MADE IN MIND #22

#22

FW 2021

Pippa Bacca | Berlinde de Bruyckere | Mona Mohagheghi | Tomoko Nagao | Alice Pedroletti Domenico Quaranta | Gianna Rubini | Agnese Spolverini | Marco Siciliano | Maria Chiara Ziosi

Photography - Design - Archive - Art - Publishing - Fashion - Comics - Architecture

co_atto is in window displays

co_atto is a project space run by Stefano Bertolini, Ludovico Da Prato and Marta Orsola Sironi, which consists of eighteen window displays at Porta Garibaldi train station in Milan. co_atto is part of Underpass, a project involving spaces within the train stations in Milan, dedicated to the promotion of emerging artists. Underpass is part of DisseMina Project, run by Le Belle Arti APS – Progetto Artepassante, with the support of Fondazione Cariplo – bando “Luoghi di innovazione culturale – 2019”.

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@co atto

www.coattoproject.com coatto.info@gmail.com

Porta Garibaldi, Milano (MI) Train station _ Mezzanine floor

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Francesca Pirillo DIRETTORE RESPONSABILE Dario Carotenuto PROJECT COORDINATOR Heidi Mancino ARCHIVING ENCOUNTERS Benedetta D’Ettorre CONTAINERS SECTION Forme Uniche STREAMS SECTION Marika Marchese V/SPACE PROJECT Gianluca Gramolazzi COPY EDITOR Sharon McMahon SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER Gianluca Gramolazzi GRAPHIC PROJECT Simone Macciocchi PRINTING Plotino S.r.l.

Via Giovanni Pacini 37, Milan CONTRIBUTORS Fabrizio Ajello Lisa Andreani Francesca Biagini Benedetta D’Ettorre Gianluca Gramolazzi Ginevra Ludovici Marika Marchese Marco Roberto Marelli Coral Nieto Garcia Elena Solito Stefano Volpato COVER #22 Marco Siciliano PUBLISHED BY Aptalab | P ublisher for innovation and artistic research ISSN | 2532-1773 Registrazione della testata al Tribunale di Cosenza N°2/17 del 10.02.2017 PROMOTED BY Blacklist Creative Studio distribution@listlab.eu DIGITAL www.madeinmindmagazine.com madeInmindmagazine made_in_mind_magazine Madeinmind_mag

All rights reserved. This production and its entire contents are protected by copyright. No use or reprint (including disclosure) may be made of all or any part of this publication in any manner or form whatsoever without the prior written consent of Made in Mind magazine. Views expressed in Made in Mind magazine do not necessarily represent the opinions of the editors or parent company.

ISSUE #22

CONTENTS

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PORTRAITS HOW TO BUILD A CONNECTION TO COMMON FEELINGS.

Hyperlinks, fluidity and destruction of boundaries characterise our times like travels caracterise colonial era. In the same manner, images and visions shape the world we live in and influence artistic productions and artworks. Gianluca Gramolazzi in conversation with Marco Siciliano

CONTAINERS PIPPA BACCA. A JOURNEY TOGETHER.

Marco Roberto Marelli tells about the life of Pippa Bacca, and how art and life merge making the distinction between the artist’s works and her social and private habits. Her “sculpture making” removes her from the heaviness of matter leading her towards a contemporaneity that has become playful, immaterial and affectionate.

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PORTRAITS ELENA SOLITO IN CONVERSATION WITH MONA MOHAGHEGHI.

Her practice develops through a conceptual thought that finds formalization in works of different nature. Languages intertwine – installations, videos, performance, collage, visual poetry – to return intense and layered works. The cultured and refined investigation finds its representation in the elegant works, delicate but powerful.

ARCHIVING ENCOUNTERS LIVING THE ARCHIVE: ALICE PEDROLETTI.

Archiving Encounters is a new series curated by Benedetta D’Ettorre, dedicated to the exploration of archives in contemporary art practices.

In this issue we delve into the artistic work of Aliche Pedroletti, an artist-researcher who investigates the meaning of archiving as an art practice focusing on identity and memory.

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V/SPACE WHAT INFORMATION WANTS.

V-SPACE, curated by Gianluca Gramolazzi, allows us to take time to think about the relationship between digital and real, thanks to essays written by curators and art critics. For issue #22, Domenico Quaranta analysed the evolution of our relationship with digital cultural products: from illegal downloads to NFT (non fungible token), in a context where information wants to be free and wants to be expensive.

PORTRAITS BERLINDE DE BRUYCKERE INCORPORA.

Berlinde De Bruyckere’s work deals with the transformation, transcendence and reconciliation of bodies in the face of mortality. These bodies are often animal, human or inanimate. In conversation with Fabrizio Ajello.

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STREAMS THE BAROQUE SUPERFLAT, AN ANTIPHRASE OF BEAUTY.

STREAMS, the column that comes from the desire to create a moment of reflection on social issues with established artists and professionals.

For this issue Marika Marchese invited the artist Tomoko Nagao, inclined to the contamination of languages and adheres to Neo pop and Superflat cultural experience.

PORTRAITS PILLOWS LIKE PILLARS.

Gianna Rubini, Agnese Spolverini and Maria Chiara Ziosi in conversation with Stefano Volpato. This conversation is an opportunity to discuss some issues that emerged during the exhibition, and all the limitations linked to the pandemic we have been experiencing along the process.

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HOW TO BUILD A CONNECTION TO COMMON FEELINGS

BY GIANLUCA GRAMOLAZZI Hyperlinks, fluidity and destruction of boundaries characterise our times like travels characterise the colonial era. In the same manner, images and visions shape the world we live in and influence artistic productions and artworks. If sometimes trends or (temporary) main topics are embodied in concepts of artworks and art exhibition, other times they are chances of deep analysis about the contemporary. The purpose of the artistic research of Marco Siciliano (Caltagirone, 1991) is to investigate relationships among bodies, transliterated into multidisciplinary works, with an impressive sentimental gaze. Thanks to accumulation and cataloguing, the spectator can enter in the story of the person behind the artist, the unknown Marco who could be someone we met, someone we love. In his artistic research the space assumes a pivotal role, a field where bodies acquire coordinates to appear in intimate places or in unknown landscapes, hiding and fragmenting themselves as we silently observe their slow dissolution between public and private.

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G.G.: Your photography production combines a perfect aesthetic with rough elements. Does it have a conceptual purpose?

M.S.: I’m interested in using familiar elements that change with the body: chewing gum, toilet paper, plasters. Elements with a precise and recognisable function that, once in contact with the body, turn into disgusting objects.

Chewed gum, used plaster, all elements that embody the DNA of the person who used them. Found on the ground, they simulate a naked body. With their function they have been intimate allies of our bodies and I try, perhaps almost unconsciously, to restore value

Cerotti, 2018 - ongoing Photo series Milan

in a design context is always removed from the technical drawings.

The photographic series, also including date and time, allows the ceiling to take on an identity of its own, observing the movements below it. We are no longer the protagonists but the ceiling which, under its gaze, sees the bodies disappear.

Marco Siciliano

Gianluca Gramolazzi: After graduation in Design, you started to create artworks. How much has your study influenced your research?

Marco Siciliano: Studying interior design at Politecnico di Milano has led me to have an open-minded approach to projects, whatever they may be.

The premise was to create an experience of a place from multidisciplinary research leading to a concept, which was then translated into a project.

With this type of preparation I never focused on a predefined media but used different media as needed.

With a background in architecture, the analysis of space takes on the same importance as the work itself, or rather, they are part of each other.

For my master’s thesis I presented Soffitti Sconosciuti, a series of ceilings photographed every time I woke up in an unfamiliar bed. This work stems from the desire to change the point of view of a room and the perception we have of it. Focusing on an element, the ceiling, which

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Marco Siciliano Cerotti, 2018 - ongoing Photo series Milan

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to these objects in the photograph. Where the oxymoron of an elegant presentation takes them into another context that can perhaps lead to a reappreciation of the moment we have shared with them.

G.G.: Your artworks mix everyday life with high references as a result of visual associations, sometimes with no logical connection. It reminds me of Mnemosyne Atlas by Aby Warburg. How do you combine different media and layers?

M.S.: My research and artistic practice, by not focusing on a particular medium, develops and creates a kind of connection between works on different levels. Semantic associations and meanings combine between the lines of a work without being necessarily linked.

Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas is obviously an inspiration for my research, but in addition to the logical or underlying meaning in my practice I try to create a sentimental map. Taking inspiration also from the work of Nobuyoshi Araki and Felix Gonzales Torres.

How does a diametrically opposed colour or image connect to a common feeling?

And above all, how to give it back to an audience?

In the development of art books, I try to create a kind of 10

Marco Siciliano Soffitti Sconosciuti, 2018 Site-specific installation, Milan

Marco Siciliano Soffitti Sconosciuti, 2017 - ongoing Photo series

Marco Siciliano Soffitti Sconosciuti, 2018 Site-specific installation, Milan

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Marco Siciliano Pink is a sadø color, 2018 Artist book

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mnemonic system in which the same elements are combined on the basis of literary and emotional inspirations.

In particular, in my artist book Pink is a sadø color, the paper expression of a wider research, the multidisciplinary nature of my research is gathered in an object-room, the book, in which the elements are combined according to a semantic/emotional fil rouge.

G.G.: Vergissmeinnicht is your last exhibition at Hošek Contemporary in Berlin. There we could see a great accumulation of layers. Could you tell us about this project?

M.S.: Starting from Astolfo’s journey in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532), where the Moon is described as an accumulation of objects abandoned on Earth, I wanted to reflect on how a lost object could tell a forgotten story.

The project is developed in two site-specific installations: the first in Berlin where the Hošek Contemporary, a boat from the early 20th century, is illuminated from under the wooden beams of the floor, allowing the viewer to observe all the objects lost and stratified over time.

As a collection of lost objects, all the plasters abandoned and found in the streets of Milan have been collected photographically and marked on a map of the city. Being lost on the Moon, and therefore charged with light, the patches are transformed into stars that come together in new constel13

Marco Siciliano VERGHISSMEINNICHT Artist Book Photo Gabriele Bizzo

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lations. This map of wounds, reflected in the sky, comes to life thanks to the collaboration with Luca Longobardi with whom we created a sound composition that accompanies the visitor in Berlin and Milan.

In the city of origin of the patches the spectator could find the second site-specific installation: a map, this time sewn onto a curtain, covers the windows of Superfluo, an independent space in Milan. As a representation of the path of a myth up to its decorative translation, on a familiar element such as a curtain.

G.G.: Another medium you use for your project is the artist book. Could you tell us about the one you made for Vergissmeinnicht?

M.S.: The book looks like a parallelepiped of opaque semi-transparent elements held together by a silver thread that binds them in a shibari knot. The bondage element constricts the body of the book together, but once freed it will not be possible to close it again, forcing the reader to make a choice.

Once opened, the book consists of a series of pages layered on top of each other, much like the project. The glossy paper with its opaque transparency allows the images to emerge as if from a fog, so that the content blends from page to page. And not being bound, each page can stand apart from the content in its singularity.

A transparency that also allows you to observe your own body as you turn the pages.

Vergissmeinnicht, from the german ‘forget me not’, the name of the blue flower, has been used as a title to represent a melancholic metaphor of the desire not to forget ourselves.

Inside, in addition to the genesis of the project and references to Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso as the incipit of the project, we find references to medieval medicine, which assumes astrology as scientific knowledge.

Analysis of a connection of the body with the cosmos and at the same time to the unconscious that vents itself in psychosomatic pain.

G.G.: Could you tell us something about your future projects?

M.S.: This autumn I will take part in the Art Verona fair, for the Pages section curated by Ginevra Bria with Archivio magazine.

Starting with the year 91, which happens to be my year of birth, we are working on a different sensory perception of an archive.

Focusing on an ancestral perception of memory that cannot be transmitted through social media, but how, through the physical memories of the body, memories crystallise into us.

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Marco Siciliano VERGHISSMEINNICHT Artist book Photo Gabriele Bizzo

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Marco Siciliano VERGHISSMEINNICHT Artist book Photo Hue Hale

I will then participate in a series of projects curated

by Petr Hošek in the Mala Voadora space in Porto, Portugal.

In which we will present the Vergissmeinnicht Artist Book with a site-specific setting. Spatially unfolding the pages of the book, thus making clear the levels of the project and the connections between them.

In November, under the curatorship of Valentina Casacchia and Mariella Franzoni, I will participate with a site-specific exhibition at the loop festival in Barcelona, Spain. The selected videos will be part of a site-specific installation project in the Souvenir space, where the room will be transformed into a mind full of questions and lies as answers.

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Marco Siciliano VERGHISSMEINNICHT, 2021 Exhibition, Hošek Contemporary, Berlin Photo Marco Siciliano

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Marco Siciliano VERGHISSMEINNICHT, 2021 Exhibition, Superfluo, Milan Photo Rafa Jacinto

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Marco Siciliano 8 DENARI series Milan, 2017-2021

PIPPA BACCA. A JOURNEY TOGETHER MARCO ROBERTO MARELLI

There are three exhibitions organized by the Foundation: Le mie vacanze, Interno di ritratti and Camera degli occhi; all made by Eva Adamovich, curator of the Foundation, and none of them included works by Pippa Bacca.

