5.
#soul
9.
An Example
Detailed Preview of
"abbi cura di te" Domestic Exhibitions
July 27th 2021
Season
#abcuradte03
03
Pieces of Everyday Rooms
I have chosen a journey through five objects near and far in my, our time. Desired objects, born by chance or by mistake. Once Riccardo Delisi told me that the best things come from mistakes.
Acrylic paint by Joe Colombo and Gianni, Oluce, 1962.
When I started recording the many television episodes for Leonardo TV they sent me this lamp. It has accompanied hundreds of dialogues. They gave it to me. He's been with me ever since.
Yellow Submarine. Because without the Beatles nothing would be possible today.
Atlas according to Lenin. I worked with Mari, I dedicated my thesis on the transition from art to design project to him. This dedicated pamphlet is a period in my life.
Morandiana city of Colleferro award for journalism and dissemination. Unexpected as welcome. Also to meet new travel companions.
The meeting with Maestro Luigi Ontani is a recent experience. “Tartaro architect” (I'm not an architect) and “Vivarte” are dedications and acknowledgements that spring up every day.
"Hell & Heaven"
Tale of a Personal Lockdown
This video collage (twice as long as recommended, sorry), as per pandemic regulation, is strictly homemade.
In its simplicity, it is the non-serious result of a seemingly senseless set of photos taken by me during 2020; they show my home and my world during lockdowns, Heaven but also Hell, hospitality and imprisonment.
However, I decided to have a laugh! Some effects offered by the video edition program then appear, as well as some images stolen from the internet during the approximately “20,000” webinars followed or googled so far. Some denounce a shameless search for relief, others the reality experienced in periods of seclusion.
The colours are few but they represent, together with the music, the comfort: the birthday cake, a little job done by my son (now a teenager) when he was three years old, the books.
Here it is, my lockdown.
Personal Ecosystem
The place I call home is where I was born and grew up. The pandemic was a peculiar chance to reconnect with my surroundings at home. After years of treating it as just a place to rest, I had the chance of escaping the busyness of daily life, travelling, social engagements and all toxic features of modernity.
The forced unexpected time spent at home gave me a new perspective of this ecosystem created by us. I started to realize that all objects collected by different generations of the family are nostalgically connecting my present to the past. It is uniquely representing the character of three generations in the story of my life. Each piece has a soul flaming me with emotions.
The home is already the most personal and valuable museum furnished with items that means something to me.
I am observing and appreciating.
When my guitar plays ... It changes the world.
At the age of three in my grandmother's house, there was a wardrobe where my uncle kept his guitar. I secretly opened the door and jumped inside to strum and beat the strings of that strange and huge instrument leaning against a jamb that housed silently between coats and blankets stacked one on top of the other. When I was eight, they gave me a guitar for my birthday. When I was ten I played in a little band but in the following years, improving the chord technique. I joined several youth music groups.
Since then the guitar has always accompanied me. It has become an instrument, not only for playing but also for measuring the world. I used it as a comparison test with the most disparate objects and subjects: architectures, natural elements, artificial forms, micro and macrocosms, philosophies, projects ... A password, to view and access an immensity of signs and knowledge measured with a meter of this instrument, which on the mathematics of sounds organizes its design and its sound presence among us. The analogies and metaphors were the basis of this "travel around the senses" which allowed me to grasp many of the invisible aspects, hidden behind the appearance of Being. This video, using the same method, collects and puts together analogies of disparate images of unknown authors, collected on the net, compared and reorganized with my Key pass: My Guitar :)
Soundtrack & Video of 4:28 min by Fortunato D'Amico - Curator
16 February 2021
KAVAFIS
#inspiration
This little incremental collection, which before finding its final collocation in the bookshelf of my home here in Milan was originally displayed on the desk of my workstation while in the Netherlands, is an accumulation of personal memorabilia assembled in the last ten years.
The different pieces are either gifts or souvenirs epitomizing specific experiences that together narrate the journey of my adult life. Far from being a proper exhibition, it is rather an intimate narration through objects, sometimes kitsch sometimes plainly sentimental, of moments that deserve to be remembered, that proves to be very useful in times of disillusion.
Intimate Landscapes
My work this past year consists of an exploration of the concepts of intimacy, mysticist reflection, recollection and self-awareness of the need to escape from the tangible world. The paintings represent the threshold to an unreal world halfway between the figurative and the abstraction, presenting imaginary landscapes that evoke past times that have been captured on a canvas.
The environment chosen to display this artwork is an under-construction apartment in which I am working as an architect. The chaos in the contrast of the surrounding with the paintings enhancing the idea of a portal to another reality.
A dramatic lighting catches our attention but it is not until the work is observed closely that the details, textures and colours are appreciated, whose mixtures create sub-landscapes within the work itself. My inspirations are very varied, from the chiaroscuro of Spanish Baroque painting, through Turner and the Impressionist, to Abstract Expressionism or the works of Lucio Muñoz on the apse of Arantzazu. The expressiveness of the materials and the contrast of colours are key as a mechanism to form these cracks that open and allow us to enter these imaginary landscapes that are ultimately part of my own intimacy.
