Where and when
From
To
Museo Novecento
Second appointment with the video review conceived by Beatrice Bulgari for In Between Art Film, curated by Paola Ugolini, for the Cinema Room of the Museo Novecento. Silence and rituals, this is the title of the review scheduled from 18 September to 24 January 2019, aims to show, through the work of twelve international artists, that magical suspension of sound and time that often precedes and accompanies both secular and ceremonies and religious rites.
Silence, physical and mental, is the meditative soundtrack of all the works presented in this project for which works have been deliberately selected which, albeit with profound political and social meanings, favored an aesthetically lyrical and poetic visual approach. The selected artists are: Sigalit Landau, Masbedo, Hans Op de Beeck, Adrian Paci, Vanessa Beecroft, Regina José Galindo, Janis Rafa, Mircea Cantor e Democracia.
“An indispensable experience for a museum of modern and contemporary art, the updating on the production of artist videos and films can and must of course now coexist with the admiration for twentieth century painting – explains Sergio Risaliti – In this sense the project by two-year collaboration with Beatrice Bulgari, as a collector and patron, is complementary to the presence on site of the permanent collection of the Collezione Alberto della Ragione”.
The Israeli artist Sigalit Landau (Jerusalem, 1969) in his works stages narratives that document, presuppose or prefigure an action. What the artist wants to create, with a multimedia approach, is a poetic world capable of creating “new emotional realities” that can have a direct impact on life with its deep and often painful contradictions. The desolate beauty of the Dead Sea has been his place of heart for fifteen years, because “… I believe that this is the place where truth and spirituality become almost tangible realities ..”. In the video Salt Lake (2011) a pair of work boots covered with salt from the frozen Dead Sea slowly sink to the frozen surface of a Central European lake, an image of desolate loneliness, poignant and powerful in its tragic simplicity that it shows us all the suffering and pain of uprooting, of the weight of memory and history. This is probably one of the most interesting aspects of contemporary Israeli art, knowing how to mix tradition and innovation in the creation of works imbued with a collective historical memory that invites reflection, while never falling into the banal obviousness of quotationism.
The professional and existential story of a woman, the Milanese restorer Pinin Brambilla Barcilon, is at the center of the video Madam Pinin (2017) by MASBEDO (Nicolò Massazza, Milan 1973, Iacopo Bedogni, Sarzana 1970) who is a profound and at the same time delicate visual reflection on the concept of beauty, its transience and its conservation. Between 1977 and 1999 Pinin Brambilla dedicated fifty thousand hours of his life to the restoration of that masterpiece which is Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, painted by the Florentine master between 1495 and 1498 in the former Renaissance refectory of the convent adjacent to the sanctuary of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. The story of that restoration, one of the most controversial and complex operations ever carried out in the history of this discipline, is told by MASBEDO in this video that focuses on the details of the restorer’s hands, face and eyes that, enlarged, as through a lens, become the protagonists of the work. The video investigates the relationship between the world of images and their conservation, between creation as a pulsating and active force that is strenuously opposed to the concept of end, of temporal inevitability and the need for care and dedication to subtract beauty from oblivion.
The Belgian Hans Op de Beeck (Turnhout, 1969) in the hypnotic twenty minutes of the video Staging Silence (2013) stages as if by magic a series of dioramas that represent solitary black and white architectural scenarios in which moments of great lyricism alternate at almost comical moments. Staging Silences is in fact mainly based on those archetypal scenarios, both urban and natural, which remain in the artist’s memories as if they were the visual common denominators of the many anonymous public spaces that he has experienced over the years. The black and white of the video emphasizes this ambiguous aspect of oscillation between reality and imagination and the uninterrupted sequence of environments that are transformed into each other refers to the mixture of images that constantly overlap in our mind. The title is a clear reference to those places where the viewer, in the absence of other characters, can project himself as the solitary protagonist of the scene. The places created by the artist are nothing more than animated theatrical scenes where possible stories can be set. These fascinating and hypnotic ephemeral scenarios, made with commonly used objects that magically become something other than themselves, give life to a series of highly evocative visual proposals that the viewer experiences in their becoming.