As stated by Adamovich, the curator’s profession is similar to that of the artist, the material she works on is the people she collaborates with.

Through the discovery of the ring binder that collects the papers of the Foundation conceived

by Pippa Bacca, we find ourselves catapulted into a complex and fascinating artistic path, which seems to overcome the Platonic dualism to dive into a universe where doubles coexist multiplying in infinite shades. Art and life do not develop a dialectical relationship, they merge making the distinction between the artist’s works and her social and private habits useless.

Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo was born in Milan on December 9, 1974. The third of five sisters with whom she forms ‘‘Il Neurone’’, a

playful name and symbol that highlights a very strong family bond and the need to get out of the singularity to be a part, and often an engine of a collective that makes life better.

Then comes Pippa Pasqualino di Marineo, she works at an interbank services call center and is the source of income that finances the projects of Pippa Bacca, the artist.

Then there is Eva Adamovic, an elegant and somewhat haughty woman, who curates the exhibitions of the Foundation. Finally, the elusive green rabbit, a superhero with a coat of the same color.

These are the five personalities that revolve around Pippa Bacca, five distinct figures that expand the artist’s experiential possibilities, five rigidly maintained worlds: Pippa Bacca and Eva Adamovic had two distinct telephone numbers, the physical one they said was only a slight resemblance.

In 1995 Pippa Bacca made her first exhibition and in 1999 she held the first solo show of her -

Pippa Bacca Nato dal ruscello, 2005 Cropped photograph

CONTAINERS / curated by Forme Uniche

“The Pippa Bacca Foundation was created for the breeding and dissemination of the colored rabbit. The colored rabbit is among the most renowned animals for its bizarre aptitude for art. The Foundation was created to help contemporary man find harmony with the colored rabbit within himself. The Foundation organizes exhibitions in everchanging spaces lent by those who can do it, this is because voyeurism and the desire to nose around into the house of others is a healthy feeling that the Foundation feels like it has to be dealt with.

The funding draws from the assets of Pippa Bacca, kindly expropriated from the earnings from the sales of her works.

All collaborators work for the pleasure of working together for free.

The exhibitions combine established artists with others who will soon become so.

Pippa Bacca is living proof that culture is priceless and that it can simply be born and developed from passion, love and intelligence.”

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Pippa Bacca Eden, 2004 c.

Yellow paper cut out

Angeli: vita, morte e miracoli - at the Slobs Gallery in Milan. Over the years her reference critic will become Giorgio Bonomi, a leading figure of Italian culture who deepens the work of Pippa Bacca through a philosophical reading, now necessary to take down any idea of frivolity in the work of an artist where high register and childhood blend in a cultured and determined way. Through the text La verità delle forbici – Variazioni dal rasoio di Occam, the author highlights the profound meanings that lie behind the simple use of scissors with which Pippa Bacca produces all her works, creations that enter, sometimes in a very delicate way , in relation with the performances, creating two never isolated poles through which is possible to explore themes that are both social and intimate. ‘‘The young artist takes a real leaf, then she reshapes it with scissors, so creating another leaf with a different shape, which is the work itself. But is this second leaf ‘real’ too? Certainly. But how do we define it? With the name of the original leaf or with the name of the one whose look it has taken on?

Another question is asked here (similar to the previous one): where is the boundary between the natural and the artificial? No-one may deny that the second leaf is ‘‘natural in its substance, though it be ‘‘artificial’’ through the artist’s intervention.’’

Referring to the cycle of Surgical Mutations, Bonomi highlights how a simple gesture can open to profound questions that lead us to explore the world of nature and the essence of things. Pippa Bacca, with a minimal and delicate, sunny and joyful way, shows the power of a complex and articulated thought that often leads to nature, to the body (private and social) and to the female condition.

Her ‘‘making sculpture’’ removes her from the heaviness of matter leading her towards a contemporaneity that has become playful, immaterial and affectionate. Through colored paper and scissors she manages to attract the user to then lead it, with determination, towards fundamental and urgent issues. ‘‘I have often seen Pippa, miniaturist of the cutout, use paper or cardboard to create worlds that live in everyone’s imagination and bring them back to the surface, both spiritually and materially.

This happened in 2002 with the “popular” series of Matres Matutae and in 2004 with the egg of original sin, in which Adamo ed Eva, together with the snake and the apple, experience different relational situations in egg-shaped worlds.’’

“The artist recovers iconographies linked to myth, prehistoric cults or biblical tradition, such as the Mater Matuta, Eva or Sirene; they are ambivalent female figures, who have the double power of attracting and destroying man. [...]The spirit with which Pippa Bacca approaches ancient symbols and rites is in fact anti-celebratory and playful; the artist cuts out the figures, in bright colors, so that they are similar to each other, stripping them of their uniqueness and sacredness, to make them more familiar and, in a certain sense, more intimate.” - Raffaella Perna

Pippa Bacca Green (detail), 2005 Metal and leaf, paper and plastic clippings

Through these words, Francesca Dell’Amore makes Pippa Bacca’s action radiant and introduces two important cycles of works where the theme of the feminine and that of the relationship between man and woman invade the mystical field. Rich in different levels of interpretation, these creations are united by a profound joy towards a life that is always in relationship, towards a being that does not exist in the finitude of the individual but that opens up to another both divine and human. If the woman, as indicated by Umberto Galimberti, is the ‘‘unrecognized interpreter’’ of the relationship that opens up to happiness and joy, the female body is the primary means of a relational vision since it is capable of containing and merging two lives through motherhood, be it biological, be it spiritual. And it is precisely this love and peace among peoples that we find in the latest performance by Pippa Bacca Bride on Tour. Here religion and material life come together in a complex

Pippa Bacca Mater Matuta, 2001 Pink paper cut out

Pippa Bacca Mater Matuta, 2001 White paper cut out

interweaving of references and symbols, even the faith of Pippa Bacca becomes a universal and concrete message. If art is a symbolic mode of communication through which we try to understand the world and indicate thoughts, the journey undertaken with Silvia Moro, regardless of the tragic ending, becomes a fundamental work to discover a powerful and determined vision of the world that is not only of the two artists but of many people. Trust in others and in the possibility of the brotherhood of people is shown here through a performance where art and life do not merge because they are already two ways of seeing a pre-existing unity.

Pippa Bacca always wore green; in a precious meeting with one of her sisters, a biographical reference emerged: their mother Elena dressed the five sisters in the same way to make them recognizable and not lose them.

A purely practical necessity could appear, and perhaps in part it was, like a charming eccentricity. In the case of green dresses, the convenience of washing everything together, the practicality of clothing blends with the artist’s personality, but she doesn’t want to convey a precise message. In the same way, the artist’s personality influences the works but it is not the ultimate purpose of the same that become vehicles of a thought that finds strength in the conviction of those who created it.

Distinguishing, especially in Pippa Bacca’s research, art and life, art and the multiple personalities created by the artist, becomes only a didactic and useless path that does not change the strong message that Pippa

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Pippa Bacca Mutazioni chirurgiche, 2004 Leaves cut out

Pippa Bacca La luna nel pozzo, 2002 Cut out silver paper

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Pippa Bacca Eva Booklet with poetry and opera Ed. Pulcinoelefante, Osnago 2004 (32 copies)

Pippa Bacca.

Title, year description

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Pippa Bacca during the washing of the feet at the midwife Iljana, Sofia, March 2008

Pippa Bacca during the washing of the feet at the midwife Lili, Ljubljana, March 2008.

Photo Maja Slavec, Ljubljana

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CONTAINERS

Pippa Bacca in Istanbul, March 2008 Print on aluminum Photo Sirio Magnabosco, Berlin

communicated through a public path that lasted only about ten years but full of different shades and many events realized thanks to the unstoppable desire to never waste a moment of the time granted on earth.

The house designed by Pippa Bacca to live with il Chiari, her boyfriend who is a Vespa rider, now hosts the headquarters of the Piero Manzoni Foundation, the artist’s uncle. Even if Giorgio Bonomi maintains that Pippa’s work has no points of relationship with that of Manzoni, moving through the rooms we notice the same ironic and sunny vision of life, two strong and determined personalities who have changed the world of those around them, and not only that, with a powerful lightness. The bathroom is all green, on a high wall of reproductions of the famous ‘‘canned shit’’. The smile for the unexpected location is immediately distracted from the furnishings of the room: three toilets, three shower heads inside a shower. Reading the fantastic story by Giulia Morello Sono innamorata di Pippa Bacca. Chiedimi perché! - I discovered that there is a name for those bathroom fixtures: matrimonial toilet.

There would be a thousand other things to tell in order to present such a complex artist full of strong thoughts but it is in the bathroom of the Foundation that an epiphanic vision of Pippa Bacca’s work is presented.

Her research, and perhaps her life itself, are based on the need to relate to others, to activate the people around her to have fun and to understand and improve the world together.

Discovering in person the unsettling generosity of one of her sisters, discovering her world through Morello’s fundamental and beautiful text, one can understand the importance of hitchhiking in the artist’s research. Moving looking for a passage from time to time not only shows trust in others but generates it, almost by magic, in people who had never paid attention to this way of doing. Through a gesture that is then 37

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Pippa Bacca and Silvia Moro in Istanbul, March 2008 Photo Sirio Magnabosco, Berlin

Pippa Bacca and Silvia Moro wash some of their clothes in Sarajevo, March 2008

Pippa Bacca in Istanbul, March 2008 Photo (detail) Sirio Magnabosco, Berlin

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Pippa Bacca Il Renato del Parini, 2007 Jar with grappa and mist, cropped photographs Mario Monaco Collection, Milan Exhibition view at Casa degli Artisti, Milan 2020 Photo Lorenzo Vatalaro

In the background, Presunto ritratto di Pippa ed Eva plays with the personalities of Pippa Bacca referring to the famous painting made in 1594 Portrait présumé de Gabrielle d’Estrées et de sa soeur la duchesse de Villars where Gabrielle d’Estrées, mistress of King Henry IV of France, is portrayed with her sister.

Sempreverde exhibition view at Casa degli Artisti, Milan 2020 In the background, photo of Camilla Micheli, Ritratto presunto di Pippa ed Eva (presumed portrait of Pippa and Eva), 2007 Photo Lorenzo Vatalaro

Pippa Bacca Boulle de Brouillard Series, 2007 Exhibition view at Casa degli Artisti, Milan 2020 Photo Lorenzo Vatalaro

“[...] I am not the only one to remember, and therefore I want to give a shape to those very real people, even if perhaps invented ones that Testori tells us in Il ponte della Ghisolfa. This is not an illustration of the book, but an interpretation of the characters given by people who today could be their modern version. In this way, the real portraits are juxtaposed with even the truest ones, taken from the novel, they are all closed in jars, for better preservation, placed under grappa and immersed in the fog.” - Pippa Bacca

made artistic with a performance or with the creation of photographs cut out in the shape of a means of transport (Più oltre), something really changes, one person at a time. No matter if this way of doing in Pippa Bacca stems from a habitual family practice, influenced by the Catholic faith in others; it is important to show how the lack of trust in people is only an anti statistic prejudice, of how with small gestures, full of meaning, you can really change things.

I did not know Pippa Bacca, I was very distant from her way of thinking and I never write in the first person. I do today, because in the end Pippa Bacca has changed me a little for the better, and this is what great artists, beautiful people can do. 1

1. References: Giulia Morello, Sono innamorata di Pippa Bacca, chiedimi perché!, Castelvecchi, Roma, 2015.

Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo, Pippa Bacca. Eva e le altre, Carlo Cambi Editore, 2016.

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IN CONVERSATION WITH MONA MOHAGHEGHI

BY ELENA SOLITO

Mona Mohagheghi (Teheran, 1981) graduated in Mathematics and attended the Academy of Florence where she studied Painting and New Expressive Languages.

She recently returned to Italy after studying in London. Her practice develops through a conceptual thought that finds formalization in works of different nature.

Languages intertwine – installations, videos, performance, collage, visual poetry – to return intense and layered works. The cultured and refined investigation finds its representation in the elegant works, delicate but powerful.

Elena Solito: Several artists start from an academic education seemingly distant from art. You graduated in Mathematics and then studied art first in Tehran and then in Florence.

How did ‘‘Knot Theory’’ lead you to art?

Mona Mohagheghi: For me I suppose, some contents of topology like the knots or open and closed curves were those aspects of Mathematics that are closely connected with imagination.

Maybe it was the logic of forms, their complexity and their relation to other forms that somehow led me to art. It’s all very vague to be honest! All I remember is that one day during the knot theory course, I was so fascinated by all those forms and their relation to space, that I decided to start drawing. There is, however, no trace of Mathematics in my works!

