Chiara Camoni, Alice Cattaneo, Elena El Asmar, Serena Fineschi, Ludovica Gioscia, Loredana Longo, Claudia Losi, Sabrina Mezzaqui
A project by Marina Dacci
In La Vita Materiale. Otto stanze, otto storie, the design lever is the desire to enhance a female artistic practice that expertly connects the artistic path to personal experience and the art / life bond in all its complexity and fertility.
The invitation for this exhibition was directed to Chiara Camoni, Alice Cattaneo, Elena El Asmar, Serena Fineschi, Ludovica Gioscia, Loredana Longo, Claudia Losi, Sabrina Mezzaqui, Italian artists who – although with very different formal experiments – are united by the use of materials often humble and traditionally associated with craft, crafts that find a generous space in their artistic work.
In a relationship made of distances and approaches, of contact and detachment, of manipulations between physicality and mnestic decay, their search is a “focus” of the self in the world; tells the apperception and the re-generation of objects and materials and gives body to visions and stories, able to fester on our daily life and to ferry us in other dimensions.
Subtended stories, provocations, interrogations, staging of the processes in their becoming in all their fragility and energy, through works in which the finite and the non-finished mix and in which their works give life to sensitive formal tales.
The spectator is invited to discover eight habitats, eight environments to which each artist has given a title; rooms like cocoons, in which each of them has proposed their own world, the work in the study and in which it clearly appears that matter, in its transformation processes, is something “organic” and vital. They present themselves in a confident manner, which does not distort and intimidate the visitor, but which favors his ability to venture into the game of discovery.
The exhibition involves and interrogates the senses: vision and touch in particular, because our experience passes through the body that creates synesthesia with its surroundings. It is a body-world; for this reason at the opening of the exhibition “the tree of the body” perceived and told by Claudia Losi and the velarium on a “body landscape“, staged by Elena El Asmar, become a happy prologue to the eight rooms.
The exhibition is proposed as a playful, intriguing, questioning path that captures the viewer as a spider, emotional and mental texture; at the end of the journey perhaps new windows will open up on how to perceive and read our common “material life”.
The project is accompanied by a volume – the last collective work of the exhibition – published by Gli Ori, which contains working diaries, notes and drawings that shed light on the creative paths of the invited artists, as well as presenting the works on display at Palazzo from Mosto in site-specific set-up.
This project offers interesting connections with the anthology dedicated to Jean Dubuffet, presented at the same time as Palazzo Magnani: the lightness, the playfulness of the installation, the enhancement of the process and of the incomplete that goes alongside a deep reflection on what defines the art and us in relation to this; the generative capacity to pollute, to hybridize, to break boundaries between high and low culture decontextualizing, employing and renewing the life of objects and materials connected to our everyday life.
The event is part of the cultural actions that the Foundation has structured with its Scientific Committee within the ample and organic system-wide project, together with the Municipality of Reggio Emilia and the Manodori Foundation, of the various exhibition venues of the city, from Palazzo Magnani in Palazzo da Mosto at the Chiostri di San Pietro.