La meraviglia, Online Art Residencies Exhibition
La meraviglia is the second edition in the three-year Art Residencies Programme at Manifattura Tabacchi. The exhibition features works from Davide D’Amelio, Anna Dormio, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur, Esma Ilter, Giulia Poppi and Negar Sh, alongside works that the artists created collectively during each of the workshops with Stefania Galegati, Rä Di Martino, Pantani-Surace, Goldschmied&Chiari, Elena Mazzi and Robert Pettena.
The residency has been a platform not only for individual artistic research and creation, but also as a means of exchanging ideas and designing collective works, thanks to a packed programme of workshops and seminars with nationally and internationally renowned artists and curators.
The curator Sergio Risaliti introduces La meraviglia artworks
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INDIVIDUAL ARTWORKS
«A OTTO ANNI LUIGI XIII FA UN DISEGNO SIMILE A QUELLO DEL FIGLIO DI UN CANNIBALE DELLA NUOVA CALEDONIA. A OTTO ANNI HA L’ETÀ DELL’UMANITÀ, ALMENO DUECENTOCINQUANTAMILA ANNI. QUALCHE ANNO DOPO LI HA PERDUTI, HA SOLO TRENTUN ANNI, È DIVENTATO UN INDIVIDUO, E SOLO UN RE DI FRANCIA, VICOLO CIECO DAL QUALE NON È MAI USCITO. COSA C’È DI PEGGIO DELL’ESSERE COMPIUTI?» (ANCORA E ANCORA HENRI MICHAUX).
by DAVIDE D’AMELIO
2020
ACRYLIC AND TEMPERA ON CANVAS AND WALL
3 ELEMENTS: CENTRAL PANEL 180 X 210 CM
SIDE PANELS 120 X 160 CM
Because it was something I had lost, I always admired childhood; the powerful imaginative realm of children, their ability to marvel at the world, their impulsive desire to seek out the sensation of fear. This is how I began my journey during my residency at Manifattura Tabacchi: by rediscovering the desire to fear what had become unknown. Going down into the dark basements, into underground passages, overlapping actual facts with psychological ideas – the idea of the subconscious, of memory, a place where I rediscovered toys I had abandoned along with a great pile of other childish belongings. There I had a vision, an epiphany. So the residue of events and memories became the catalyst and the subject of this work. Like a child, I tried to disfigure that which had a definite form. I tried to look at the world through the eyes of a stranger, ‘seeing as children arrive in their physical bodies like strangers’ (Henri Michaux). Every eight-year-old, more or less, has drawn the sky above the horizon. As strangers we have asked ourselves: what’s in front of me? The horizon or the sky? ‘And the child arrives in society, in our civilization, in our world, as a stranger’ (again, Henri Michaux). Alberto Savinio in the appendix to one of his novels, Tragedia dell’infanzia (1937), terms this primigenial moment of our lives ‘dangerous pink’ – a state which all pedagogic structures attempt to remedy so that we become adults who adhere to civilised society’s norms.
A Far-off look
by ESMA ILTER
2020
FABRIC, WOOD
SETTING-DETERMINED DIMENSIONS
A problematic relationship with the place one calls ‘home’ begins when life is dislocated and uprooted, when life drifts from one crowded city to the next, from one house to another. Urbanisation has caused the size of the average home to be downscaled. Houses have become boxes with walls. Modern life’s transitory nature has broken the organic relationship between dwelling itself and its geographical location. Each seem to be disassociated elements that belong to a synthetic scheme. As the home is modernised and idealised, it becomes increasingly abstract: an object that is impossible to construct or desire. Ilter’s memories of home are connected to the places she lived in when she was growing up — places she eventually had to leave. Starting from a mnemonic-architectural process, Ilter redrew the plans of the houses in which she had lived.
As she drew the plans, her first blurry recollection came to mind. In A far-off look, Ilter has tried to reconstruct this memory based on a photographic recollection of her childhood. By doing so, she tried to create a space as faithful as possible to all these eidetic images. “When I close my eyes, I can imagine myself there, with the sound of the sea, under a blinding sun, in a big garden.”
Apolide
by NEGAR SH
2020
WAX, VISA
SETTING-DETERMINED DIMENSIONS
With Apolide, the artist offers an explanation of the difficult situation immigration presents and the vital necessity these movements implicate. This work takes the word of those who decide to leave everything, those who no longer have a place in which they feel safe, those who decide to throw themselves in unknown waters, without having the slightest notion of what the future may bring. The material’s transparency represents the migrant’s lack of knowledge and how sometimes visions of their future lives outside their homelands might induce the error of falling into a new series of difficulties. In the middle of this installation, Sh placed her first Italian visa – which she waited so long to obtain – in hopes of being a law-abiding resident in search of new opportunities for her future.
