim for my films to be able to create bridges, to share the lives of others. I hope cinema and film can create these possibilities where a space can be made to relate to other people, and lives and experiences we might not be exposed to».

The different lifes that Yasmin Fedda tells seen together seem to compose a variegated world of emotions and perspectives and hopes, distant in space and time, but concretely nearby in the representation of the Other. The Other told by Yasmin has never declared as such by either synonym of exclusion or marginalization, what clearly emerges from her work is rather as the other – intended as a different point of view, of experience, of culture or condition – can easily become a collective self, different each time, in which each person can recognize its own identity. On the other hand, is Boutrous the Syrian monk protagonist of the film Milking the Desert (2004) to reveal the crucial point in the Yasmin’s work: telling the relations between the Muslim and Christian communities Boutrous says, with tangible genuineness, which in deep “a person is a person”.

The Yasmin Fedda’s work, in fact, is focused on people, individuals symbol of springtime cultural.

Yasmin looks to these universes with authenticity and raw purity with through the camera, and it is evident in the two works exhibited last March in Rome for the group exhibition “Ides of March” at the British School of Rome: the award-winning Breadmakers (video of the 2007, filmed to the Garvald Bakery in Edinburgh, where a community of workers with learning disabilities, makes a variety of organic breads for daily delivery to shops and cafes in the city. The Garvald Bakery’s project is inspired by the Rudolph Steiner’s ideas, according to which the workers realise their potential for self-discovery and creativity in a social environment) and the unpublished Siamo Tornati/We are Back (2013) outcome of the roman experience.

Siamo Tornati/We are Back tells about the growing phenomenon of italian social occupations – Teatro Valle, Cinema Palace, and others – as a reaction to the cuts on public services and the unemployment significant increase. In roman district of San Giovanni the boxing teacher Gianni other sports trainers and activists have come together to create S.C.u.P (sport e cultura popolare) a popular gym, school and community centre. I ask Yasmin why her decided to show together these two works that clearly address the theme of community as a place of positive growth: «because I felt that both films, in different ways, show how different communities are finding positive ways to deal with the issues they face. I found both projects inspiring and I felt they complimented each other».

The films are however stylistically quite different: Breadmakers is fully observational, without any voiceover or interview. The public can only look at the bakery, the bread and the social interactions while everybody is working. In Siamo Tornati/We are Back the main protagonist is Gianni; he explains what is the project S.C.u.P and why he realized that, and tells about this experience’s meaning for him and for the entire community. Yasmin select the players for her films in different ways adapting each time to the circumstances, this happen also in the editing phase where the style does not overlie the content, but is sculpted on it making every work unique and complete. It is in the film phase that Yasmin tends to propose always the same pattern of approach, spending long periods of time with the people who will film, this is in aid of her to obtain trust, and be able to film life ‘as it happens’.

Yasmin Fedda has palestinians origins, she lived in Syria and in different parts of the Middle East, after moved to UK and spent the first three months of 2013 in Rome at the British School of Rome, as winner of the Creative Scotland document24 Fellowship 2012-13. When I ask her if she feel herself a world citizen she answers: «It is sometimes hard not feeling rooted anywhere, but at the same time I enjoy feeling a part of many places and not any one place in the world».

Yasmin Fedda, Siamo Tornati/We are Back, 2013 http://vimeo.com/63646958

Lui chi è?? – Gaia Scaramella

Pia Lauro — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 23:13:47 +0000

Gaia Scaramella was born in Rome in 1979. After graduating from Rome Fine Arts Academy, she has been taking part in various collective exhibitions since 1998. She got numerous awards for her engravings and finally won the first Italian Graphics Price in Vigonza in 2007. Her research starts directly from the engraving technique, so that all of her works display a serial conception. Much of her research aims at decomposing and recomposing objects, works and memories, creating new perceptive dimensions and unexpected reading plans following articulated and multifaceted paths.

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.

Lui chi è?? – Francesca Romana Pinzari

Pia Lauro — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 12:10:28 +0000

Francesca Romana Pinzari, roman artist, was born in Perth (Australia) in 1976? She started her career in 2001 as figurative painter.
She has been recently going through an artistic research regarding body and the identity phenomena in contemporary society: using different media such as videos, performances and installations, her work is developing in the form of self-portraits that tell universally known concepts in which everyone can recognize himself.
Her own body is conceived by Francesca as a place of experimentation, on which, with which and through which she tends to explore the relationship between intimacy and sharing. In a continuous relation of antinomy between different elements put into connection between themselves, works such as Chimere (2012) were born. They are ethereal sculptures, fruit of a patient manual work that combines the fragility of horsehair with the resistance of a metal structure. Between myth and history, between utopia and reality, chimeras are looming, materializing in ancestral individual memories and and in the hybrid result of their own uncertainties. Chimera actually is a mythological monster, but at the same time it’s an impossible desire, an illusion, an absurdity.
Nevertheless it’s in works such as Hair Majesty (2011) or in the series made on plexiglass that Pinzari reveals the intimacy and the consistency of an organic element such as hair. What at first sight in Hair Majesty seems to be a pattern in china, actually is a work entirely made of the portraited subjects’ hair, a feature that creates a direct link with the represented people far beyond the visual similarity, as a sort of extension of the same body. Hair interweave as a slight frame recalling the subject’s spiritual thoughts, as a filter of separation of the material and the instinctive from spirit and soul. Hair creates intimate and interior figures also revealing pure eroticism.
On the other side, to tell about herself Francesca chooses plexiglass and hair. The dark wires outline a clear and emblematic shape. It’s a fetus, located upside down as in a young pregnant woman’s uterus close to delivery, and at the same time fixed and locked in plexiglass, as a sort of conservation case. In these works the artist leaves a trace, a test: her DNA.
After an acute survey on human body, Francesca Romana Pinzari has focused her work on the concept of identity, stressing the need to reflect on the difficulty to define who we are in relationship to a society that tends to allocate individuals for political, cultural, religious, physical group membership, incorporating the individual in the whole community.
That’s how works as Bestiario (2011) are born. On aluminum plates monstrous creatures take shape, composed of parts of existing animals and fantastic beasts that emerge as the anguish and anxieties of contemporary human beings from the inscrutable depth of a dark background. Or Cavalli (2012), approximately 150 small pictorial works which at first sight seem similar to each other in color intensity and smudges, but which are actually all different from one another. Unique and unrepeatable figures are dictated by the hand of the artist and the randomness of the used techniques. Each image is unique and serial at the same time, just like the individuals who inhabit the contemporary society, unique individuals, for history or culture, that tend to embrace each other for a pure sense of aggregation.
But can belonging to a group, a movement or a faith actually influence and distort the identity of the individual? Francesca Romana Pinzari thinks it can’t. The artist tells us about her point of view through the images I am not (2011), video of the performance presented during a session of performances within the review organized by the Yes Foundation (the Netherlands) last year. According to Francesca each individual tries to satisfy his own sense of belonging by embracing philosophies, religions and political parties, but in reality the individual can’t do anything in the group and it is precisely from this awareness that shows his own frustration towards the contemporary system.

Lui chi è?? – Alessandro Giuliano

Pia Lauro — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 17:06:00 +0000

Alessandro Giuliano (born in 1974) lives and works between New York, Rome and Naples.

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

Lui chi è?? – Silvia Iorio

Pia Lauro — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 11:00:49 +0000

Sorry, this entry is only available in Italiano.