Mixed Media on Canvas | 6 Canvases (Five 120x80, one 1800x100) by
Juan Alonso Gordoa -Architect
23 March 2021
See you tomorrow.
Material Balance SAPERLab is a space full of stories and cultures to see and tell thanks to the many people who have left their contribution on site. Furthermore, its strategic position in the centre of the Campus and its windows allows it to fully experience the university life of the participants. But during the lockdown, of all this, there was nothing left but an empty space, an end in itself, at the centre of solitude awaiting a return of its (contributors and visitors) or (participants). An afternoon like any other ended up at the Material Balance SAPERLab with a "See you tomorrow", but no one would know when that tomorrow would come.
A video of 1:39 min by
Ingrid Paoletti - Associate Professor of Building Technology &
Material Balance Research SAPERLab - Research Group Laboratory
February 15, 2021
My Chandigarh
During the last lockdown, I started collecting photographs and documents dating back to when my father worked as an engineer in Chandigarh, the Indian city designed by Le Corbusier.
These images, which together with historical documents and magazines of the time will form my personal archive, have allowed me to relive my youth, spent exploring the Chandigarh shipyard with my father and, at the same time, to retrace the history of India in the 1950s.
A Collection of 41 Family Photographs
& Historical Documents by
Arun Mirchandani – Civil Engineer & Archivist
19 June 2021
Butterflirt
Butterflirt is coming to life when the covid-19 news in Europe became headlines of all newspapers around the globe. The butterflies are created in the past 100 days, and each of them is an inspiration of some highlight of the day they have been thought and created.
An Instagram page called butterflirt is the testimonial of my imaginary collection, I found this a way to communicate and show positivity to my friends and family, by collecting my thoughts and expressing them through lines to my outside reachable world, using socials.
89° 15′ 50.8″
In the past year, the only landscape that I had in front of my eyes was my house. Due to the lockdown, the possibility to go outside and interact physically with others had been taken away from us and suddenly we found ourselves alone, or perhaps only in the company of ourselves. This led me to think about how, due to the pandemic, we witnessed an inversion between the outside and inside. My proposal wants to manifest this shift through a familiar object to me and which, of course, I could not find anywhere except that at home. For this reason, I started wandering around, until I saw, "resting" on the shelf of the library in my room, a compass that my uncles gave me a long time ago and that I used to carry in my pocket as if it were a talisman capable of protecting me. I took it in my hand and the idea for Abbi Cura di Te came clear.
The photo I present is simple, perhaps not perfect, but it exactly wants to represent this shift from the outside to the inside. In fact, an object such as the compass that is usually used to find the right route in external space is in my picture transferred in an interior. With this, I would like to show how, even if the moment we are all experiencing is resetting the canonical and traditional points of references, such as social relations, it is even more necessary to find a “North” in ourselves. The compass is indeed nothing more than an object that has always been used to find the North.
Here the North is not the geographic one, but intimate, it is the 89°15'50.8" that each of us has sought, seeks and will continue to seek.
Why Complain?
#performance
"The pandemic has forced people to stay at home with their loved ones.
For me (the outgoing and the sociable) it has been way too long and exceeded the point of depressing. During these roller-coaster emotional moments, my baby girl has become everything to me, literally, the good and the bad, the saviour and the disaster, the entertainer and the distractor, etc. This pop art style of my daughter picture represents every time I see her during this pandemic, repetition with different colours, different embellishment. Indeed, too much is never good, but a second without her definitely makes me miss her.
So, I figured, why complain?
Just pop it up."
The silence that sets the world on fire
#reality
When the "outside" forcefully breaks our silent spaces of isolation, the opportunity arises to focus on the world through new visual parameters. The photographic shot becomes a catalyst for a lucid gaze, a harbinger of revelations: the nature that we see every day, but that we never look at; a touch of light, photographic and metaphorical, which highlights the eternal ritual of birth, strident in front of the continuous echo of its opposite. A completely contemporary inversion of the "sublime". A real story of small expectations, sharing and new awareness.
Concept
These stolen shots represented a micro-world catalyst of curiosity and attention for some families who, in those days of isolation and tension, shared the amazement for some eternal rituals of nature that we usually never stop to observe, except when they literally land on the doorstep. The deafening silence of the "mute" outside the home and broken only by the noise of ambulances, for a month found counterpoint in that peep of new lives which, even if only through a photo shared in the chat, was clearly felt. An unexpected alliance between man and nature offered distant families the opportunity to share a common experience, giving meaning to the idea of “taking care" of living beings. A real story of small expectations, sharing and new awareness.
Series of 5 Stolen Shots; a Family Experience by Marica Guccini - Art Historian
04 September 2020
The sun
goes down & comes up,
but will it be pink?
An Album of 25 Sky Photographs by
Marzia Ferrari – Architect
29 March 2021
#performance
"I light up immense and it is immediately evening" (G. Ungaretti).
"Hold me by the hand at sunset, when the day fades and darkness slips its curtain of stars" (H. Hesse).
