Italy

For the Alternative Art Guide I opted for diversity- trying to sustain a regard upon the  Italian artistic scene that would diverge  from what normally offered to the  international public. All three chosen artists are fully  proactive on the Italian independent art scene and differently collaborating in person with CARS activities and more independent art spaces.

Working within a “neutral” territory, somehow discarded from the contemporary and artistic debate, we have to struggle upon daily basis to survive and carry on our funding mission of artistic promotion and didactics.

VCO, where we do abide, is somehow a place of contact and separation in both culture and history.

Our mission is strictly related to the creation of an unusual artistic offer to  VCO disctrict public, trying to stimulate  the Italian artistic scene, offering to its partecipants a welcome to the exceptionality of our territory, that, basically, find its one and only  local contemporary art representative, in our residency.

We are trying to win more affectionates everyday, finding it both hard and satisfactory. Our policy consist in facilitating a direct dialogue between the local manufacturing firms and our invited artists, and, equally relevant, abdicating the role of curators to adopt the more familiar of  hosts, both towards artists and public alike.

Among all artists I have diverse relations with, I’ve chosen Lorenza Boisi, Ambra Pittoni and Yari Miele beacause of their peculiarity within the Italian artistic panorama, as well as  their direct involvement into some plural collaborative activities and independent art spaces.

Lorenza Boisi

Lorenza Boisi is a well known painter and sculptor, certainly a significant influential reference  for  younger Italian painters. Being an artist herself, she is the founder and director of two among the most active Italian artist run spaces, MARS and CARS. She is an independent curator and art director- even if she’d rather describe her role as the one of a Facilitator, avoiding any more precise definitions.

Lorenza Boisi, Portrait of a painter, 2011, oil on canvas 70x60cm

Lorenza Boisi, Untitled, 2013, oil on canvas 120x100cm

Yari Miele

Yari Miele has somehow developed a certain heritage of  60s/70s Italian art scene. His research is issued from the swinging sensibility of that very tradition. He is  a proactive curator and art director, and in the last 10 years has been running several spaces and collaborating the a number of others- he is presently, together with Lucia Leuci, Nicola Genovese and Lorenza Boisi (founder) running MARS, the notorious Milan Artist Run Space.

www.yarimiele.com

Yari Miele, Ohne Titel, video still, colors 8ÔÇÖ min, 2013

Ambra Pittoni

Ambra Pittoni is a multi talented artist and intellectual. Her multiple skills open up for a profound inspection of performance, participative art and installation.

Her approach descernes  both aestetic qualities and the implicit political  and existential essence of aestethic choices. She is a very proactive individual involved in several tutorial activities and collaborating  with independent artistic projects all around Europe.

http://www.ambrapittoni.com/

Ambra Pittoni, Dance is not forever YUSUKE, performance Berlin Milan 2010

Ambra Pittoni, The Saved Night Varsavia dinner, still from video, CCA Zamek Ujazdowski Warsaw 2012

CARS

CARS born 2010. CARS stands for Cusio Artist-Run Space.

Set in the naturally distinctive VCO lake district CARS is an artists’ residency aiming to a virtuous circle with the local cultural and productive excellence areas.

It is CARS firm belief that the study and research phase require proper support to ensure efficient communication with the receivers of the art produced, this is why CARS promotes the art projects produced within the studio context – always open to unpredictable developments .

CARS heartfully welcomes the integration of non-linear, unconventional projects with the local territory, landscape and community, and promotes new experiments and interactions.

CARS opens this studio for faraway guests and glances at the local territory to try and convey its existing forces to launch a new action and cultivate opportunities to then turn them into profitable relationships and results.

CARS offers artists an opportunity, and recognizes and follows their work, also following clues and planting new ones building a specific collection of donated art pieces that will contribute in making a new tradition, reinforcing the present and building a bridge to the future.

Andrea Ruschetti

Graduated in Business Management, he works as buyer at Alessi Spa  (2000-2003). In 2003 he starts cooperating with La Nuova Faro Srl, an Italian toys factory, inside of which he sets up in 2004  Ludiko, an R&D departement  focused on the exploration of  the meaning of “play – game- player”  through the creation of objects, images, videos and performances .