Reflection
by NEGAR SH
2020
MIRROR, WAX
297 X 230 CM
In Reflection, the artist contemplates her identity. The virtual image of an emigrée from a foreign country might cause others to judge Sh based on propaganda and their own limited ken; but it was viewed negatively that
a person who made the decision to move from her place of birth could significantly change her personality and tradition to the point of being considered different, even in her country of origin. The reflection seeks to demonstrate the process of fusion and sacrifices made to shield against the scrutiny of the public eye and eventually avoid becoming the victim of acts of racism.
Fanta Vergini Senza Paura
by GIULIA POPPI
2020
SCENOGRAPHIC STRUCTURE, CONCRETE CAST, PLASTIC FLOWER
420 X 420 X 420 CM
The Minister of Space Edward N. has his astronauts to the Space Minister’s project, should take place within perform unusual training exercises. For example, the fifteen-year-old Giulia Poppi who was selected for the next lunar voyage, must roll down a hill, crouch inside a barrel, and launch herself from one plant to the next using a liana vine. E. N. explained that doing so will train Giulia to get used to the violent landings and the absence of gravity she is sure to experience. Despite the enthusiasm and good intentions of the imitator of Attilio Regolo, a lunar voyage is anything but safe. The Minister of Space is missing the seven-and-a-half million pounds needed to carry out the project. But E. N. is confident that UNESCO will give him a loan. “For now – he stated – we can only make use of some books and some American model toys.” E. N., the director of the L. Science Academy, appointed himself as Space Minister and recruited six astronauts supplied with space adventure books for children. The
six astronauts were charged with the task of designing a vessel (an eagle on the background of a cap and a lance), and set out to wait. “Inspiration struck from the God Mulanga. I know that Mulanga had built some huts on the Moon. These huts are now roofless and we mistake them for craters. We need to honor the God Mulanga. We will send G. P., because she is the best astronaut of the group and also the most beautiful. The lunar voyage, according
the following year.”
Freely taken from Fanta Vergini Senza Paura of the weekly publication ABC n. 18, 1967.
Boom Boom Papà
by ANNA DORMIO
2020
CUTOUTS OF WEAPONS CATALOGS ON WALL
VARIABLE DIMENSIONS
The work’s title recalls an expression from Dormio’s childhood. As the daughter of the owner of an armoury, Dormio was accustomed to being in close proximity of weapons. Distanced from their true purpose, to the artist, weapons represent a playful and ‘emotional’ presence, associated with the memory and the presence of her father despite their estranged context. Grouped in such a way as to compose a personal archive, the artist obsessively collected cuttings of guns and pistols coming from a variety of magazines she found around the house and in her family’s armoury, a reenactment of an ingenuous and innocent game. Dormio thus confronts the theme of the ever-growing availability of arms and the militarisation of western society in a light-hearted manner. The weapons are stripped of their function and display an unexpected innocence which reveals a personal sensibility that clashes harshly with the legitimate nature of the object.
volpe
di BEKHBAATAR ENKHTUR
2020
TREE BRANCHES, WAX SETTING-DETERMINED DIMENSIONS
Memories of the past
Remain in closed eyes
Float in the air
Touch the light of the sun
The smell of grease
Infiltrates the stream of thought Last night’s dream
Blown by the morning wind
COLLETTIVE ARTWORKS
Artworks that the artists created collectively during each of the workshops with Stefania Galegati, Rä Di Martino, Pantani-Surace, Goldschmied&Chiari, Elena Mazzi and Robert Pettena.
WS1 - Stefania Galegati
TUTTO PARTE DAL PROBLEMA DI ESMA CON IL PERMESSO DI SOGGIORNO E DALLA VOLONTÀ DI RISOLVERLO INSIEME
by Davide D’Amelio, Anna Dormio, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur, Esma Ilter, Giulia Poppi, Negar Sh
019
WHITE PAINT
VIDEO AND AUDIO RECORDINGS 4 WALL MONITORS
51’
This work was conceived with the purpose of taking a stand that is rooted in the awareness that, by transcending our individual dimension, we open ourselves to a universal one, which is nonetheless intimate and human, while also choral. This is a choice, a white line on the floor of impartiality, so that space becomes a confessional within which all of the current employees of Manifattura Tabacchi resound their answer to an invitation.
This is a question that inhabits utopias, meant to provoke discomfort and engender reflection, to inquire into the dreams and the desire of each of us to create a different world, open to imaginative scenarios.
The work fills a gap between subject and absence, the absence of what no longer exists and of what is yet to become. Imagination stimulates a comparison with our present, leaving a trace in the process of creating our reality.