In the slow flow of the lockdown, with the days gradually getting longer, the appointment with the sunset has become a constant habit. The walls within which we were confined were broken down to see a spectacle of different wonder on the horizon every day: sometimes slow and serene, sometimes dramatic and stormy. The sunsets of Versilia! The sun going down into the sea, transforming its colours. From the photos I started taking every night, a sort of diary of my days of quarantine was born.
Sweet twilight of Versilia: the sea is populated and every voice goes out, while in the evening it spreads scents and encloses the landscape in shadow and silence. But the night will soon come and the air will fill with the music of the moonlit summer parties.
“Evening of Versilia”, Alfonso Gatto.
Metamorphosis
Metamorphosis is an introspective exhibition using poetry, photography digital collage projection, scent and melody as methods for preserving and remodelling fragments of time. The immersive experience is closely connected to the author’s self-searching with an emphasis on her memories, emotional states and world views mirroring various stages of her life entering adulthood.
The show is portraying the omnipresent themes of trauma, melancholy and other profound sentiments stemming from the creative’s personal stance.
Each one of the transformation’s phases is meant to be installed in the most intimate spaces of one’s home, not necessarily in subsequent order.
As anxiety and worry are conditions often associated with the strangely familiar sleeping disorder, the comforting experience is designed to eventually lead a spectator to fall into a meditative state or the so-called golden slumber.
An Exhibition including
4 Phases of Visual, Poetry & Soundtrack by
01 April 2021
The Phantom Virus
This sculptural ghost was born from the work of a grandfather and his grandson trying to cope with lockdown boredom.
While the older brothers were busy with the DAD, me and Leonardo (a child with very good manual skills) took refuge downstairs, transforming it into a "Ghost Room" dominated by a character made of pillowcases, pieces of bamboo and equipped with a mask.
This environment was then followed by the "Trap Room", created this time by Leonardo and his brothers without the adults stepping into it.
3 Collection of 32 Photographs by
Ernesto d'Alfonso – Architect
with his grandson Leonardo
15 November 2020
RUMAH
It has been over a year since I stay in my hometown to
care for my ageing parents surviving the pandemic. Finding connection to the home I left 15 years ago and being surrounded every day by the memento from the past, I come to realize that I am the big part of the embodiment from the evanescent side of my parents.
By observing the lights and shadows of this physical home, I deal with this heavy feeling that one day my mother will wake up and wonder if everything was only a dream as she could not trace my presence sitting on the black chair next to her.
Wunderstadt;
An intimate exhibition on the roofs of the city.
"My life is not this uphill hour / where you see me in trouble"
Rainer Maria Rilke
Each private collection can be considered a Wunderkammer. Each of us does surrounds, according to his own possibilities and tastes, of a series of objects that arouse emotions. We are proud of them, we find them useful, they resemble us or amaze us, they become in a certain sense our extension. They thus become the symbolic space of our daily universe, of the care. During the first lockdown, our cocoon houses became places of confinement.
A condominium terrace in the center of Rome capable of rewriting new human, social and dialogic geographies.
Able to transform the wunderkammer into a wunderstadt, a city of wonders, where people, objects and artworks talk to each other, helping each other and rediscovering each other, with renewed glances of understanding.
* Photographed by Daniele Epifanio | With: Sol Costales Doulton, Ivan Mandon, Andrea Settepassi & Cristiano Leone
#inspiration
The cabinet of curiosity (or ‘wunderkammer) preserved little intrigues: little pieces of history. Moreover, the keepers of these cabinets used them as a way to learn, gather knowledge and examine natural science through unusual objects. I’m certainly partial to keeping little tokens of memory, learning, and interest. My cabinet during covid-19 has been one of my own creations: exploring the bounds of what is possible to create in my domestic space.
This particular cabinet of curiosities emerged organically from a need to create and experiment. I made hundreds of these miniature vessels during the pandemic, learning more with each new shape and glaze. I was creating my own study of objects: of shape, of how to nurture each colour and texture.
The Other Side of The Moon
I chose two photos that came to me in the last few months. Two photos were taken from my grandfather's old super 8 movies. Two images were found. A way to reweave threads, to resume 'the long interminable conversation of women, that conversation that holds the world in its orbit' as J. Saramago says.
The reference
It is the long interminable conversation of women, it seems like nothing, this is what men think; not even they imagine that it is this conversation that is holding the world in its orbit. If there were no women talking to each other, men would have already lost the sense of home and the planet. J. Saramago, Memorial of the convent, Feltrinelli, Milan, 2010 p.97
INTERNORAMA [3 wishes]
I made simple tools, designed to imagine small changes in the home. To visualize desired changes. Augmented reality analogue filters: Internoscopes.
As soon as possible, I want to invite you to my house.
I looked at these rooms, in which I spend a suspended time, and I made three wishes. I would like to share them with you, show them to you and ask you what you think. I made simple tools: physical objects born by recovering available materials. Designed to imagine small changes in the home, to visualize desired changes. Telescopes, viewers, perspective screens, theatres, augmented reality analogue filters offer a point of view on this domestic landscape. Internoscopes.
Move a little more to the right, now get up on your toes ...
Do you see it? What do you see? It can be done?