In 2005 he creates “Pups.it”, a toys-design project  which collects international awards in the field of arts and design, among which the selection by  the MOMA’s catalogue (New York and Tokyo). Since  2007 the project is part of  the  exhibition “New Italian Design”  by La Triennale Milano represented in 2010 at the Santral Museum in Istanbul, in 2012 at the Beijing Industrial Design Center and at the National Taiwan Craft Center Research and Developement Institute in Nantou, in 2013 at  Alhondiga in Bilbao, at  Cannery Galleries  Academy of Art University in SanFrancisco, at  The Power Station Of Art  in  Shangai.

As member of the multidisciplinary duo Ludiko he participates at different  group shows:

“Toys for good” in Florence (2009), “Bloom” in Koln (2010-2011), “Pictoplasma” in Berlin (2011), “B.Y.O.B” in Milan (2011 “ Philip K Dick tribute” Palazzo Ducale – SalaDogana in  Genova (2012beijing project in Beijing  (2012), Pictoplasma Exhibition at La Casa Encendida in Madrid (2013).

As President of the cultural association  Mastronauta , which he established in 2001,  leads several cultural events including   C.A.R.S. – Cusio Artist Residency Space (since 2010).

Life develops from the interaction with an environment (J.Dewey); believing in this assumption, we decided to shape our intervention for the Alternative Art Guide on this reciprocity (man/environment) that generates diversity and strenght….

“We live in the post-photography era.

We are all homo photographicus.

But few can call themselves photographers.”

~Joan Fontcuberta

In modern times, photography has played a central role in “creating reality.” Yet today, the way in which we relate to visual images and to photography itself has changed fundamentally. In an age where positivism reigns supreme, photography seems to have been demoted to the service of our “own models of reality.” As images bolster this capitalization of the self, we are well served to recall that the true art of photography lies in using metamorphic, regressive processes to cast light on that which was previously invisible.

This project sees visual image as symptom and photography as dialectics, as theorized by Freud, Warburg, Benjamin, Einstein, Bataille and more recently, Didi-Huberman. In the images presented, psychic models give rise to visual paradoxes. The pieces are operational concepts in and of themselves, agents of a critique of representation whose symptom is the singular interweaving of time and space. They are a Pathosformel, the involuntary and discontinuous expression of a far-off memory – that memory which humanizes time and has always reflected photography’s reasons to seek greater individualism and universality. A memory which takes shape in the physical gestures ingrained within each image.

My proposal for the Alternative Art Guide features Angela Colonna, Andrea Morucchio and Larry Paul Scott, three professional photographers who capture the visual experience as symptom. By experiencing the space of reality through an internal lens, they revel in the micrology and archaeology of the image, as well as in its complexity and over-determination, underscoring how depictions ebb and flow like dreamed reality. This procedure brings forth visual thoughts whose power lies in the affinity between formal creation and the inquietude of the creative process, an inquietude which inhabits physical and psychic spaces, eschewing causality or physical conceptions of time.

This trio’s images epitomize the dialectics of the visual image – at times independent and unsettled, at others primal and new. Through their deliberate gaze, they decelerate the ever-accelerating process of reading images, bringing order and meaning to the passing of time. All three work in a reminiscent present, focusing on the truth of transcendental moments, the essence of things, and places as repositories of power. Image-fragments of deterritorialization emerge from their series of photographs – physical and psychic, external and internal, spatial and linguistic, morphological and formless, sculptural and discontinuous. Their elective affinities are largely structural: a photograph is the visual deconstruction of the visible, of the reality we tend to perceive, reshape, reconstruct and re-imagine through an introspective, internal model of conjecture and deeply-rooted depiction.

Colonna, Morucchio and Scott share a phenomenological notion of the invisible. Their works unveil and convert the space of reality: restoring its material, poetic peculiarities; exalting estrangement; reconfiguring time. As such, each snapshot becomes a single, easily identified frame in an experimental film, where the enigma of the visual image is at once existential, mental and empathic, where physical setting, internal experiences and the visible finally coincide, imbuing our models of reality with renewed truth.

