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

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.

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