Collective project Joy, London 2019 Posters, zines, self printed newspapers Courtesy the artist

E.S.: In your research there are recurring themes: identity, migrations, conflict, time.

What role does the socio-political issue play for you in your work?

M.M.: We live in difficult times of our collective history. I believe that art can open up new avenues of reflection…new spaces. Spaces where new subjectivities can be rewritten, and where alternatives to the current situation in which we live can be reimagined. In view of this, art defines itself as deconstruction, decoding

values and norms. It opens up a space in our imagination to see reality differently and reconsider the boundaries between the supposedly normal and the subversive in our minds. In my research I am interested in pushing against the dominant narratives of our world. There are some of my works that critically reflect on the global socio-political realities but there are also some other works that are more intimate.

They are formed through the recounting of a personal story.

E.S.: The outcome of your last London academic career on the relationship between Art and Politics led you to realize projects with a very powerful emotional and visual charge. I think of the strength of Other Gases.

M.M.: Other Gases aims to highlight a fact not relayed to the public regarding the safety of lachrymatory agents. Banned as a method of warfare, tear gas still stands as a viable option for domestic police enforcement. Other Gases is a three channel video installation in which performers read the articles of the Chemical Weapon Convention on riot-control agents, in different languages. After a few seconds, the performers begin to feel irritation in their eyes, nose, and throat and struggle really hard to keep on reading or even to keep their eyes open.

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This condition was caused by onions being grated and chopped at a very short distance from them. When cut open, onions release a chemical that combined with enzymes, turns into sulfur gas and causes tearing. This is similar to the tear gas effect which gets worse the longer one is exposed to it. Despite its toxic properties and despite being a chemical weapon, tear gas is considered harmless to use in times of peace in every corner of the world: from Hong Kong to France, from Gezi movement to the refugees being gassed when crossing borders. In Chile, the daily use of tear gas during the demonstration in 2019 has made this dangerous chemical weapon a part of the quotidian life. And as we saw just recently in 2020, this toxic weapon was used by the police in the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in different parts of the US. E.S.: And the Room 52?

M.M.: Room 52 is a guide through the Iran room at the British Museum presented in the form of a performance lecture. The guide starts like a normal museum audio tour with the description of the objects, but then after a few seconds, the visitor is lured into an unexpected story. The objects of this room have been associated with a chronology of events starting from Britain’s interest in the oil-production potential of Persia and the formation of Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

This guide re-narrates the ancient historical objects to tell the not well-known (in the west) story of the US and UK led 1953 coup in Iran. It tends to re-articulates the Iran room; to make it speak an alternative narration of Iran’s past and the UK’s long-standing neo-colonial interventions in the region. My focus in this project in fact was not centred around questions of repatriation, but deeper questioning of the part the museum played in colonial exploitation. It was a way of countering how the collection of the museum is perceived, seeing it from a different perspective, and 48

Mona Mohagheghi Other Gases, 2020 3 channel video installation Courtesy the artist

Mona Mohagheghi Untitled, 2014 Projection on wall, site specific installation Paesaggi in movimento, curated by A. Daneri at Antico Palazzo Comunale, Saluzzo (Cuneo, Italy) Courtesy the artist

Mona Mohagheghi How painful!

From Untitled series 2014, Florence Fine art print on aluminium dibond Courtesy the artist

rethinking it from a non-institutional point of view. The British Museum and multinational oil and gas company BP, have a partnership since 1996. Various exhibitions and public events of the museum were sponsored

by BP. Many know that BP is responsible for several environmental disasters, in particular the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

But not so many people know that the harm caused by this company is not only environmental. The history of the company now called BP, is intertwined with imperialism.

BP, originally known as Anglo-Persian Oil Company, monopolized Iran’s oil production and exportation for four decades. Due to covid restrictions I presented Room 52 as an online lecture performance, but in the upcoming months I will do the performance in person at the museum.

E.S.: In works such as In this space, 1 out of 3 breaths that you breathe in, is polluted or in Untitled 2015 you addressed the issue of international sanctions imposed on Iran and its consequences. Tell me about those works.

M.M.: Both works reflect on how the sanc-

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Mona Mohagheghi I have a fever!

From Untitled series 2014, Florence Fine art print on aluminium dibond Courtesy the artist

Mona Mohagheghi Untitled (detail), 2017 Cut out from passports on vintage map Courtesy the artist

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tions have affected the economically and socially disadvantaged citizens in Iran. In this space, 1 out of 3 breaths that you breathe in, is polluted in particular focuses on air pollution. The blockage of the crude oil exports forced the country to employ technologically primitive methods for refining it locally.

The end product, mostly used in automobiles as fuel, turned out to be a highly polluting substance. During a period of 10 years from 2006 to 2016, a total of 1237 days were indicated as high-risk for the air quality, an equivalent of 33% of the days in a year; one day out of three. The death rate in the country increased by 181% only in Tehran, much of it attributed to the pollution level.

In this space, 1 out of 3 breaths that you breathe in, is polluted the visitor is placed at the center of a temporal space (between 2 wall calendars of the years 2006 and 2016), allowing them to physically become a part of it while looking at the text in forex inscription on the wall.

E.S.: You conducted an interesting survey on identity and migration, in particular to the role of the identity document as a proof of a person’s existence. Its presence defines us and its absence makes us invisible.

M.M.: Living in Europe and being categorized as a non-EU citizen can deprive you of some rights. At a first glance they might seem insignificant, but then one notices how in daily situations this categorization takes away opportunities from them or sometimes might result in being treated differently. I’m really interested in decontextualizing identity/travel documents. I did a few works using passports (mine and other people’s) and the border stamps on their pages. The passport is a document of both travel and recognition. The visas and the entry/exit border stamps, render visible the existence of the boundaries and differences. I use the passport stamps as a visual element to address the question of inclusion and exclusion and the construction of limits and barriers. For me the passport is also a metaphor for identity and displacement.

I see identity here not only as something static defined in relation to the roots, but also an identity as something fluid that is always subject to change and transformation due to immigration and exposure to multiple cultures.

E.S.: Despite the production of works, your work is deeply conceptual. You analyze mechanisms, phenomena, rituals, places or the variables of time, around which you build a narrative. (I’m thinking of Untitled 2012, in Caffè; A local/golbal/Social connection, Here is always elsewhere, or Untitled 2014, Between and A map for the waiting times).

M.M.: I have always been interested in the perception of time and space. In most of the projects you mentioned, the concept of time has a strong presence. In these projects I used mapping and remapping as a method to perceive the space and the urban settings.

And countermapping as a practice to challenge the natural order of narratives, as you see in A map for the waiting times for instance, where I compare my perception of time to that of an average Palestinian who has to wait for hours everyday to cross a checkpoint. To me maps are somehow an interpretation of that territory by collecting memories, experiences and impressions of that territory by those who designed it.

Perhaps each mapping comes from a desire to narrate and tell. Tell a personal story that is part of the collective story building together a shared experience. Walking is an activity of mapping at a scale of one-to-one. It’s a way of taking possession of places that want to be seen and heard, to get in touch with the place and start a dialogue with it. When walking, I lose track of my thoughts, my steps mark my presence, my story intersects with those of the others. This is the approach you see for example in Untitled 2014 projections or in Here is always somewhere else. In Here is always somewhere else I ask passers-by for directions showing them modified maps of streets of Tehran juxtaposed on Florence map and vice versa. Not being able to recognize the reference points on the map, people get bemused. In their own neighborhood, their own world, they get lost. The phenomenon of not fully possessing either of the two places (the home town and the new one) after immigration is a common thing felt by many immigrants.

A condition in which the space belongs less and less to those who inhabit it. This is the idea behind Between, a neon light installation showing the distance between Tehran and Florence, between the two reference points, a space that can not be measured nor planned, but only felt.

E.S.: What role does performance play?

M.M.: In my older works I used to perform myself, but now I really like to collaborate with performers. Furthermore, I am becoming more and more interested in using a combination of performance, storytelling, video materials from the web, theoretical reflections, etc. In particular I find lecture-performance an intriguing practice because of its hybrid nature.

Mona Mohagheghi Untitled, 2017 Cut out from passports on vintage map Courtesy the artist

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Mona Mohagheghi Untitled, 2013 Light box Courtesy the artist

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E.S.: Today, the artist is less and less rooted in one place. You also have this nomadic tendency. What does this constant displacement mean and where do you imagine or plan to go as soon as the current situation allows?

M.M.: I think this constant displacement comes from the dynamic or fluid identity I was telling you about earlier. I feel like I am always ready to move and to explore a new place, but at the same time I am sure that I will come back to the places that I have lived. Mainly because of the people I have met in those places and the memories I’ve had. I have to say that this nomadic tendency is sometimes a bit stressful but pays off most of the time. As for the plans, I should say that after the pandemic and all we’ve been through, I still find it a little bit early to decide. I need to wait and see how things will be in the next few months.

E.S.: What are you working on? What plans do you have for the future?

M.M.: One day during the (second) lockdown while I was cooking, I was also on the phone having a conversation with a friend who lives on the other side of the world.

I was giving her the recipe of a dish and at the same time we were also talking about the current situation and its long-term outcomes. At one point I started recording our conversation and filming the cooking process. This was the beginning of a series of short films I am working on at the moment. I make things/give instruction on how to make different objects while in the background I am discussing and reflecting on social issues. I am collaborating with other people from different fields for this project and trying to include different views and voices in the films. The playful and unexpected aspect of these videos is that at first they seem like tutorial videos to the viewer, but then you realize they are actually something else.

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Mona Mohagheghi Untitled, 2015 Postcards, passport, “Getting Lost with Julie Mehretu”, at Botin Foundation, Santander Courtesy the artist

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Mona Mohagheghi Here is always somewhere else, 2012 Maps, mp3 players, “Chen Chen e Mona Mohagheghi” Curated by Lorenzo Bruni at SUN studio 74rosso Gallery, Florence, Courtesy the artist

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Mona Mohagheghi In this space, 1 out of 3 breaths that you breathe in, is polluted, 2016 Installation with wall calendars and forex inscription, Così ti ha fatto Dio e così ti devo tenere, curated by Filippo Bigagli with Lorenzo Bruni at Officina Giovani, ex-Macelli, Prato Courtesy the artist

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ARCHIVING ENCOUNTERS

BY BENEDETTA D’ETTORRE

The idea of the archive is similar to that of the collection, and that is also one of the reasons why contemporary institutions are ever more eager to engage with them, in the sense that they both constitute a group of objects that is actively gathered and preserved. Both archives and collections constitute fertile terrains to ask questions of power, how we organise and build knowledge, what we choose to preserve for the future. Similarly, both for archives and collections we may know the context which produced the objects, however as a set of objects they, in theory, present a slight difference. Collections can be created with the sole motivation of collecting, the gathering of different objects where material connections can be pre-established by the interpretative work of collectors and curators; archives, instead, frame the items in a context or theme, so they become a set of records that can shed a light on each other, where the job of the archivist should be that to be as objective as possible in their preservation. Archives, in this sense, invite interpretations from users to re-elaborate on the materials and make their present and future meanings never fixed. It is by embracing this discursive approach, what Sue Breakell calls ‘negotiating the archive’, that Archiving Encounters propose to delve into the exploration of archives as a domain for creative exchange through the practice of contemporary artistic practices.

Alice Pedroletti (Italy, 1978) lives and works in Berlin and Milan. As an artistresearcher, she investigates the meaning of archiving as an art practice focusing

Alice Pedroletti Studio , Lingeri House, 2015 Working and research table, archive material Art Residency, Lingeri House. Isola Comacina (IT) Courtesy of the artist

ARCHIVING ENCOUNTERS / Alice Pedroletti

Archiving Encounters is a new series dedicated to the exploration of archives in contemporary art practices. These explorations do not follow a specific set of parameters but start from a general understanding that archives are groups of objects, traces of actions, that can take different forms: including, but not limited to, photographs, drawings, diaries, letters, sketchbooks and official documents. Archives are often seen as hidden away, impenetrable and suspended in time, waiting to be re-activated by users. Archives are the product of the social processes and systems of their time, presenting the stories of those included within those systems and reproducing the absence of those excluded. So, rather than proposing a fixed definition of archives, and the kind of work that can be associated with them, Archiving Encounters takes conversations with artists, and their practices, as starting points to encounter the different kinds of archives they choose to work with. Often artists use ‘the archive’ as a theme itself, produce new taxonomies, respond to real archival materials to critically challenge modes of knowledge production, or use it as a framing device to invent characters or events from the past that are put in dialogue with the present to shed new light on contemporaneity. In this sense, this series has two purposes: documenting encounters with archives and exploring their possibilities, and archiving the encounters with the artists, who through a deeper understanding of their work, allow us to see the meanings of archives and archival practices.

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LIVING THE ARCHIVE: ALICE PEDROLETTI on identity and memory. Her work moves between various fields (science, literature, history), but she is mainly interested in geography and architecture. She questions the image’s significance through a physical relationship between photography and sculpture concerning temporality, fragility, and matrix in both disciplines. She won the Italian Council 9th Edition (2020), a program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for ContemporaryCreativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.