Angela Colonna

A photographer and architect based in Venice, Italy, Angela Colonna has participated in numerous Italian exhibitions and been featured in major photography contests. Steeped in a deeply introspective, metaphorical artistic consciousness, Angela’s photographs exalt the intimate gesture that calls for the expression and reminiscence of an original, fundamental, anachronistic reality. Through her profoundly poetic and aesthetic visual language, Angela’s static isolation of form and compositional synthesis dialectically underscore the fragility and force of her images – at times the symmetrical reflection between presence and absence, at others a visual documentation of existence. Focusing primarily on interstitial moments, her work strips away veils to access hidden insight into the ways we interact with places and things. Her deliberate gaze awaits the harbingers of darkness and resurrection, while the oscillating distance of images conjures up feelings of nostalgia. Colonna thereby aims to (re)create a visual experience of memory – of all its nooks, crannies and subterfuges, both real and imaginary – in order to delve into the secret relationships between things and reveal the stratification that typifies our heterogeneous times.

www.behance.net/angela_colonna

Angela Colonna, Naturalia – Haiku visivi, photograms on baryta paper, Unique artwork, 2013

Angela Colonna, Naturalia – Haiku visivi, photograms on baryta paper, Unique artwork, 2013

Angela Colonna, Sine Oblio, 2009

Angela Colonna, Sine Oblio, 2009

Angela Colonna, Anarchitecture, 2003

Angela Colonna, Anarchitecture, 2003

Andrea Morucchio 

A regular feature at numerous international exhibitions, Venetian artist Andrea Morucchio blends photography with other contemporary artistic practices including performance art, installations and video art. By dislocating visual markers, reinventing spaces, and reconfiguring depictions, Morucchio nurtures a multi-focal view of photography and experiments with the processes underlying how we perceive forms and images. He dialectically expands the viewable panorama to a discontinuously transcendent reality, where space is experienced through unusual – and therefore private – layers of depth, while differences and repetition meld together, playing with the appearance of distance and the symptom of the visible. In a critique that focuses on phenomenological reflections of aesthetics and the enigma of boundaries in contemporary times, Morucchio contemplates urban sprawl and the solitude of industrial ruin as they attempt to forge new identities to overcome this time of crisis. Underpinned by architecture, territory and landscape, Morucchio’s images anthropologically reshape their unknown, static, unconscious and indefinite dimensions, creating dreamlike, fascinating photographs that celebrate the dualism of mental and metaphysical territory and the sacralization of space.

www.morucchio.com

Andrea Morucchio, The Pool . La Habana, 2009/2013, inkjet print, Ilford Galerie smooth pearl, 40×26 cm ed.1/7

Andrea Morucchio, Campo Marte . Venezia, 2012/2013, inkjet print, Ilford Galerie smooth pearl, 40×26 cm ed.1/7

Andrea Morucchio, Porto Marghera #25, 2013/2013, inkjet print, Ilford Galerie smooth pearl, 40×26 cm ed.1/7

Andrea Morucchio, Porto Marghera #33, 2013/2013, inkjet print, Ilford Galerie smooth pearl, 40×26 cm ed.1/7

Andrea Morucchio, Stair #01, Porto Marghera, 2012/2013, inkjet print, Ilford Galerie smooth pearl, 115×75 cm ed.1/7

Andrea Morucchio, Porto Marghera #45, 2013/2013

Larry Paul Scott 

American photographer Larry Paul Scott works in both Milan and New York. Through his deliberate, non-referential gaze, he portrays the melancholy nature of social and urban landscapes through snapshots of everyday scenes. His virtuosity shines in trailblazing photographic compositions, black and white diptychs and triptychs featuring sculpted tones and syncopated rhythms, where images are coupled to create a sense of narrative déjà vu amidst stillness, where the spectral, psychic transitoriness of subject and object is blended with frames seemingly suspended in time. The discontinuous nature of his improvised collages derives from his speculative tone of empathic criticism and a latent visual memory that begets a sense of impending surrealism and a metamorphosis of conventional reality. Unconsciously spellbinding photographic montages help us approach the fluctuating nature of the visible, depicting the phantasmal ambiguity between consciousness and unconsciousness and the regression and progression of explored time. Scott’s oeuvre thereby evokes a disquieting sense of strangeness in which altering apparitions give rise to a dialectic of desire steeped in reflections, offering up an alternative to the real world and the images within each of us.