WS2 – Rä Di Martino
RAW FISH
by Davide D’Amelio, Anna Dormio, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur, Esma Ilter, Giulia Poppi, Negar Sh
2019
VIDEO PROJECTION
18’12’’
Raw Fish is an exploration of the video medium’s expressive potential. It is the result of an experiment which, in using one common object as a point of departure, investigates possible arrival points found via the journey through each artists’ inner realm. The transparence of the glass bowl and the vivid red color of its handsome inhabitant become a recurrent manifesto that reappears within a silent film, a performance, a song, and a story. Object becomes subject, and in this transformation each artist creates a narrative unique in premise yet collective in rendering – a narrative which is at times stream of conscience, political statement, at times solitary gaze, a narrative which retrieves archetypes and smoothes borders.
WS3 – Pantani-Surace
EDELWEISS (A bordo con i tacchi)
by Davide D’Amelio, Anna Dormio, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur, Esma Ilter, Giulia Poppi, Negar Sh
2019/2020
PASTA MADE WITH DURUM WHEAT SEMOLINA AND FRESH EGGS
250 g
Red like fire on black that erases identities, violent and chaotic like all beginnings. Mouths dry and tight with fear. The shapes of the fresh, handmade egg pasta, desiccated in a static dryer, are formed by the partial bites by the
six artists-in-residence together with the artistic duo Pantani-Surace. The bite-forms were taken by using dental wax which was in turn used to make plaster casts of the indentations. Once the plaster hardened, the artists used these moulds to shape the pasta dough, recreating the indentations left by their bites. The bite evokes the idea of choosing to fight for one’s ideals, while the act of eating recalls the role of the community. EDELWEISS (A bordo con i tacchi) offers the outside world the possibility of coming into direct contact with these bite-marks, thus creating the atmosphere for a completely relational art that is potentially endless.
WS4 – Goldshmied & Chiari
BLUE TOBACCO
by Davide D’Amelio, Anna Dormio, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur, Esma Ilter, Giulia Poppi, Negar Sh
2019/2020
GLASS, BLUE PAINT
190 x 110 cm
This site-specific intervention consists of six glass panes, a reference to the blue-tinted windows that were used to prevent the tobacco from sun-damage when Manifattura Tabacchi was in function. As light is filtered through the glass surfaces, it evokes the feeling of the spaces the workers had occupied. While every brush stroke is representative of each artists’ character, the work as a whole returns a memory to the architectural space, a recollection revived by individual expression in a collective process. Time becomes the actor with which we construct the setting – not the original scene, but a new one. It is this new scene that breathes life and meaning into the setting of the past.
WS 5 – Elena Mazzi
UNTITLED
by Davide D’Amelio, Anna Dormio, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur, Esma Ilter, Giulia Poppi, Negar Sh
2020
VINYL ADHESIVE, AUDIO RECORDING
SIX ELEMENTS OF VARIABLE DIMENSIONS
This work is the transposition of an exercise performed by the artists in Manifattura Tabacchi’s indoor and outdoor spaces. It is inspired by Georges Perec’s book, Species of spaces and other pieces (1974). The space has been traversed, introjected, listened to, fragmented, and ultimately transformed into written text and sounds. These texts and sounds can be considered nomads, because they themselves at once embody home, city, garden, corridor, and memory. These individual narrations, unified by a recurrent tone within the identity of the space itself, do not pose the problem of how they arrived at a certain place. They contemplate, rather, their arrival as a fact unto itself. By means of the words and sounds traced through the air, the space manifests itself as something concrete yet manipulable.
WS6 – Robert Pettena
UN-MAPPABLE ZONES FOR A DE-COLONISATION OF SPACE AND MIND
by Davide D’Amelio, Anna Dormio, Bekhbaatar Enkhtur, Esma Ilter, Giulia Poppi, Negar Sh
2020
HECA, WOOD, AND PLEXIGLASS
SIX ELEMENTS (ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, BOVINE SKULLS, TIN, VIDEO, RESIN, WAX)
170 x 80 x 90 cm
The work is an anthropological collection of artifacts of fantasy, derived from the collective action of walking through Firenze’s historical gardens. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, these places served as theatrical venues for the delight of the guests of Florentine high society, where nature and technology merged to conduct the visitor on a symbolic journey. Today, organised tours transport entire busloads of tourists from one city to the next, stopping only briefly to visit a few of the historic gardens, which have now become stagnant and static. Linked to an instinctive fascination and the recreation of stories, be they imaginary or true, that once animated them, this small Wunderkammer revives these slumbering marvels, thus enclosing them in an archive of possible universes.