As an artist-curator, she founded ATRII and its Open Archive for the future, a collective and nomadic project hosted at Cittadella degli Archivi, Milan Municipality Archive. She is a fellow at Rabbit Island Foundation and TSOEG - Temporal School of Experimental Geography: artist networks focusing on ethical and experimental art practices concerning the environment and she’s a member of AWI - Art Workers Italia. Her work and ATRII have been presented in several Italian and international galleries and institutions, along with talks and residencies. Among these: BOZAR - Center for Fine Art (Bruxelles - B, 2021), ZK/U Center for Art and Urbanistic (Berlin - D, 2021), Unidee - Fondazione Pistoletto (Biella IT, 2020), Royal Geographic Society (London - the UK, 2019), Museo del ‘900 (Milan - IT, 2017).

This text has been inspired by several conversations with artist Alice Pedroletti, which opened a dialogue on how we think about what archives are, how they are generated, how they can be used and, in particular, how these questions are reflected in the work of contemporary artists. Coincidentally, the first conversation happened while on a guided walk to explore the history of a neighbourhood in Venice. The city then offered itself as a prompt to think of it as an open-air archive. Instead, the publication of this article coincides with the final phase of the artist residency at the ZK/U Center for Art and Urbanistics in Berlin. I take it as an oppor64

Alice Pedroletti DIN DIN , 2019 Archive images (print on A4 tracing paper) MAC - Museo di Arte Contemporanea Lissone (IT) Courtesy of the artist and ATRII

tunity to reflect through her experience and artistic practice on urgent questions on how the pandemic has impacted life and shaped the work of artists. While Pedroletti’s latest works give us a snapshot of the contemporary time, in her previous works we can also see how they signal to the ongoing research that constitutes the artist’s practice, which brings to the fore, with renovated importance, questions about the meaning of artistic labour in engaging with how we construct culture and society, and everything that derives from them, through the accumulation of knowledge and objects, how we preserve them for the future, how we create new knowledge and new things and eventually how we engage with the past, the present and the future.

Alice Pedroletti DIN DIN , 2019 Octometric brick made with kinetic sand MAC - Museo di Arte Contemporanea Lissone (IT) Courtesy of the artist and ATRII

Pedroletti’s practice is not bound to a medium but spans from photography to sculpture, from drawing to installation and others to play subtly with objects, images and symbols to destabilise viewers’ assumptions and preconceptions. For example, in DIN DIN (2019), she used text, sculptures and several images from an old handbook. The images show an unknown person engaging with some sort of building work: they have a similar aesthetic and gestuality of the photographs that can be usually seen at retrospective exhibitions of renowned Arte Povera or land artists from the ‘60-‘70s. By extrapolating and decontextualizing the images, she created a fictional character, as if they were archival images documenting the work of an unknown artist or designer, lost in the time frame 65

ATRII Archivio Aperto (Open Archive), 2015 ATRII Archivio Aperto - Project folders Cittadella degli Archivi, Milan (IT) Courtesy ATRII

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of the art system. DIN DIN reflects on notions of standardisation and challenges visual stereotypes, questioning the symbols and signs of what we understand as art or daily life. If we can misinterpret these images as if they were the real documentation of an artist at work, does that mean that we have developed a standardized notion of what an artist’s work looks like?

Alice reflects on who decides the standards and how the media themselves shape how to see and consume art today.

These questions are layered throughout the work, in the subject of the photographs, in the medium, in the context and in the final artwork at the MAC - Lissone Museum of Contemporary Art. She uses the archive as a methodology to organise her own work, as well as the starting point for the research from which she, in the end, produces a totally new artwork imbued with the meaning of the overall work. Through the installation, conceived as a fictional minimal exhibition, one can finally understand the ‘plot’ of both artists: the unknown person is not an artist but more likely a gardener, as the images came from a manual that provided standard tools and tips to create what would be ‘the perfect garden’.

The photographs were displayed as A4, the most common standard size for printing. The final, new object, created out of this process, was a simple, recognisable optometric brick made of kinetic sand which, while it is usually used as a standard measurement, here never finds a fixed form. In this work, we can already see a recurring methodology: the artist’s work happens through archival research, subtraction and the creation of an ever-changing object. In the end, the artist herself disappears in favour of the fictional artist, who she created from archival materials that could be coming from the museum, but that were actually found in a second-hand bookshop. In this way, her work re-activates the idea of the archive by creating a new one and keeping it in constant motion, inviting us to question the apparent truth that can be extracted from books and destabilising its own nature as a fixed, permanent collection of objects.

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This approach is also explored through the collective ATRII, which she found in 2015 in Milan. ATRII brings together artists to work with the liminal quality of atriums: lobbies and courts at the entrance of buildings that are at the same time private and public as they formally belong to each one of the people living in the building, but they also stand in between the public space of the street. All invited artists are required to identify in an atrium or in the concept of ‘atrium’, a link with their research and work as the basis for an artwork - or a project of an artwork - that could highlight the links between art, territory and inhabitants.

The outcomes of the research are archived at Cittadella degli Archivi, the Municipal Archive of Milan, and they are also published online. In this sense, ATRII is an open and living archive, continuously expanding until the realisation of the idea into the physical space of an atrium.

This methodology can be compared to what is known as the archive continuum. Developed as theory (the ‘record continuum model’) first

by Australian approaches to archival sciences, the archive continuum sees archiving as a process in constant ontological unfolding. This understanding expands the life cycle of records beyond the initial creation and the final filing away, after they exhausted their purpose, to that of objects linked to their context of creation, from which they were ultimately disembedded in the process of conservation, and that can be represented and used in new circumstances, renewing the possibilities for their value. This change of perspective turns archives from ‘excavation sites’ into ‘construction sites’, as Hal Foster wrote in his article An Archival Impulse.

The application of the idea of the ‘archive continuum’ can be seen in the work (cose) rose (2018) in collaboration with artist Lucia Veronesi, also part of ATRII Collective. Alice collects archives, which bring together slides affected by what is called ‘magenta shift’: a temporal process in which the cyan and yellow colours of the slides disappear, leaving only magenta as the prevailing one. A small part of her collection was used in (cose)rose, meaning ‘pink things’, to investigate the idea of fragmentation, metamorphosis and mimesis between art and architecture, literature and photography. The artwork functions again by subtraction: neither the historical artefacts nor their photographs were taken by the artist, who acknowledges partial authorship given the inherent element of collaboration that exists 68

Alice Pedroletti Archive slides affected by ‘magenta shift’ (on going) Artist private collection Studio6, Milan (IT) Courtesy of the artist

Alice Pedroletti & Lucia Veronesi cose(rose), 2018 Site specific installation Yellow, Varese (IT . Courtesy ATRII Photo Alice Pedroletti

when using archival materials, and it highlights the defecting nature of the objects, which slowly decay, losing something of themselves.

The diapositives used once as a teaching tool in school, here appear under a, literally, new light while maintaining recognizability as icons fixed in our memory. By projecting the images in an atrium, the two artists want to reinforce the transient nature of the object in a space that is also a passageway. In front of the projection, a mirrorball reflects a portion of the image all over the space, creating an immersive, kaleidoscope-like, ambience that forces the viewers to consider the myriad of future narratives and ways of seeing that these materials could take on. The process of subtraction from a fixed state, with the purpose of reinvention, is made even clearer by the striking contrast that results from the black hole that the mirrorball creates by blocking out a portion of the projected images.

However, Pedroletti engages with archives in

a broad sense, conceiving spaces and people as living archives too. In Study on a floating island (2018), she adopted a cartographic approach to producing a map that could include sensitive elements, shreds of evidence of the past, memories, recent lived situations, changes in the landscape, traces of the permanence of living beings on the island. Alongside archival materials collected over the years by the artist, which were used here to expand on how we think of ‘islands’, she created a site-specific wall/ archive following the shape of Isola Comacina, where she was on a residency. The title of the project Study on a floating island suggests that we consider the island as an object that exists outside of the water, what we normally see, as well as existing below the water. The map explored the boundaries and contours of the island searching for an imagined access point to the world beneath the surface. The whole project took an inside-out/upsidedown approach working with temporality and space: the outside world was brought inside 69

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Alice Pedroletti The other island, 2019 Photography Art Residency, Lingeri House. Isola Comacina (IT) Courtesy of the artist

the architecture, and the map showed possible entry points to the bottom of the island and it was accompanied by drawings that showed its possible underwater conformation. From pieces of lightweight concrete, she made several sculptures recreating the shapes of the island in its complete form so that it could be seen in its entirety. The interlayer of the media in this work, where each step is used to investigate the process itself, questions to what point something exists in itself and how we can engage with it. Interestingly, while the map shows the life of the island as unfolding through time and seeks to show entry points for what cannot be seen, what is absent from sight, the sculptures also never reach immanence as they are carved, photographed and recarved, becoming the remains of the sculpture that was. Again, a work of subtraction. The artwork exists in its absence, its memory exists as fixed in the image, which works as an archive of itself: it provides a snapshot of something that is gone while it continues to exist in the present.

The themes of the archive, the atrium and the island are found again in her residency at ZK/U in Berlin, presented during the first Open House event after a year of restrictions

due to the pandemic. The residency addressed the contemporary contradiction of creating collectivity in the distance while dealing with imminent questions surrounding the reconstruction and future of cultural spaces. ZK/U, invited to the 15th edition of Documenta for their community-based collective work, hosts individual artists, practitioners, urban researchers and collaborative groups, in self-contained units with living and working areas in a former railway depot surrounded by a public city park in the Moabit district. Pedroletti presented the project “The city, the island”, also a collaborative project with ATRII, which stems from a similar consideration about liminal spaces: the invisible border between the residency and the city, the juxtaposition between the private and public space, recreate the conditions of an atrium that artists need to navigate through.

This research is presented through a selfpublished zine, which will be included in the ZK/U archive, but it is also conceptualised to perform various tasks. The choice of the zine, an alternative version of a book, is loaded with various meanings: it is an archive itself of the process and research of the artist, as a book it carries knowledge and, as a guide, it becomes a means to navigate the neighbourhood.

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It is important to keep in mind, to understand the experience of the residency, the spatial features of ZK/U when considering that her 9-months residency started in January 2021, concurrent with a steep increase in the number of coronavirus cases that brought a second global wave of the pandemic. While the Moabit district has historically been seen as an island next to the city centre, as it is surrounded by waterways, ZK/U - due to its characteristics - could also be imagined as an island on the island or a utopian atrium of the city. During the pandemic, the artist felt that the institution adopted even more insular qualities with its enclosed community of artists. Ideallyprotected but also excluded from the water itself, during the lockdown the community of artists in residence was legally considered a household, giving them the possibility of socialisation, forbidden for the majority of the population, but also putting them in a fragile position. Could this have been a similar experience, maybe an experiment, to test how artists would survive if they were stranded on an island? What would they do with the limited resources available? Alice began to reconsider

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her relationship with this newly found home, the domestic and working spaces of the residency, as well as the limitations and the conditions for spatial and social interactions during the pandemic.

The territorial and political conditions pushed her to imagine projects for specific emotional needs that go beyond the classical architectural space of the atrium. Islands never cry (2021) is a site-specific installation made of three sails that inflate with the wind recreating the sound of a sailing boat and, simultaneously acting as a barrier and an invitation to go beyond those barriers, perhaps using them to overcome our limitations. The installation sits on the edge between the ZK/U and the park, similar to the curtains that are sometimes used to separate spaces, like those found in southern Europe to divide the domestic spaces of private homes and businesses from the public footpath. In this sense, the sails recreate the space of the atrium; however, they are also permeated by the desire of the artist to be able to leave the residency and explore the city.

Alice Pedroletti Study on a floating island, 2015 Drawings on paper Art Residency, Lingeri House. Isola Comacina (IT) Courtesy of the artist Alice Pedroletti Research Archive, on going Installation at Studio 12. Research material about islands, boats and navigation (archive images, photographs, texts, maps) ZK/U (Studio 12), Berlin (DE) Courtesy of the artist

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Alice Pedroletti Islands never cry, 2021 Site specific installation (three sails 4,5x1, sailing ropes, wind) ZK/U Open House, Berlin Courtesy of the artist

In the studio, the artist presented the ongoing archive of the process of the research during the residency. It shows a collection of images of the neighbourhood, islands and boats that have inspired her to map the space and re-imagine it.

The juxtaposition of the images further reflects on the local context and the role of the artist in that context. Moabit, as a neighbourhood, can be understood through this lens if we observe the local, more permanent communities, and the temporary communities that would need to cross the water to leave and come back to the place. What does it mean to meaningfully respond to it? What is the role of the artist?

Reflecting on the ambiguity of the artistic work often othered, she thinks of artists as islands for their idiosyncrasies. So while artists may be like islands in society, they are also the ones creating the ‘boats’ that help us to transcend borders, connect ideas, and arrive at new lands.