www.larrypaulscott.com

Larry Paul Scott, Reflections from Madison Avenue #8. New York, 2013

Larry Paul Scott, Intersections #3. Milan, 2014

Larry Paul Scott, Intersections #6. Milan, 2014

Larry Paul Scott, Intersections #9. Milan, 2014

Larry Paul Scott, Elements of Self #16. Milan, 2014

Larry Paul Scott, Broken Bodies #4. Milan, 2014

Laura Cornejo 

Laura Cornejo is an art writer, researcher, independent curator and cultural agent based in Venice. Currently completing doctoral researcher on Contemporary Art Theory and Cultures, she received her B.A. in Art History from the University of Girona and M.Phil in Contemporary Art from the IUAV in Venice. She is the Italian correspondent for Artishock and A*Desk magazines, and also pens art criticism for Sardarch, My Art Guides and various academic journals on visual arts. Her curatorial work includes experience with art galleries and foundations in Spain and Italy, where she recently curated the exhibition Prospettive senza (con) FINE (Tiraoro e Battioro Art Space, Venice, 2014). Cornejo also served as the communication manager for the My Biennale Guide for the Venice Art and Architecture Biennials and is co-founder of Colonna&Cornejo, which provides photojournalism and art critique to magazines all across the globe. As a cultural agent, she offers art project management services and cultural events communication. Her current project: creating a collective platform for contemporary art in Venice, an incubator targeting international artists and creative thinkers interested in developing ideas in and for the city.

artincubatorvenice@gmail.com

I was recently part of the curatorial residency programme at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. During four months I traveled across the country and meet artists, curators and researchers. It was a privileged opportunity through which I got to know the Italian artistic context and I was captivated by the vitality and the energy of the many scenes of the country. The programme ended with an exhibition at the Foundation’s space in Turin where a selection of artist met during the research displayed their work. Here I have highlighted three artists who were not part of the final exhibition but whose work I am interested in.

Lupo Borgonovo (1985) lives and works in Milan.

Borgonovo searches for the boundless pleasure in experimenting with materials and shapes. He proceeds through mixing and associating materials, confronting solids and liquids, existing and imaginary objects, refined and brut materials. His surreal sculptures seem to (re)become organic and living, edible, adoptable. Yet hard to grasp, since they emerge from a chemical and poetical kitchen which provokes a strange fascination, as if something exotic; extraterrestrial organs, mutant machines, transfigured moods. The impermanence of the process and the instinctive dimension of the relation to the material urges Borgonovo to create sculptures that seem ready to convulse.

by Marie Villemin

Ornithology, 2014

Maialito, 2014

Fruttolo, 2014

Eskimo Effervescent Entities, 2013

Costanteen McDonald (Leesa), 2013

Tomaso De Luca (1988) lives and works in Rome.

De Luca investigates the relevance and modernity of archetypal, political and personal images, analyzing the products of these images in our collective consciousness. 

His work takes cue from reflections about architecture, design and classical forms of art: practices able to induce both imagery and behaviour in the westerner, as visual machines designed to form his conscience. Often grounded on notions as technique, comfort and beauty, these practices reveal themselves as codes that underhandedly contribute to the establishment of the homo faber, the maker in and of society, the architect as much as the working citizen, who produces in accordance with the history of humanity. De Luca's work, alternatively, functions as a bachelor machine that spreads cultural images around. The artist invents his own terms and laws, which do not refer to comfort or technique, but become their antidote, and are independent from History by proxy, therefore becoming homo ludens.

The subjects that take part to his work are often liminal, unimportant and obsolescent: irrelevant materials, dying or diseased objects that apparently have no right to become subjects. De Luca arranges abandoned mattresses and suffered furnishings, withering decorative palms or even the walls of a prospective public toilet as the remains of a fading body: these are public and human evidences of a difference that has become perpetually dropped from the image and which is not contemplated in architecture or sculpture. By using large series' of drawings or increased numbers of images, the artist reintroduces these materials as symbols, pointing out the political structures in which the object and the subject are embedded in precise functions.

