Darsena residency #2: End of residency show
From 29 September to 5 November 2016 the Galleria Massimodeluca will be hosting a show to mark the close of the “Darsena residency#2″ for artists (opening on Thursday 29 September at 7 p.m.). The second edition of this project, which is unique in Italy, was conceived and promoted by the artistic director of the Massimodeluca gallery, Marina Bastianello. It was held from June to July, and its protagonists were four young artists who were chosen from more than 250 high-quality candidates from more than thirty countries. These young artists not only worked but for a month shared the exhibition venue and transformed it into a space for creating relationships, contaminations, and production.
The works made in those weeks reflect the thoughts inspired by three thematic sessions, conceived by the project’s coordinators Paolo Brambilla and Stefano Cozzi. The show, curated by Valentina Lacinio andClaudio Piscopo, will be installed using the gallery’s entire space including the corners, never before used for exhibitions, and will tell of Appropriation, the Future, and Resistance.
Starting from thoughts about social-political problems, Regina Magdalena Sebald (Pfaffenhofen an der Ilm, Germany, 1984) physically places her own body at the centre of the dispute between human beings and society, in a work that inquires into the current debate about migrants, and reflects on the idea of common territory and the limits of frontiers. The performance will be undertaken live for the whole period of the opening, and will show the artist nude and “trapped” inside barbed wire, the same wire than anyone can buy online in order to mark out private property. This work also alludes to the special situation of the artist’s homeland, Germany, where new walls and boundaries have taken the place of others that have been knocked down. Sebald’s intervention will be rounded off by an installation that will record the performance undertaken in the gallery during an open workshop last June.
Through the materials he experiments with, Agostino Bergamaschi (Milan, 1990) questions himself about primal geometrical figures and tries to grasp the meanings of the concept of “vision”. For the Darsena residency #2 he used for the first time the Venetian material par excellence: Murano glass. The work consists of three pieces considered as the acts of a single play that expresses his aim of modelling material – in this case long, irregularly-formed bars of coloured glass – to stage a new vision of the sky. If in the first act the bars are placed on cylinders of various materials (photographic film, printed photos, polyurethane), the second has as its protagonist a single long, curved glass tube that, in its form and colours, imitates a ray of light that has been pulled at its extremities; in it black is mixed with silvered straw to recall two galaxies. The third part of the project is, instead, represented by a large curved photograph the protagonists of which are light and its reflections.
The research undertaken by Marco Strappato (Porto San Giorgio, 1982) has its origins in questions about images, their production and distribution; these questions are embedded in a multidisciplinary action that incorporates installations, sculpture, and video. The work on show begins with the animation of a 3D file of a trading desk (the complex, multi-screen desks used by financial brokers). The artist has worked on a specific site in the gallery’s office with installations that allude to the fossils of some dystopian future; in appearance they are reminiscent of a scribe’s tablet but they also recall digital files and sheets of paper, all making use of a material resembling plaster: Jesmonite. Furthermore, Strappato makes sculptures from objects that are apparently technological, such as abandoned laptops, but changes their substance and deprives them of their original function.
Isabel Legate (Austin, U.S.A., 1992), whose concerns are with ideas about the body, femininity, and identity as constructs filtered through consumerism and the media, is exhibiting three works which develop her poetics. Through the creation of an imaginative showcase, Legate commercializes the idea of desire, youth, and beauty by producing glass objects as luxurious containers for desire; in them are images she has appropriated from advertising, together with precious materials and her own poems.