To overcome access restrictions to the building and make the archive available, Pedroletti collaborated with artist Isaac Schaal to create archives.berlin (https://www.archives.berlin/): an ever-growing online space collecting images related to the themes of islands, boats and navigation, accessible online and also on-site through a QR Code near the sails installation. It also functions as a database of images of boats that are elaborated through artificial intelligence to design a real folding boat. The idea of the folding boat has been inspired by German architect and inventor Alfred Heurich who first designed a foldable kayak in 1905 and here it is taken as the ultimate symbol for mobility. The archive, located in the Cloud, is able to bring closer artists, publics, ideas and images that would be otherwise, in reality, far from each other. The limits of authorship and agency are often tested in Alice’s practice, even for the project ‘‘The city, the island’’ she collaborated remotely with different artists around the world. In these relationships the roles interchange making sometimes the artist just a marginal actor, almost becoming herself the audience of her work, on which, though, she still maintains some form of authorship.

digital archive then becomes alive. Once again, the artist has to relinquish some of her power over the work. Likewise, an analogic archive, which needs the reactivation from its users, the project of the folding boat could only be actualised when the artist, or someone else, would be able to access the design created by the machine. In this last work, we can see how Pedroletti treats archives not as dead repositories but rather as a living, fertile ground on which we can build new ideas. In a previous text she wrote about archives, she says: ‘‘‘Living’’ typically means ‘‘life’’: with its flow, its endurance, its survival. It generally refers to the natural being destined for a predefined cycle. It also reminds me how necessary it is to rethink the Archive itself: like a body that grows and ages, the Archive changes and should change. But unlike a body, it is destined to last.

A living archive looks to the future, encompassing the risk of not being applied, understood or conserved. Its fragility leaves room for a possible and continued adjustment into something else, proposing a different history, a new archaeology.”

Similar to islands that self-reproduce and manage, Schaal and Pedroletti are training the AI through an autopoietic process where the

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Alice Pedroletti Islands never cry, 2021 Drawings on paper Site specific installation (three sails 4,5x1, sailing ropes, wind) - View from the artist studio at ZK/U ZK/U (Studio 12) Open House, Berlino (DE) Courtesy of the artist

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Alice Pedroletti Study on a floating Island: searching for an entrance, trying to float, 2019 Mixed media wall Archive and Light concrete sculpture Installation view. Solo show at Ncontemporary, Milan (IT) Courtesy of the Artist

Alice Pedroletti in collaboration with Isaac Schaal Archives.berlin, on going Database Research material about islands, boats and navigation Web version screenshot (archive images, photographs, texts, maps, QR code) Presented in the occasion of ZK/U Open House, Berlin (DE) Courtesy of the artist

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V-SPACE A DIGITAL AND ANALOGUE PROJECT

V-SPACE, curated by Gianluca Gramolazzi, allows us to take time to think about the relationship between digital and real, thanks to essays written by curators and art critics. For issue #22, Domenico Quaranta analysed the evolution of our relationship with digital cultural products: from illegal downloads to NFT (non fungible token), in a context where information wants to be free and wants to be expensive.

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WHAT INFORMATION WANTS

BY DOMENICO QUARANTA

At the first Hackers Conference in 1984 Stuart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, uttered a sibylline sentence about information, which later appeared, in a more elegant form, in his book The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT (1987): ‘‘Information wants to be free.

Information also wants to be expensive...That tension will not go away.’’ 1 Along the last decades, we experienced both sides of this tension, in ways that didn’t seem to be going to change.

Despite copyright regulations, trials, obfuscated websites, hardware and software protections, digital or digitized information always found a way to circulate freely and for free: from cracked cartridges to scanned books, from streaming football matches to badly recorded movies, from commercial software to mp3 discographies to leaked classified documents. With Free Software, and later on Open Source and Creative Commons, a whole cultural movement emerged in order to adapt the idea of intellectual property to digital, networked modes of circulation. In an age in which ‘‘we copy like we breathe’’ (Cory Doctorow, 2011), we also got used to sharing our contents for free on platforms that grant us free access to them. 2 Markets for digital contents developed anyway, yet they were always based on the implicit assumption that they should be cheaper than material contents or experiences. But the value of digital information – its wish to be expensive – usually manifested in another way: through the impressive economies some companies were able to build upon scraping, collecting, mining, processing, elaborating huge amounts

of free personal data and turning them into meaningful information that can be sold to advertisers. Something that became crudely visible along the pandemic, when we all became poorer except the likes of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, or the companies behind Zoom and Tik Tok. March 2021 will go down in history as the spring in which a .jpg file was sold for 96 million bucks, becoming one of the most expensive works of visual art ever sold by a living artist – and the most expensive piece of digital information ever. The file can be accessed and downloaded by anybody from the link below.3 By clicking on it, you get exactly the same file (same resolution, same pixel matrix) that Metakovan – a Singapore-based blockchain entrepreneur – bought from Christie’s for all that money. So, what happened here?

Metakovan didn’t actually buy that file, but a “non fungible token” (NFT) registered on the Ethereum blockchain, linking to a metadata file that refers to the unique string of digits identifying our jpg on a peer to peer protocol called IPFS (Inter Planetary File System). While the jpg file can still be copied and downloaded, the NFT is unique, protected as it is by cryptography and registered on a tamper-proof distributed database called Blockchain. First conceived in 2008 to allow online transactions between two nodes without the supervision of a financial institution, Blockchain has proven its security along the last decade by allowing the creation of a number of cryptocurrencies, most notably Bitcoin and Ethereum, which became astonishingly valuable.

Besides cryptocurrencies, blockchains can support a number

1 Stewart Brand, The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT, Viking Penguin 1987, p. 202

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2 See Jason Huff, “We Copy Like We Breathe: Cory Doctorow’s SIGGRAPH 2011 Keynote”, in Rhizome, August 12, 2011.

The file can be consulted from the link in the QR code below.

The file can be consulted from the link in the QR code below. scan to see links

of applications, one of them being NFTs: unique tokens that can be used to generate artificial scarcity for digital assets.

Although it has some flaws (mostly in the off-chain part of it) this system works: but in order to accept that it works, we either have to understand the technology or take it as a miracle – as a manifestation of that technological solutionism which is the only faith surviving in our hopeless present.

Basically, this is enough to understand what happened when Metakovan won the Christie’s auction outbidding another Blockchain entrepreneur, Justin Sun: two investors with an exaggerated amount of cryptocurrency in their wallets and an interest in making us believe that the system works, and an auction house with an interest in the exaggerated amounts of crypto investors’ money, packaged a spectacular miracle.

Supported by an increasing number of believers, and by many other smaller miracles, their effort worked out: whatever you may think about the NFT bubble, a few months later the idea that digital information can be owned, and can be incredibly expensive, is widely accepted.

Hundreds of thousands of people, from anonymous gamers to infamous members, from little known digital artists to art stars and pop stars, from giant media networks to heroes that played a significant role in internet history, are trusting this system and entrusting their digital creations or possessions to it. Edward Snowden, who sold a self portrait NFT for 5.4 million dollars in a benefit auction supporting the Freedom of the Press Foundation, declared: ‘‘Emerging applications of cryptography can play an important role in supporting our rights.’’4 Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who packed up the original World Wide Web source code as an NFT to auction it with Sotheby’s, added: ‘‘NFTs, be they artworks or a digital artefact like this, are... the most appropriate means of ownership that exists. They are the ideal way to package the origins behind the web.’’ 5 Amen.

If statements like these are reassuring, they also confirm that what’s happening now is introducing a paradigm shift in the way access to information is managed online; a new chapter in the tension between freedom and value of information, to use Brand’s words. It’s no surprise that, for many of those who are keeping up with its developments, this phenomenon is equally exciting and scary, often at the same time and for the same reasons. As always, much will depend on how the infrastructure for this new contents economy will be designed, on how much it will be influenced and informed 4 Freedom of the Press Foundation, “Whistleblower Edward Snowden to hold charity NFT auction”, April 15, 2021.

The file can be consulted from the link in the QR code below.

5 “This Changed Everything: Source Code for WWW x Tim Berners-Lee, an NFT”, Sotheby’s, 23 - 30 June 2021. The file can be consulted from the link in the QR code below.

scan to see links

by social habits, misuses, laws and regulations. Unsurprisingly, there will be blood.

In order to understand what’s at stake, let’s focus on an example. As we already noticed, the NFTs infrastructure is mostly transparent. The average NFT marketplace usually provides links to Etherscan, where the smart contract governing the NFT can be accessed and where we can keep track of all transactions; to IPFS metadata and to the file on sale as it is uploaded on IPFS. There is a simple reason for this: as much as it firmly believes in the ability of NFTs to generate digital scarcity, the crypto community has no problems understanding it as a construct. You can download the file for free, but only if you buy the associated NFT, you can brag ownership rights on it. Period. If this transparency persists, NFTs are more likely to enrich the public domain, instead of impoverishing it. For one’s personal, compulsive downloading habits, NFT marketplaces are becoming just another source of free content. This, of course, is true if we forget, or avoid, to consider some structural problems of the whole infrastructure: the fact that IPFS is a relatively new and small network, whose future is uncertain; or the fact that the blockchain is mostly a platform for transactions, home of a currency in a constant state of fluctuation, where everything (minting a token included) has a price and whose future depends on the interest of the miners to keep mining.

But let’s go back to the main topic. As we said, the artifacts certified with an NFT can be, at the same time, scarce and abundant, unique and infinitely reproducible. Yet, for most of us, scarcity can hardly be reconciled with abundance, access and disposability. Scarce means password protected, watermarked, encrypted, undownloadable, unavailable.

Scarce is what can be accessed by its legitimate owner only.

It’s no surprise that some dealers and auction houses, eager to join the NFT craze as well as to meet the poor understanding of digital scarcity of some potential buyers, are making this process less transparent. Where is the link to the hi-res image of Michelangelo’s Tondo Doni that the Italian company Cinello apparently sold as an NFT to raise funds for the Uffizi Gallery after a cash strapped year?6 But it’s in the selling of memes by their creators that these contradictions become more apparent. Memes, which contributed to the emergence of NFTs thanks to the launch of Rare Pepe Wallet7 in 2017, are a long time selling item in the NFT market. One may wonder how something like an ‘‘original creator’’ could even be found for something that actually becomes a meme only when it’s shared, modified, remixed, reformatted, redistributed infinite times. But every 6 “The Uffizi Gallery Just Sold a Michelangelo NFT for $170,000, and Now Is Quickly Minting More Masterpieces From Its Collection”, in Artnet News, May 14, 2021. The file can be consulted from the link in the QR code below.

7 The file can be consulted from the link in the QR code below.

internet meme has a starting point, and years of passionate research often did a good job in finding it. Know Your Meme, one of these passionate researchers, recently auctioned the original picture behind the Doge meme, selling it for 1.696,9 ETH (about 3.5 million dollars at the moment of writing) through a dedicated website to a decentralized organization of collectors (DAO). The original creator, Atsuko Sato, agreed to donate the proceeds for charity. The site provides additional information as well as links to Etherscan and IPFS.8 Everything is just fine with this story: still part of the public domain, the meme is now in the hands of somebody that hopefully will take care of it; the original creator got some money for the incredibly successful image he shot, finally capitalizing on the attention economy he enjoyed as well as supporting some charities, including the Japanese Red Cross and the World Food Program. All the successful meme sold by the US-based NFT marketplace Foundation, from Nyan Cat to Bad Luck Brian to Disaster Girl to Leave Britney Alone, enjoy the same degree of transparency and accessibility.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t go like this all the time. In May 2021 the Davies-Carr family, who recorded the Charlie Bit My Finger viral video and uploaded it on YouTube in 2007, declared that the video would be deleted from YouTube after selling it for nearly 761.000 dollars. Original Protocol, the platform which ran the auction, declared that the intent behind removing the video was for it to be ‘‘memorialized on the blockchain.’’9 Later on NetGems, a digital agency that helps internet stars sell their viral videos as crypto-collectibles, said in a press release that Numa Numa, The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger and Two Pretty Best Friends would all be removed from YouTube after being sold as NFTs as part of the “NetGems NFT collection” on OpenSea. 10 One may claim that these artifacts are simply moving from one digital economy – in which the uploader gets some crumbs through advertising, while the platform takes it all by monitoring and monetizing user behaviors – to another, in which the creator gets rewarded but the artifact becomes scarce. But the removal is actually based on a naive notion of digital scarcity, that doesn’t add anything to the value of the NFT being sold while, in fact, destroying a piece of internet history.

Back in 2010, YouTube took down Petra Cortright’s video VVEBCAM (2007), now in the New York MoMA permanent collection, for violating its terms and conditions.11 The 8 The file can be consulted from the link in the QR code below.

9 Zach Sweat, “‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ NFT Sells For Over $760,000 As Original Upload Set To Be Removed From YouTube”, in Know Your Meme, May 24th, 2021. The file can be consulted from the link in the QR code below.