Salopp Gesagt Schlapp, installation view, 2014

An Incomplete Portrait of Anchises, installation view, 2013

Generous Palmstroke, detail, 2012

Sad Disco Stone Men, installation view, 2012

The Monument, installation view, 2012

Gabriele De Santis (1983) lives and works in Rome.

Social media, symbolism and separation are ingrained into the work of De Santis; showcased in his paintings are a scattering of networked signs prevalent on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Generating unusual juxtapositions, De Santis incorporates skateboard wheels, grip tape, and traditional marble into his works. As a result, questions of instantaneity, movement and transmission are raised, as well as themes revolving around the ambiguity of symbols, the precariousness of human connection, and the notion of intimacy in an increasingly digitized world.

Through the use of skateboard grip to formulate his bold symbols, De Santis references not only the flow of digital information, but also the immediacy of online connection. This acts in antithesis to the slow changing nature of marble that is often used in his images. De Santis progresses this dialogue through the inclusion of skateboard wheels that are mounted to the back of some of his canvases.

Many of De Santis’s recent works translate popular culture into a something humorous. For example, As Long as You Love Me riffs on the 1997 Backstreet Boys classic single of the same title, playfully creating a dialogue between the brackets in the diptych. His artworks are not just about the nature of contemporary popular culture but also relate to the nature of humans; “I have an interest in personifying the artworks, giving them human attributes — allowing them to form a personality.”

By juxtaposing contrasting materials and symbols, the artist addresses the change and chasm between the digital and real world, raising questions about the development and alteration of human contact and giving new meaning to the notion of social media outside of the networked digital world.

Dear Michael,, 2014. Installation View. Courtesy of Frutta, Rome. Photo by Roberto Apa

Dear Michael,, 2014. Installation View. Courtesy of Frutta, Rome. Photo by Roberto Apa

Dear Michael,, 2014. Installation View. Courtesy of Frutta, Rome. Photo by Roberto Apa

Dear Michael,, 2014. Installation View. Courtesy of Frutta, Rome. Photo by Roberto Apa

Dear Michael,, 2014. Installation View. Courtesy of Frutta, Rome. Photo by Roberto Apa

Dear Michael,, 2014. Installation View. Courtesy of Frutta, Rome. Photo by Roberto Apa

João Laia

João Laia (1981, Lisbon) is a writer and curator with a background in social sciences, film theory and contemporary art. He publishes regularly in international magazines and newspapers such as Frieze, MOUSSE and Público. Past collaborations include BES Arte e Finança in Lisbon, CCCB – Center for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, Waterpieces Festival in Riga, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, The Delfina Foundation, South London Gallery, Cell Project Space, The Mews and Whitechapel Gallery in London. In 2014 he was in residency at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin and along with Rosa Lléo founded and runs The Green Parrot in Barcelona a non-profit space dedicated to contemporary art practices – www.thegreenparrot.org He is a member of the curatorial team of the 19th edition of Videobrasil a contemporary art festival dedicated to the Global South that takes place from October to December 2015 in São Paulo.

For the Alternative Art Guide we chose to present the work of 6 artists who have participated in our project How to make a Delicious Tea, contributing to define a new relation to image as object and notions of reproduction.

The proliferation of images has diluted the specificity in experiencing a discrete locale. A place is no longer understood as a location bound by space-time but forms another domain created by circulating images, one that has been further emphasized with the speed of digital interface. The image facilitates ease of mobility and fluidity of transport between different localities. How to make a delicious tea utilizes the opportunity of the digital image to produce a new creative typology while considering the playful tension in presenting an image as an object. The participating artists acknowledge that the photographic representation of their work may form other tangible substances. A synergy is created through the various artworks combining into a larger whole whereby an image severs from its original and acquires separate existence. The object thus achieves the agency to be multiplied, duplicated and reproduced. How to make a delicious tea extends the idea of the print or artist-multiple, addressing the singularity of the original and the implications of reproduction.