Adrian Paci (Scutari, 1969) is an artist who lived through the harshness of Albania crushed by the totalitarianism of the communist regime, even his father Ferdinand was an artist who unfortunately died young when Adrian was only six years old. Ferdinand’s style is figurative, with a realistic and almost rude sign, which however does not reveal the weight of ideologisms. Adrian’s art, on the other hand, belongs to a completely different world, in 1992 he arrives in Italy thanks to a scholarship and from this moment in his artistic work, drawing and painting become rather marginal expressive elements because the range of possible languages suddenly arises. expands enormously to include video and photography. When Adrian was a teenager, Shkodra was a city closed to the world and for a boy it was difficult to understand what was happening even just beyond the Adriatic, so the books on the great artists of the past that his father had left him were precious. they taught the craft of art through their images. In the video Interregnum (2017) the artist, not surprisingly, chooses the analysis of the human mass as a starting point, leading the viewer on a path that ends with the study of the subject from the depersonalized collective body that occupies large urban spaces. single. The video brings together various moments extrapolated from the funeral celebrations of communist dictators of various nationalities, recovered in national archives and televisions to tell how the political body, formed by the multiplicity of human beings, acts in synchrony with the will imposed by the regime. With his death, the leader gives way to another powerful protagonist of the public scene, pain, which moves the irrationally painful mass of the people who inconsolably mourns the death of their oppressor.
In our civilization of images in which the real body has become virtuosically virtual, Vanessa Beecroft (Genoa, 1969) has always visually taken to extremes the cold nudity of her models suspended in that limbo of androgynous perfection that borders on eating disorders and pathology. From the very beginning during the Milanese years as a student at the Brera Academy, her morphological model was unattainable and very high, models such as angelic characters by Piero della Francesca or ethereal saints or Vogue models. All female icons with the common denominator of a problematic relationship with food, the basic element of existence, the deprivation of which makes you feel powerful and which in the Middle Ages brought you closer to God. In this latest VB82 performance, shot in July 2017 in the evocative spaces of the Certosa di San Lorenzo in Padula, the artist abandons the female body and its psychological facets to stage a new mystical and Christological ritual. The performance, which involved the inhabitants of the village, is part of the project “Il Cammino delle Certose” which includes an itinerary in the footsteps of the monks and the sacred through three Carthusian monasteries: that of San Martino in Naples, of San Giacomo in Capri and of San Lorenzo in Padula. In the empty space of the Padula refectory, 13 male performers of various ages, dressed in a white tunic, recalled the traditional iconography of Christ as it has been interpreted by the history of art, with hieratic faces, hair and beards long or boyishly beardless with the delicate and angelic features of a baby Jesus. Outside, a long and choreographic procession of 300 people, all dressed in white with cloaks reminiscent of those of the Carthusian monks who lived in the convent, gave rise to a long scenic procession lit only by the light of the torches.
The Guatemalan Regina José Galindo (Guatemala City, 1974) among the most important contemporary artists and international performers in her works at the limit of physical and psychological endurance uses her body, fragile and often naked, to denounce violence against women and more in general the social, political and cultural one of contemporary society. In each of his works, the artist pushes his body to the limit of pain to become an active spokesperson for the forgotten and oppressed. In the video of the performance La Intención (2016), presented as a world premiere in the Salento countryside of Novoli, in a suspended and almost magical atmosphere, the artist staged a ritual with a high symbolic rate. The artist, despite the cold, remains standing motionless for a long time covered only by a sort of light habit on a rudimentary stone altar, reminiscent of a pagan sacrificial altar, while it is gradually covered and wrapped by hundreds of bundles that they are usually used to build the great pyre, the focara, which every year on January 16 is set on fire in that town in honor of San Antonio Abate. The performance is a powerful reflection not only on the constraints that women, as women, undergo but also a touching visual representation of the symbiosis that exists between nature and body.