10 The file can be consulted from the link in the QR code below.

11 See Petra Cortright, VVEBCAM, 2007.

The file can be consulted from the link in the QR code below.

scan to see images

case made it clear to many that a YouTube video is not simply a video: it’s a multimedia object in which title, keywords, description are often part of the thing, and the aggregator of an archive made of likes, comments, video reactions etc. According to a Twitter user, ‘‘Charlie bit my finger getting removed from YouTube is basically the modern day equivalent to the burning of the library of Alexandria’’. 12 I wouldn’t go so far, but this eventual loss13 can definitely be a useful reminder that the tension between freedom and value of information needs to be handled with care.

12 The file can be consulted from the link in the QR code below.

13 Currently, the video has been just unlisted on YouTube, but it can still be reached if you know the link. The file can be consulted from the link in the QR code below.

BERLINDE DE BRUYCKERE

INCORPORA

BY FABRIZIO AJELLO

... you are this, the plague of nothing ... you are therefore the necessary plague.

Giorgio Manganelli, La palude definitiva

We live in a time that is rediscovering sacrifice devoid of sacredness. A time when, more often than not, sacrifice is considered as an unexpected tragedy painfully imposed by a ruinous fate. A drama after the disaster to which we must conform, with which we must deal, as long as is still possible. Undertaking the painful and purifying path of sacrifice is a pact solely for the elect whose destiny is chosen ahead of all the time that will pass. The call is equivalent to coming to terms with oneself before anything else, with one’s being in the world in the first place. It is about trauma and acceptance (a non-passive one, not an instance of endurance). Among the synonyms of acceptance in Italian we find: welcome, meeting but, above all, wax. So what would be the link between the two terms, acceptance and wax? Without great effort it would be enough to think of the extreme malleability of this substance. But there is more.

The word KEROS (wax) in Greek was decomposed into KAIO-burn and REO-flow. The property of the honeycomb of liquefying in contact with heat determines its very naming.

Taking guises flowing in a precarious aspect, wax takes in time the shape of time. Unsurprisingly, in Greek KARA also indicates the head, sometimes specifically the face and its outer appearance. Che brutta cera, what a bad look --- we usually say in Italian when meeting someone apparently feeling unwell. And the French verb acarier would be equivalent to face-to-face confronting. In Latin, the plural of wax was used to indicate the images of the ancestors, the penates, which were made with beeswax and vegetable waxes.

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Fabrizio Ajello: I would start from the mythology that seems to be one of the cornerstones in your work. I am thinking of the evident references to the legends of Apollo and Daphne, to Marsyas, to the continuous metamorphoses present in Greek mythology. How relevant is classic mythology as well as that kind of tales, in broader terms, to your work?

Berlinde De Bruyckere: Yes, the myths of Ovid, the metamorphosis especially is something that I very often refer to in my works. It has always impressed me, this idea of transformation, for which you start from something and you grow into something else like Filemone and Bauci, the beautiful couple who became two different trees (an oak and a lime tree) stood together. These myths have been a great inspiration to me, as well as the Christian icons, like the saint Sebastian for instance, that was a key element in my work for the Belgian Pavilion, Kreupelhout-Cripplewood. Mythology’s protagonists and christian icons have always been starting points that I translated in another language, in my language. In fact, in many cases there is a profound relationship between Greek mythology and Christian icons. It’s easy to find the same topic translated and remodeled in different cultures. The Pietà by Michelangelo, the representation of San Sebastian, the relationship between mother and child, I have had these references since the beginning of my career, then slowly I found the right balance with mythological connections. For example, Saint Bartolomeus and Marsias, both these figures embody the same icon

Berlinde De Bruyckere

Exhibition at Galleria Continua / Beijing, 2012 Courtesy the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA Photo Oak Taylor-Smith

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in some ways, but with a different name. So this is a pulsating universe for me and, as human beings, we often refer to stories that elevate us.

F.A.: You were talking about surface and depth, hard and soft, two important dimensions in your work: two, dimensions linked by the touch and by the wound. To tie, for example, is a violent but at the same time protective gesture, it is again a kind of research for the balance between excess and default. But how do you manage to find the ‘‘right’’ balance?

B.B.: When I bring the wax pieces on top of the cushions and blankets, you can feel this duality, whereby something hard is in contact with something soft, or when I take the wax out the silicon mould, it is still warm and fragile so that I can deform it; it’s very dangerous to lay it on the floor, or on the table, and with my staff, we usually lay the pieces of wax on cushions. The relationship between them is perfect, and at the same time it’s quite the opposite visual effect of swaddling the broken branches. I connect broken parts with something soft, textile materials that reassemble, a bit like nurses or surgeons do. It’s in a certain way taking care of, as it would be for a body of a human being. This drives to a tactile perception and, at the same time, to the vibration of colors, from the nuances of the cushions to the darker parts, from the shadows to the brighter parts.

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The symptoms of Berlinde de Bruychere’s artistic research are cached in the remote bowels of language. The carnality of creation. Carnality as a monolith of existence. Osseous, mineral, vegetal, epidermal, textile carnality. Everything is vulnerable, and an invisible unstoppable lifeblood flows within. Yet, everything must make room for itself, get incarnated. Matter thus becomes a bagful of time and a container for the soul. It is the artist herself who often states in interviews that the surface is a container for the soul. In this sense, the skin is a hint at the depth and the beginning of a journey and discovery. What is hidden makes the surface a bridge between the interior and the ever-changing external world. The epidermis of de Bruyckere’s works is not superficial, and appears as a pulsating, iridescent organism where the balance between the parts at play is broken. The dialogue between the internal and the external transmutes both and an osmosis gets going in a blatant fashion, which demands our attention, nails down our gazes and questions them. The challenge to the material opens the image, handles it to the point of exhaustion, pushes it elsewhere.

G. Didi Huberman stated: “The incarnation, therefore: a motive, an engine, a desire, a setting in motion that, by additions and subtractions, often pushes the images towards their own boundaries.”1 1 Georges Didi Huberman, L’immagine aperta, Pearson Paravia Bruno Mondadori, Milano, 2008

Berlinde De Bruyckere

Kreupelhout - Cripplewood, 2012-2013 Courtesy the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA Photo Mirjam Devriendt Venice Biennale, 2013

F.A.: The alchemical research in your work has always fascinated me. The elements, the heat, the wax, the skin, the blankets, the wood, the pigment, I mean all the tactile and olfactory qualities, the resistances. And even the decision to leave the blankets that you use in your works, in the garden, as to let nature itself consume and alter them. This reminds me of E. Munch who did the same in his paintings. Is there also a biological and organic care in your modus operandi? A constant research for the balance between macrocosm and microcosm as well?

B.B.: I can give you a good example with the blankets that is a material that I have been using since the Eighties and during that time I was impressed by the presence of existences in the blankets, I didn’t really choose the material for its esthetic qualities, but for the variety of stories that these blankets contained. They had served people in a very intimate way. To use them in my work was in a way giving them a second life. When I was in a flea market to find blankets for my works, I had to choose the most 88

appropriate ones, trying to feel the past of each of them. Some of them I was not interested in, others instead were damaged, or showed defects, so this made me start dreaming and led me to imagine what they could have become.

From there on, I began to be interested in colors, and patterns that said something about the period in which they were used. In my work, blankets have always been a constant element but since 2005 blankets have also become a second skin, in some cases in a tone-on-tone relationship with respect to the wax part. There is a clear evolution in the use of blankets in my work. Going back to the early works, the beds, I put hundreds of blankets, one on top of the other and I cut out part of them. This work was related to a parasite, who was eating and beating holes in the most intimate place of our home: the bed. Also layering was and is a constant in my work. In recent years I brought blankets outside my studio for months, sometimes even for years, to change the characters of the blankets. Then, with the passage of time

Berlinde De Bruyckere

Kreupelhout - Cripplewood, 2012-2013 Courtesy the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA Photo Mirjam Devriendt Venice Biennale, 2013

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16 november ’18 2019, 2019 Courtesy the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA Photo Mirjam Devriendt A single bed, a single room exhibition view Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, 2019

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and the intervention of nature, their power to protect and warm disappears. That’s when I bring them back to my studio and hang them.

I start cleaning them one by one, and I see the result of nature’s intervention. Layering blanket on blanket it becomes clear how fragile they have become.

F.A.: Getting goosebumps (in Italian: avere la pelle d’oca) is the first form of art; my Art teacher told me like that, when I was a student in Sicily. Experiencing an emotional reaction before a real understanding, it is, in my opinion, the signal of a strong relationship with something ancestral and radical, sacred in a certain way. Where does everything that inspires and leads us actually come from?

B.B.: My topic from the beginning was the cage. In that period I used to build huge cages of steel, and still I do! When I look back at my Arcangelo today, I can still find the old works inside, even if they are invisible, covered by a blanket. So you may be wondering where all this is coming from, but it’s something not rational, it’s something emotional that comes from my gut, from my heart. We all grew up in

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Berlinde De Bruyckere

Exhibition view, Galleria Continua, Les Moulins, 2019 Courtesy the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA Photo Oak Taylor-Smith

a certain atmosphere, the theme of religion was very present in my background and it found its way to my work. When I started working I did not realize it rationally. As an artist you have to accept it and take care of it. Of course, the condition of the human being, death, anger and fear, are hard topics.

Nature, and its overwhelming force is also very important in my work. The tree is a metaphor for the human body. The work Embalmed – Twins for example, was related to Holy Week processions, thinking back to the suffering, the difficulty of carrying the effigies of the saints despite the heat, the weight, I made these double bodies of large trees, and unlike Cripplewood this work is more connected to the essence and quality itself of the skin and the nature of human body.

The tree stands out as the protagonist in de Bruyckere’s research. Roots. A canopy of leaves. Leather here too. A torso.

Wounds. Corridors of coagulated sap, hollows, dented branches. Francis Bacon stated in an interview that the real challenge for the art of the future was not about taking a tree and exhibiting it in a gallery, but about being able to find a way of representing it not as a mere reproduction but as an accomplished image affecting one’s nervous system. In this sense, the Belgian artist’s research perfectly blends the emotional impact of the wound and the imperturbability of a monolith. Suddenly a panic icon appears from the bottom, a supreme deposition of the entire Creation. The definitive vision that liberates time from its tyrannical flow. If the Italian artist Giuseppe Penone achieves a poetic aestheticization of the tree, digging into it, revealing its veins, gilding the unconcealed voids, de Bruyckere burdens the vegetal body with a full payload to reveal its dramatic destiny.

The ultimate fallen angel. The refined and embellished bark on one side, the inexorable and ruinous shipwreck on the other.

The contortion and impenetrability of Nature, here extremely evident, are a metaphor for the absolute weight of the human condition: the entire planet is made of flesh and bones, which we still carry.

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Berlinde De Bruyckere

Exhibition view, Galleria Continua, Les Moulins, 2019 Courtesy the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA Photo Oak Taylor-Smith

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Berlinde De Bruyckere

Berlinde De Bruyckere Engelenkeel exhibition view, 2021 Bonnefanten, Maastricht Courtesy the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA Photo Mirjam Devriendt

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Berlinde De Bruyckere

Berlinde De Bruychere Engelenkeel exhibition view, 2021 Bonnefanten, Maastricht Courtesy the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA Photo Mirjam Devriendt

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Berlinde De Bruyckere

Berlinde De Bruyckere Engelenkeel exhibition view, 2021 Bonnefanten, Maastricht Courtesy the artist and GALLERIA CONTINUA Photo Mirjam Devriendt

Berlinde De Bruyckere was born in 1964 in Ghent, Belgium, where she lives and works. The artist has taken part in international events such as the 50th Venice Biennale, Padiglione Italia (2003), as the artist representing the Belgium Pavilion for the 55th Venice Biennale (2013) and the 15th Istanbul Biennale (2017). Her works have recently been exhibited in prestigious international museums.

These include the Leopold Museum in Vienna (2016), the National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavik (2016) and the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2015). Many of her works have also entered private collections. These include the Gori Collection, Fattoria di Celle, Pistoia; Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin; La Maison Rouge, Fondation Antoine de Galbert, Paris and the De Pont Foundation, the Netherlands.

Berlinde De Bruyckere’s work deals with the transformation, transcendence and reconciliation of bodies in the face of mortality.

These bodies are often animal, human or inanimate. She is often inspired by the legacies of the European Old Masters, of Christian iconography as well as mythology and cultural lore. Berlinde De Bruyckere plays on existing stories and imagery, mixing them with new narratives that are suggested by the artist’s choice and by her consequent manipulation of the materials.

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a warm thank you to Silvia Pichini

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THE BAROQUE SUPERFLAT, AN ANTIPHRASE OF BEAUTY.

STREAMS / Tomoko Nagao

Before talking about the contemporary and Tomoko Nagao, the super Japanese artist I will interview, we need to take a big step back and go to Pop Art, 60 years ago.

What was this phenomenon?

