Fondazione Spinola-Banna per l'arte // Visual Arts // Mostra. Workshop 2010-2011

From 4th May until 3rd June 2012, the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation hosted Mostra. Workshop 2010-2011, featuring the works of four artists selected from among those who had taken part in the workshops of the Spinola Banna per l’Arte Foundation in 2010 and 2011. The layout of the exhibition, which was first held in Poirino autumn 2011, was redesigned for the display in the rooms of Palazzetto Tito by the curator Stefano Coletto. The exhibition featured works by Giorgio Guidi, Alessandro Laita, Marco Strappato and Diego Tonus, whose projects were selected by a jury made up of Liliana Moro, Leigh Ledare, Gail Cochrane and Guido Costa.

The work by Giorgio Guidi, developed during a workshop held by Liliana Moro at the Spinola Banna per l’Arte Foundation, draws inspiration from the little votive chapels to be found in the countryside around the Spinola estate. By deploying a ‘stratigraphic’ observation of his surroundings, the artist created a synthesis between landscape, iconographical study and ‘living’ during the residence, then placed in relationship with imagery from the film Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen (“Even Dwarfs Started Small”) by Werner Herzog (1970).

The installation by Alessandro Laita was made up of sheets of paper obtained by recycling her entire archive of rejected or unused projects, through a process of paper pulping performed in the exhibition room of the Spinola Banna per l’Arte Foundation the week prior to the opening of the exhibition. These sheets, the silent witnesses of a private archive, are thus created thanks to an regenerative process in which the ‘negative’ changes state, becoming a possibility.

Marco Strappato presented the development of FakeLake, an ongoing project enhanced by two new collages and a site-specific display for the Venetian venue: Route To Elsewhere and Lovely Lakeland. These works, despite being firmly rooted in the overall concept of the project (which deals with the notion of ‘landscape’ meant as a physical, mental and emotional place), lead to a multiplicity of visions through formal juxtapositions: between the authentic and the artefactual, the exotic and the everyday, the origin and the end.

Diego Tonus elaborated the video material from the courses held at the Spinola Banna per l’Arte Foundation from 2005 to 2011, identifying the repetitions to be found in the words, the pauses and the actions in the footage and as used by various different participants. Through the narrative element of déjà vu, Residenti traces a hidden path which follows the common thread of the Foundation, looked upon as a set and its collaborators as directors/actors. The creative process is deconstructed to outline a non-story, indefinable a priori, yet one which unfolded through the experiences of those on the residency programme.
And for the Venetian exhibition, the four artists worked together on the preparation of the Stanza del Camino, a shared venue, documenting several aspects of the creation process of the works on show in other spaces; a sort of exploded perspective in which the works shut off minimalistically within their spaces are presented to the public in a new potential interpretation.

On the occasion of the Venice show, a cycle of meetings curated by Alessandro Laita was organised in collaboration with Chiaralice Rizzi and with the support of the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, entitled Spaccherò questo schermo che mi rappresenta e ne uscirò, perché solo io rappresento me stesso (“I shall break out of this screen that represents me, for I alone represent myself,” a quote by Francesco Matarrese), with a discussion on the concepts of crisis, ‘failure’ and error in artistic development.

Thursday 10th May
5pm Pietro Gaglianò, The Wall (archives)

Thursday 17th May
5pm Lewis Baltz

Thursday 24th May
4pm Mattia Pellegrini, Cosa fai? Preparo un archivio (“What are you doing? I’m preparing an archive” - title borrowed from reading Gianfranco Baruchello)
5pm Elisabetta Modena and Marco Scotti, MoRE Museum

Thursday 31st May
5pm Antonello Frongia, Vanished as affection flies: il fallimento della memoria fotografica (“The failure of the photographic memory”)