The work of Janis Rafa (Greece, 1984) investigates the condition of mortality, mourning and melancholy in relation to the natural world. His narratives are located on the fringes of urban reality, in often inhospitable and sinister places populated by car accidents, stray dogs, and deaths that perhaps could have been avoided. The cryptic but universal nature of these cinematic worlds always begins with a certain amount of realism which, however, is unsettling because it has very little in common with its usual representation. It is a slippery reality that takes us to a dimension suspended between dream and sensuality in which the dead and the living, human beings and non-humans coexist with a certain unexpected harmony. In the video Winter Came Early (2015) the violent impact of a car shakes an almond tree vigorously for ten seconds, causing the leaves to fall prematurely. The action is captured by a high-speed 2000fps camera. The work becomes a metaphor for the brutal intervention of man on nature and at the same time for the transience of life.
Mircea Cantor (Oradea, 1977) born in Romania, but who “lives and works in the world”, is an artist who creates works through which, with a good dose of humor and as much visionary, he observes and stages the representations of our contemporary society underlining them the profound contradictions. In Funia (2017) the artist’s hand runs through the rope-shaped external decorative motif of a typical Transylvanian wooden church. The title Funia means “rope” in Romanian, that of the rope is a recurring motif in Cantor’s work which takes its inspiration from the typical decorations of buildings in Transylvania. The hand that runs through one of these decorations seems to want to emphasize its materiality, to the detriment of its almost immaterial presence as it is only hinted at by this detail. The rope, in the Orthodox tradition, symbolizes the link between body and spirit and, linked to architecture, the sense of community connected to the buildings that surround it.
Ser y Durar (To Be and To Persist) is the title of the 2011 video by the Spanish artist duo Democracia (Pablo España and Iván López) whose strong interest in social and political issues is developed not only through artistic interventions, but also through editorial productions and curatorial activities . To make this video, the Democrats collaborated with a group of young traceurs called to practice their discipline, parkour, in the non-Catholic cemetery of Almudena in Madrid. Parkour was born in France in the 1980s as part of the subculture of the Parisian suburbs (the name is an adaptation of the French word parcours, “path”). The challenge among the traceurs consists in the study of urban architecture, in which a path is traced to be followed with the utmost precision, elegance and agility, overcoming any architectural barrier with only the possibilities given by the human body. A barrier is perceived not as an impediment or obstacle, but as an element that can be used to create movement, by running and creating real stunts, according to a single rule: never stop and never pull back. Ser y Durar’s action is set in the Madrid Civil Cemetery, a place born in 1884 where those who did not belong to the Catholic Church were buried. The video establishes a tension between the mobility of this practice and the immobility of the necropolis, between the epitaphs inscribed on the tombstones and this completely contemporary popular cultural practice. Epitaphs (such as “love, freedom, socialism” or “freedom and reason will make you stronger”) create a narrative that is defined by the movements of the traceurs. However, even if their action takes place in this place of collective memory, endowed with deep symbolic, historical and political meanings, according to the typical nature of parkour, the traceurs are not interested in these meanings of which they remain, in fact, unaware. For these young people, the urban landscape is considered as a structure without a past, a system of elements that can be recombined during each new session, according to a principle comparable to the so-called “situationist psychogeography”, whereby the citizen, instead of being a prisoner of the daily routine, should have seeing and experiencing urban situations in a radically new way. We can interpret parkour groups as a sort of urban guerrilla that provide a critical experience of the city, rejecting canonical values and spatial-temporal modalities of the contemporary capitalist world. Democracia creates a sort of negative monument: presenting a critical practice of urban culture in a context in which the memory of those who made the history of the emancipation of the individual emerges, but where many of the egalitarian and revolutionary aspirations of the Spanish history, and towards which contemporary society is now increasingly indifferent or unaware. On the one hand, the slogan that identifies the traceur is “to be and to persist”, on the other, an epitaph from the cemetery reads: “there is nothing after death.”