Anyone who has always been involved in art was born with this knowledge, but for newbies or non experts, a refresher is needed.

Art from the late 1950s to early 1960s is called POP (popular) Art, not as one might think, an art of or for the people, but a mass-produced art and therefore known.

By representing the mass, art becomes as anonymous as possible and thus understood by as many people as possible. The objects, in this case, the works, were found on the shelves of our common supermarkets. Small, banal but necessary premise, this type of art was born and evolved in large urban centres, mainly between London and New York, where we meet the main proponents. But those who did not live in these large centres, but in small or very small realities, these shops were real amusement parks, full of oddities. Thinking about this reminds me of the many stories about my Sicilian grandparents, that coming from small peasant realities, were amazed and sometimes even afraid to see, for example, a coloured detergent, liquid and in a bottle. They were used to making handmade soap, strictly solid. They marvelled to see pasta in packages or in receiving from relatives who came, from Milan or Turin, colourful packages of sugared almonds or other surprising gifts.

Pop Art wanted to bring to the highest point the cultural and above all, social revolution

that was taking place between Europe and the United States, praising consumer goods.

Yes, because the artists of this period, with the increase in wealth in Western countries and with the birth of consumerism, which leads precisely to the production of a large number of goods and the spread of household appliances, cars, mass, including television, make their way and bring men back to the centre, like a new Renaissance, this time social, which has never ceased to be.

Art no longer wants to express hermetic emotions, but to represent itself. There are no desecrating or ironic intentions, but they simply document the changes in values that we find in the new consumerist city and in the great industrial reproduction in series.

When mentioning Pop Art it is inevitable to follow the name of Andy Warhol, who created his “Enterprises” by placing the faces of actresses and politicians among his works like any other consumer object.

The task of art has also changed thanks to continuous changes of direction, awareness and important continuous revolutions, as society changes the way of thinking and the way of representing it has changed.

Since the 1980s we have witnessed the growing affirmation of China and Japan, the success of these two powers from an economic, strategic and military point of view, in fact, is the consequence of a long process that began the last century and at its peak, precisely in the eighties there is a new economic boom.

So what changes between these two economic

Tomoko Nagao Flowers 3 after Jan Brughel Elder with Dolce&Gabbana Shiseido Chanel LuisVuitton, 2018 Digital contents

BY MARIKA MARCHESE

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and cultural increases? We would say only the geographical coordinates, but no. The scope of the new Asian Pop Art influences everything thanks to fashion, and new communication systems, the mobile phone, but also video games, being involved in all social aspects, from the way of thinking, to the way of dressing, with cartoons, films and the growing interest in martial arts, in short, rooting a new way of life full of charm in our culture.

The artists of the new Asian pop wave are, therefore, spokespersons for a new nationalism, to overcome the sense of powerlessness created by the United States at the end of the Second World War. In fact, after the war, the Otaku and Kawaii subcultures (Otaku, manga’s obsession; Kawaii, cute) would have proliferated among the younger generations to seek and obtain the sense of escape and leave behind the traumas of conflict. The one who creates the neologism Neo-Pop is Noi Sawaragi, a Japanese art critic and close in the nineties to the artists Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Mariko Mori, Kenji Yanobe, to name a few, who have transformed these subcultures and their marginality into a new art style.

Today we are used to inserting icons in instant messaging that should accompany the words and represent our emotional state. Takashi Murakami with the Superflat had made these emoticons the subject of many of his works. The term Superflat was invented in 2000, in which Super indicates superior quality, superlative and Flat, uniform, smooth. This flat style, according to Murakami, was present in the Ukiyo-e genre, images from the floating world translated into prints

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and paintings of the Edo period. So Murakami’s Superflat not only deals with flattening in formal terms but wants to smooth out borders and cultural references.

When did Warhol’s Brillo Box ever smile at us?

Certainly, the smile is not the exclusive prerogative of Murakami, but the Neopop has entered our veins and has understood our mood as well as the artist ambassador of the Neopop in Italy, Tomoko Nagao, who for Streams will speak to us through his works of current themes. Tomoko, in fact, through the reworking of famous art icons, first of all, The Mona Lisa, analyzes the role of women in contemporary society and the marginalization of women in some cultures. In Kawaii playfulness, ironic and erotic, “the ever-growing competition towards appearances, the weakened contents of communication, the vocation for the ephemeral and the superfluous” are mixed.

(Tomoko Nagao - Iridescent Obsession, 2018 exhibition catalogue at Deodato Arte curated by Christian Gangitano and Paolo Campiglio) The symbolic importance of the compositions emphasizes clear, defined cultural and moral messages.

Tomoko Nagao (Nagoya, 1976), lives and works in Milan.

She graduated from Chelsea College of Art & Design, MA Fine Art in London in 2003, she participated in the Botticelli Reimagined exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2016.

Tomoko’s art has an approach inclined to the contamination of languages and adheres to Neo pop and Superflat cultural experience, capable of elaborating stratified reading devices only apparently trivial: at a first level, in fact, we are witnessing the grafting of traditional Japanese of Souls in the myths of Western culture, already sifted by the long Pop experience, from Caravaggio to Leonardo da Vinci, from Botticelli to Titian, to Velasquez, from Scuola of Fontainebleau in Delacroix. In this contamination and rereading the icons of the contemporary world of the most famous brands, introduced with a taste between irony and satire.

A second interpretative level concerns the choice of the subjects of eradication, which affect often subtly erotic female figures or myths of Western beauty, translated into kawaii aesthetics: figures that the artist intends to rehabilitate as heroic icons of femininity always subject to the stereotypical violence of the culture of the male eye, from which they would like once and for all break free and break in as protagonists. It follows a further and more intimate sense of work, which connected to her own experience as a woman artist in the world of art, with the difficulties and ambiguities that the creative story entails, but she intends to expand on contemporary Japanese female condition, increasingly fragile and yet able to conceal the most suffered drama behind a happy and carefree icon.

On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the famous art movement, and with the

Tomoko Nagao The birth of Venus, 2018 Print on Pvc

Tomoko Nagao Venus of Urbino in Tokyo Milano, 2016 Digital contents

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reopening of museums after an intense year of the global pandemic, Streams then wants to pay homage to Pop Art, through three important themes, not three simple words. If we were to say what the lockdown period has taught us, perhaps among the first places there would be the figure of women, LGBTQI rights and the fight against hunger in the world, with the value of food. We made bread, prepared cakes, exchanged recipes, experimented with new dishes: food was, for several weeks, our little great salvation, as much symbolic as it is factual, but how many men and women will have suffered indoors with their torturers?

It is hoped that this unprecedented experience has left a legacy, therefore, a greater awareness of the importance of accepting our differences, supporting each other and not wasting what the earth and the effort of men and especially women produce, but to use it with conscience and respect.

It, therefore, becomes even more decisive and morally necessary to fight domestic violence, hatred and food waste, given that almost a third of all food produced each year is wasted or lost before it is consumed.

Returning to speak about art, for example, for Andy Warhol, a simple soup is not a plate of steaming broth, but a cold can on which the flat and colourful words ‘‘Campbell’s’’ appear. In the most different ways, food enters the artistic circuits, but if it is true that food becomes art, it is first of all true that art becomes food, because it nourishes man in an “integral” way. Art is food for the eyes, for the mind, for sensitivity, but above all, it is food for the soul.

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Tomoko Nagao Napoleon Bonaparte with Godzilla, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Michelin, Danone, Emirates, Kitty, Barilla, PSP, the Louvre, Fukushima, Shibuya, Tokyo tower, Mt Fuji and Google, 2016 Digital contents

Tomoko Nagao Il quarto stato with motta, campari, firelli, armani, prada, chicco, alitalia and visa at piazza duomo, 2016 Digital contents

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WOMEN EQUAL RIGHTS

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Marika Marchese: Thanks, Tomoko for your support. Let me start by asking you, you have often treated the woman’s body in your works and you have told me that, just like the principles of Pop Art, you feel the viewer consume yourself and your works at the same time, at this very moment how can we free the woman from obsolete stereotypes? (But also obtaining simple recognition such as the right to education?) In the Iridescent Obsession catalogue a performance with Arab women is mentioned, how did it go?

Tomoko Nagao: Many problems in the society; gender, discrimination, poverty, declining birthrate today… And the problems are hiding behind the surface of society, which is colourful, designed, fashionable, mass information…My art telling these situations.

I don’t want that ‘‘my art and I are consumed by people’’, but it is true, I only want to tell the truth. My art and I are consuming by people on many kinds of websites and social …even I do not want. I am confused sometimes by my artworks on websites or social. Because I know I cannot control the images, people make copies and screenshots as they want, when they want… it is very fast to go away from me the images of my artworks and me.

I don’t know how we women can be free from this situation.

For me, it is important to be a testimonial and tell about these situations of today for the future.

MM: Another point that branches out, against the background of Pop Art, thinking about the social aspect that your works have, especially with regard to public art, we know how important the appearance of the product is, you have described two things: - the first that I was struck by the idiosyncrasy towards certain foods, such as ham when you arrived in Milan and then you created the Madonnina di carne= Princess meat and the Duomo di Carne (Sweety duomo). So I ask you if you could explain this double soul of your works, on the one hand, the Kawaii synonymous with freedom and carefree and on the other, the desire to make people think.

TN: Kawaii is my way of communication, I use it as my language, not only because I am Japanese and originally from traditional Manga.

I think it is suitable for contemporary society very much.

Because it is simple and fast image communication and easy to understand… You can tell many things correctly and fast.

About paintings Princess meat, Sweety Duomo are ideas, that I had an opportunity to make for the company which made a result of research for the consumed food in the world, it is many countries who have strong Catholicism’s influence, they have a strong economy, then they are buying and throwing out more foods, especially meat.

These artworks, the way of communication and the contents of communication made particular effect.

MM: The third point, that is the gender-fluid aspect of some works such as San Girolamo in the studio or Fuwari which means “soft”, I read Male in parenthesis and I wanted to ask you if you could tell about the transformation of San Girolamo and the vein Manga that unites all the artists of FlatArt. Does it have anything to do with the Otaku subculture? Could you tell us why?

TN: I liked to transform myself, from San Girolamo in traditional to a Japanese woman in 2020. This transformation from a man to a woman, from tradition to contemporary, from temperance to cosmism, from wildlife to technology life...etc “Fuwari” means soft and light, like flying. It is a big balloon with PVC. It is a contemporary sculpture artwork for me, not heavy like traditional sculpture.

The idea based on the Nio (two wrathful and muscular guardians of the Buddha standing today at the entrance of many Buddhist temples in Japan), some animation characters (Doraemon, Shojo Manga…). One side is female, the other is male. I am not interested to pursue otaku culture, I use it as a contemporary language.

A special thanks to Tomoko, Paolo Campiglio and Christian Gangitano.

Next page Tomoko Nagao Hokusai-The Great Wave of Kanagawa with mc, cupnoodle, kewpie, kikkoman and kitty, 2012 Digital contents

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PILLOWS LIKE PILLARS GIANNA RUBINI, AGNESE SPOLVERINI AND MARIA CHIARA ZIOSI IN CONVERSATION WITH STEFANO VOLPATO

Agnese Spolverini Tengo un peso en el alma que non me deja respirar, 2019 Pillows like pillars exhibition view Associazione Barriera, Turin 2021 Photo Studio Abbruzzese

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Stefano Volpato: The collective show Pillows like pillars, which has featured your works at Barriera in Turin in May and June 2021, is over. This conversation is an opportunity to retrace our steps and discuss some issues that emerged, opening a horizontal dialogue among us, without the pressure from deadlines, from the event itself, but also from all the limitations linked to the pandemic we have been experiencing along the process. I would start with a transversal feature through all the interventions, which is strictly related to your artistic research and practices, even if they are clearly diversified. In my critical contribution to the exhibition catalog, I highlighted a common reference to a rather mysterious and opaque corporeality, its presence or trace, expansion or absence, its translation or dispersion.

Gianna Rubini: An important element of this common ground has certainly been the use of voice. I focused on my voice in relation to the machine, to the intelligent assistant Siri, then to the artificial intelligence. But all three of us brought this body reference, the voice, which represented a sort of narrative path within the walls of Barriera.

Maria Chiara Ziosi: The exhibition has changed continuously, also due to the extraordinary situation we have experienced in the last year and a half, and despite this there has always been a convergence on a common ground. For me it is interesting that the voice has emerged as part of it: it is a powerful device, but at the same time it is somehow an abstract one. Regarding the exhibition, the voice comes out to be paradoxical: it is something revealed but ephemeral, performative but mysterious.

Agnese Spolverini: Regarding the voice, I think it is a trend linked to a disappearance of the body during the last year. Moreover, in all our practices there is this dematerialization of the body, which turns out in other and unexpected forms. From this perspective, I think that the voice is one of the most evocative traces capable of bringing this issue back in the game.

Gianna Rubini: Yes, I think it is a tool that this year we have bonded a lot to, also considering the huge spread of remote communication with other people. Let’s think about the Clubhouse boom: it had just staked everything

on the voice without images: detaching from a visually-saturated world to indulge in a voice that has no face, and its powerful, imaginative force.