How to make a delicious tea initiates an artistic production marked by subtle and layered processes. The process involves a material space through silk surfaces onto which images manifest. We invite artists to select a photographic representation of a physical work to engage in a process that maps its visual coordinates onto a new spatial condition. Silk as the support for this ‘other space’ evokes a sense of depth and dimensionality with an ephemeral, almost elusive, lightness that reinserts the initial art objects back into our perceptual reality.  Here the image is transposed into a tangible formation disconnected from mere representation. We are intrigued by the delicacy of this small shift that creates a new object, with a kind of conceptual blurriness, as it hovers between image and the real.

Hierarchy of value is questioned through the relationship between the image and the silk. From the ethereal and boundless context of the digital it solidifies onto another substance that presumes value and is materially finite. This physical limit forces a momentary loop back to the original, connecting it again to a place and time. However the project sustains this fuzzy connection with the intention that the silk production continues, grows and accumulates, each iteration moving on to a new location to be exhibited, anchored to that place for some time. The accompanying publication is another space in which the image returns to its proliferated condition – onto a paper surface of printed matter – thereby accumulating and circulating parallel to the silk surfaces.

This project has been realized so far in two locations – Artissima Turin and Art Metropole Toronto – with works by Eloise Hawser, Martin Soto Climent, Andrea Sala,  Per-Oskar Leu, Patrick Tuttofuoco and Lena Henke. How to make a delicious tea is an ongoing project that will develop through time with additional artist collaborations contributing to its composite process, exhibiting each time in a new context.

Flip Project Space – Federico Del Vecchio & Ala Roushan – Napoli, Italy

Eloise Hawser: Untitled. 2011 (Re-print on silk). (original: Polyurethane Foam /Paper Lantern)

Martin Soto Climent: Dolcce Dolcce! 2011 (Re-print on silk). (original: dyptich fold paper print) courtesy T293, Napoli

Andrea Sala: Indiani, 2010 (Re-print on silk). (original: varnished wood, spray paint on plaster, ceramic)

Per-Oskar Leu: Whatever Happens, I Love You. 2010 (Re-print on silk). (original: Morrissey’s shirt collar -from concert in Oslo, June 20, 2009- sewn onto the artist’s shirt)

Patrick Tuttofuoco: David Hasselhoff. 2011 (Re-print on silk). (original: mix media)

Lena Henke: Soil III, 2010 (Re-print on silk). (original: carpet folds)

FLIP

flip is a platform to expand on various interests in relation to current culture and artistic practice. The projects are the result of our international network and multidisciplinary collaborations. Though formally based in Napoli, Italy, flip is not exclusively committed to this site. Continuous shifts in context invite inputs and spontaneous occurrences that contribute to the multi-layed and transnational discourse that characterizes flip.

flipprojectspace.com

Federico Del Vecchio (Naples, 1977) lives and works between Frankfurt, Glasgow and Naples. Del Vecchio is engaged in an independent artistic practice as well as co-curator of flip project space.  After finishing his studies at the Academy of Fine Art in Naples, he attended the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main, followed by completing the Master in Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art.  He was then at the HIAP – Helsinki International Artist in residence Program supported by 2012 Movin’ Up prize for the mobility of young italian artists abroad. He is the recipient of the Marie Curie Research Fellowship 2015 at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Del Vecchio’s most recent solo and group exhibitions include: I wish I were a Futurist, Jenifer Nails, Frankfurt am Main, DE (2014); Come, All Ye Faithful, curated by Carson Chan, Florian Christopher, Zürich (2013); Turning and Boring, Queen Park Ralway Club, Glasgow (2013); I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now, curated by Marysia Gacek, 109 Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2013); MFA International Show, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2012); Life Jacket under seat, curated by Flip project, Toronto, Canada (2011); Persona in meno, curated by Erica Cooke, Angelique Campers, Chris Fitzpatrick, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin – Palazzo Ducale, Genova (2010).

Ala Roushan (Pittsburgh, 1983) lives and works between Toronto, Canada and Napoli, Italy, engaged in a multidisciplinary practice exploring the potentials and boundaries of design, art and architecture. She is the co-curator of the independent curatorial initiative flip project space. She completed her post-graduate studies from the Städelschule Architecture Class, in Frankfurt, Germany, with a Master of Arts in Advanced Architectural Design under the direction of Prof. Ben van Berkel. Currently, Ala is involved in the academe and teaches Design Studio at Ryerson University, Faculty of Communication and Design in Toronto.