Stefano Volpato: I think there were quite different voices on display. The use that Agnese makes of the voice is more physical: it is her voice, as for example in La Boum. Gianna’s voice is lended to an alterity: an impossible subjectivity. Maria Chiara’s voice actually is not even present in the show: the one you featured in the work Songs from a rat hole is aseptic and androgynous.

Maria Chiara Ziosi: Above all, it’s not mine.

We don’t know whose voice it is; the one you just mentioned is a work about fiction and deception: the story I try to tell is imaginary and fragmentary. I therefore worked on the non-recognition either of the voice by listeners or by the voice itself towards itself. There are five short speeches, sometimes hummed, sometimes spoken and each piece has a different intonation and a way of telling: sometimes more introspective, other times more evocative, others even more didactic.

Gianna Rubini: It seems that Maria Chiara and I made an opposite use of the voice: starting from a human content, you tried to use a less human voice, less identifiable - i.e. from the point of view of gender - I would say, somehow less linked to emotionality. On the other hand, I have started with a ‘‘non-human’’ content - the

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answers given to me by Siri during our conversations - and I used my voice to re-interpret them, without trying to simulate any digital or robotic nuance. Yes, there is the dramaturgical passage, in which Siri’s answers become a monologue, creating a narrative line - almost a mash-up starting from contents that come from a precise source, with a precise approach to the device, forcing the AI outside its comfort zone, to a foreign territory.

Maria Chiara Ziosi: The thing that seems relevant to me is that we both started from a written text: yours, Gianna, is a performative act that has a lot of the theatrical, even in the way it is performed; instead, among my references there is more radio play, for example. However, at the base there is a strong need to talk about self-exposure.

Stefano Volpato: Self-exposure, together with self-display, is another issue that has crossed the works on display, but more generally we could see it as a theme deeply concerning your practices. This reminds me also about the way I was involved in the project when I got in contact with Barriera: as a young curator, underlining the idea of something new, fresh, never

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Maria Chiara Ziosi Nickname generator, 2019 Gianna Rubini Ehi, 2021 Agnese Spolverini Toothpaste Chronicles #3, 2021 Tengo un peso en el alma que non me deja respirar, 2019 Pillows like pillars exhibition view Associazione Barriera, Turin 2021 Photo Studio Abbruzzese

Maria Chiara Ziosi Oh hi, 2020 Agnese Spolverini, Friends, 2020 Gianna Rubini, Ehi, 2021 Agnese Spolverini, Toothpaste Chronicles #3, 2021 Tengo un peso en el alma que non me deja respirar, 2019 La boum, 2021 Untitled (tears), 2020 Pillows like pillars exhibition view Associazione Barriera, Turin 2021 Photo Studio Abbruzzese

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Agnese Spolverini Untitled (tears), 2020; Friends, 2020; Maria Chiara Ziosi Oh hi, 2020.

Pillows like pillars exhibition view Associazione Barriera, Turin 2021 Photo Studio Abbruzzese

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seen before. This prompted me to reflect on how much putting your work on display involves displaying yourself. It seems to me that there is also a kind of youngness-ratio in this equation, strongly connected to the theme of self-exposure.

Maria Chiara Ziosi: Indeed, so it is. I think all three of us deal with identity and its narration.

As far as I am concerned, it seems this revolves around recognition, self-narration, self-identification and therefore also around showing off. As we have already told in the past, Pillows like pillars was an exhibition that also tended to hide.

Stefano Volpato: Is there a contradiction in this?

Maria Chiara Ziosi: Yes, there is; but I think that if the contradiction is on purpose, it may be the best way to make something understood.

For example, if you want to talk about something fake, by doing something even more fake you could unhinge some logic. In other words, talking about the difficulty of self-narration by hiding yourself: this points out a difficulty without having to tell it.

Gianna Rubini: Regarding this, an interesting article on intimacy as a conundrum comes to my mind, by the Italian philosopher Bruno Madera. He tells a short anecdote about Michèle Blondel’s paintings, which were all white, because white sums up all colors but

none were visible. She was convinced, in this way, to be hidden from the gaze of others. But then she came to the opposite consideration, because “when people believe what we say about ourselves, then it was us who made up a box-shaped prison in which we lock ourselves without even realizing it”. Being exposed gives birth to fragility. So it is clear that when you try to show this intimacy you still feel exposed, especially if you are in a field open to the judgment of others.

Agnese Spolverini: There are works that if they do not experience the moment of their exhibition, actually they do not exist. In fact, I think some of them exist on the basis of their relationship with the other, not only with the place. It is precisely a relationship of continuous interdependence, the one between the moment before the exhibition and the exhibition itself. Some things and processes would not even make sense, if not to be fed to the other. I think our exhibition has not been designed for quick consumption. You can easily see around extremely captivating and amazing practices, instead Pillows like pillars needed a space for relationship: many works showed fragility.

There was also a distracted audience, but I am afraid they didn’t really see anything: the visual part of the show was beautiful, but also very fragile, and needed time and attention. It is not a negative consideration from my side: it was nice to think about the exhibition discourse not in reference to a canon of perfection, but rather by orchestrating a series of notes, which

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Agnese Spolverini Toothpaste Chronicles #2, 2020 Digital image Courtesy the artist

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Agnese Spolverini Untitled (crumpled), 2019 Photo Alessandra Draghi Courtesy the artist

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do not present their own strength on their own, but cooperate to create a world together.

Gianna Rubini: Regarding my intervention featured in the exhibition, I have strongly perceived the audience’s desire to leave the space to listen to the recording after the visit. Many people needed to re-listen to it outside, to take it home: this is very interesting to me, as the work leaves the exhibition and institutional context by the will of the public, not the author.

Stefano Volpato: Together with the powerful concept of notes as a display strategy, I think this latter openness stresses the vision of the exhibition project not as something finished, which ends around an object or space, but that can continue and expand. I also think of the scenography that Gianna created for Ehi, in addition to the recording of the monologue: an environmental intervention with a common material, the colored tape. It modified the exhibition space in a simple way, opening it up to the imagination in a very playful way; I am thinking of Maria Chiara’s works that found a different dimension with the public in the moment of the listening session. We have seen people living in the exhibition: I really got the impression of a feeling of domesticity inhabiting the moment, rather than a series of objects and interventions simply talking about it.

Maria Chiara Ziosi: Here the object also returns as a trace.

When I think of an object, I think I’m simulating the trace of something. Talking about a trace is problematic, because it is something that refers to a previous experience, i.e. a performative act. Instead, I usually start from the idea of simulating a trace in some way, at least for these works on display. This simulation of a trace then gains strength in the exhibition moment.

Stefano Volpato: Let’s focus on a word that Gianna mentioned a little while ago: intimacy. It is a mysterious, powerful concept, on which we have worked intensely...

Agnese Spolverini: …and that, by exposing itself, it apparently contradicts its nature. I am thinking about the exposure of intimacy: it is almost a paradoxical attempt. The moment

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Agnese Spolverini La luce della sera mette il mondo in disordine, 2019 Photo Luigi Varacalli Courtesy the artist

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Agnese Spolverini Untilted (tears), 2019 Courtesy the artist

you open it, beyond its dimension which is then an elusive, secret one, it becomes an impossible attempt. I feel it very much as a necessity to create closeness. But, again, it is quite paradoxical. It reconnects with the exposure of the self. The need to always expose a discourse on intimacy also tells about the collapse between the public and the private spheres. Everything overlaps, a little confusedly: it seems to me an attempt to cling to something.

Gianna Rubini: So I ask myself: is it possible to create intimacy and how? Is it something very private, or even public?

Agnese Spolverini: In my opinion, intimacy can also be shared. It is not just mine, something that belongs to me, but it certainly cannot belong to a very crowded audience. Perhaps the challenge is to make an audience intimate.

Maria Chiara Ziosi: There was an interesting question, in the same text by Madera quoted above: “is it really possible, and how, to see intimacy as a disclosure of oneself beyond role masks?”. It is clearly a political discourse, bonded to the way

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Gianna Rubini Ehi, 2021 Performance and installation view at Barriera Photo Alessandro Rindolli Courtesy the artist

Gianna Rubini Ehi, 2021 Installation view at Barriera Photo Studio Abbruzzese Courtesy Barriera

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Gianna Rubini Home, 2021 Digital image Collaboration for Cartografia dell’abitare

by Annalisa Zegna Courtesy the artist

identity is fluid - not only the exposed one but also the personal one. There is always this contradiction in wanting to remain unknown but, at the same time, feeling the need to be someone. To be recognized, but without claims of any kind. I reflect a lot about what we tell each other to identify ourselves.

And believing or not in something that we talk about or we are told by others. So, in this sense, the term ‘‘self’’ triggers a circle of personal and collective research that does not necessarily lead to a destination, to a solution. However, I believe it is important to describe this need. Perhaps it is a question of living and embracing the mystery; if being constantly exposed is actually a need, and also a normal condition - you find yourself in any place, at any time, in a situation in which you have to reveal yourself, or live in hiding - on the other hand there is also this need not to be all the way someone or something. And, as artists, the question is even more problematic.

Stefano Volpato: All of your practices bring these issues to the table. That of Maria Chiara is linked 126

Gianna Rubini DPC (Vicina in vestaglia), 2020 Digital image Courtesy the artist

to disappearance, deception and fiction; in the case of Agnese, it is carried out more directly, on the contrary by exposing herself in the first person and on personal basis; Gianna, on the other hand, mixes the planes: the personal is filtered by otherness and reassembled/reincarnated again. That emotional plane, which common sense would consider concerning a very private and exclusive part of us, is actually manipulable, subservient to other purposes.

Gianna Rubini Colored cages, 2018 Digital image Courtesy the artist

Agnese Spolverini: There are a number of influences on this part of our existence, far beyond the most immediate and obvious example that could be advertising. Emotions, desires... nothing of what we consider to be part of our identity belongs to us; this is devastating, at least for me. Perhaps this is also why there is this desire to try to understand who one really is, when this still remains undefinable.

There is no “free zone”; there is only an attempt to create a free zone; the challenge is to create a new territory to occupy, but it is difficult, almost impossible, because I feel that nothing belongs to me, not even myself belongs to me.

Gianna Rubini: So what is remaining of what we call intimacy? Perhaps, to define the awareness of these conditionings. Personally, it seems to me that I often get to talk about this but starting from another point, for example from

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Gianna Rubini Meeting of ethnicities in five millimeters (details), 2018 Ink on paper Courtesy the artist

the deconstruction of gestures, words, superficial postures that we execute automatically.

Maria Chiara Ziosi: Whether it’s authentic or not, we’ll never know, intimacy is everywhere.

Everything represents an act of violence towards this aspect. Of course, here the digital returns, the machine, because everything is delegated to something that makes you produce content that seems intimate, but it really isn’t.

Gianna Rubini: We are the result of other mechanisms. I felt an urgency to bring out the research linked to Siri, perhaps because of its punctuality with respect to the enormous theme of the invasion of every aspect, every moment of our daily life ...

Stefano Volpato: ... and the almost utopian attempt to somehow try to stem it.

Gianna Rubini: In that work, Siri gives its voice to me, indirectly. What is “mine” comes out of her answers that originated from my questions.

In some exchanges we have had, it has really been like handing over your most personal and private part in the hands of a stranger.

Gianna Rubini Sensitive Data Volume 1 - 2, 2018/2021 Digital print Courtesy the artist

Stefano Volpato: Perhaps in a too naive way, I imagine the circumstance of an exhibition as an opportunity to express oneself outside of pervasive dynamics, although within a culturally constructed framework: a moment where one can be naked, according to one’s own rules.

Maria Chiara Ziosi: However, it may seem like a territory where passivity and inert exposure reign. On the other hand, if it is an aware process, this act of disclosure of the naked self may say something; in this sense, intimacy is an active, political territory. Speaking of identity and hiding, it can seem a passive way to bare fragility, when instead this gesture could tell us of a choice: the attempt not to box oneself in one’s work. Something not aimed at oneself but that opens to dialogue. For me, disappearing or becoming evanescent is the way to focus on this: it is not an escape. That is why the moment of exposure and exhibition is important, as it is open to sharing. Can opening an exhibition and expanding it, like the work we did for the catalog, or with this conversation, be an example of how we all work?

Maria Chiara Ziosi Nickname generator, 2019 Pillows like pillars exhibition view Associazione Barriera, Turin 2021 Photo Studio Abbruzzese Maria Chiara Ziosi ((D1+D2)_2)+E, 2018 Courtesy the artist Maria Chiara Ziosi Oh hi, 2020 Pillows like pillars exhibition view Associazione Barriera, Turin 2021 Photo Studio Abbruzzese

Maria Chiara Ziosi Songs from a rat hole, 2021 Pillows like pillars listening session Associazione Barriera, Turin 2021 Photo Studio Abbruzzese