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The project, that did not win the contest, consisted of the realization of a light installation in the arcade of one of the square sides. The idea of the artist was to place in the middle of each of the fourteen vaults of the arcade of Palazzo Sersanti a special lighting element that, through a dedicated optical system, would have projected on the ground the image of the same number of green Ginko Biloba leaves, replacing the preexisting lighting system.
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This utopian project, donated to MoRE, is part of that line of research based on the combination between major art exhibitions and live animals, which the artist began to develop in 1981 with the installation Dust of Louvre Mist of Amazon at the Weddington Gallery, where he let two peacocks roam freely through the exhibition of modern art collections. The work that most closely resembles Lionson-line walking freely in the Louvre was realised by Dimitrijević in 1995 for the exhibition at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt. Against historic sense of gravity featured pythons from the Zoo of Cologne set free inside a specially built platform (with a heated pool and an island) containing female portraits dating back between the 16th and 19th century.
As Nena Dimitrijević, art historian and Braco's wife, recalls presenting the project, there’s a tension towards a utopian and unfeasible dimension that characterises his entire career: [Braco Dimitrijević] has managed to achieve many of his projects, that at first seemed impossible, because of his nature and ability to theoretically support his ideas. For example, his use of the façade for the portraits of unknown people encountered a lot of obstacles at the time and opened the chapter regarding the use of urban vocabulary in art. ]]>This work, that has never been realized, could be seen as part of a series of practices through which the artist “examines how we come to know and speak about the conflicting geographies and temporalities of power”, investigating the map as way to measure, represent and control a territory, that contains in itself several contradictory truths and is strictly connected with an ideology, a vision or a point of view. In particular the use of metaphors and representations to study political and social environments here is declined through the potential multiple authorship of the tattooists that could have drawn the maps, and through the introduction of a technique usually connected with the idea of traveling and with the concept of identity. The tattoo, here a personal interpretation of something usually considered fixed, could have been another mean aimed at “the investigation of the historiographic, geographic and mathematical models that helped to ensure the colonialist domination of the world by Western modernity”.
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“I planned to get at least 50 Dads. They would drive in to the square outside the medieval hall. One car for each dad. They would stop and remain in their car. They would all simultaneously pull down their car windows and play the same song; The very romantic Pietro Mascagni, as used as the sound track in Raging Bull by Scorsese.
When the song was finished, they were to slowly pull away, head to the motorway in a line towards Southampton, where I also had commission as part of the same project.
We were to hire helicopters to film the motorway, like a “News Copter” where the Lonely Dads would parade with their cars, missing their children.”
Reflecting upon roles and structures inside the families and in the society, here Annika Ström investigate in particular relationships, self-doubts and failures, designing the staging of a dramatic scene where cars would have invaded the historical setting.
The artist also wanted to install enormous disco balls inside the hall, but this project too remained unrealised.
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In Stockholm, the choir would have been introduced by “fifty loud skateboards with lanterns on their wheels and hoods.” The same conductor would have parachuted down, and when the skateboarders had moved a short distance away and fallen silent, the choir would have sung the phrases projected onto nearby building façades. The performance would have been closed by the skateboarders, who would turn their lights on once more.
A sound recording and a vinyl record were to be produced after the show.
]]>The themes of fragility, uncertainty, sadness, the interest in the act of travelling and in the condition of the traveller, the focus on female protagonists, these are just a few hints we can grasp from the brief description of the artist showed here, that can also easily be found inside Annika Ström film production.
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This project, the fourth donated by the author to MoRE, dates back to a period between 1968 and 1969, when Guerzoni, then in his early twenties and at the end of his education, abandoned the traditional painting technique and started doing researches in the avant-garde, especially around Duchamp.
He was spontaneously attracted by the most important international researches, such as the American Land Art and the Italian Arte Povera. These interests reflect in some of his works, not always realised, such as this project donated to MoRE. The concept behind the project was quite simple: Guerzoni wanted to bring inside the closed space of an art gallery a natural occurrence, the rainbow. The project included, as shown in the sketch, a field sprayer machine in the center of the room. It would have sprayed water, playing with the artificial light effects.
The author, thinking about that installation – also with the collaboration of Luigi Ghirri, friend and companion of many art adventures – took some photographs in the countryside. These study series of water splashes investigated the nature of the rainbow and its visual perception. These conceptual photographs are the only evidence of the project. It remained unrealized due technical difficulties but also because it was more theoretical than realizable. The theme to bring the nature inside the culture was particularly strong in that period; Guerzoni itself thought to produce a black rose, as symbolic synthesis of the two elements.
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The title refers to the Atlas Palace, a myth that appears in the Boiardo and Ariosto Orlando, and that here acquires a personal value for Tosatti as a place to deal with, but also in a relationship with the visitors, though the symbols of the labyrinth and the mirror, a central theme in the artist's research between 2011 and 2012. Through a practice divided between art and architecture, often described by Tosatti himself with an analogy with the room in the middle of the "zone" in the Andrei Tarkovsky film Stalker, a model of superimposition of identity and desire, here the artist tries to make the apparition of “castles and monuments” true, introducing in the project the themes of electricity and illusion:
“The culmination of the work will consist precisely in a large switch that visitors could turn off, letting darkness and silence fall over the entire building. It will therefore be necessary - also from the visual point of view – to rely on certain image of technology, related to electricity. Obviously the kind of technology that should be used is not be the most modern one, but the one that is present in a shared imaginary, consequently machines and tools form several decades ago, which aren’t used anymore”.
Studying the construction diary and the preparatory drawings we can also highlight the particular attention dedicated to the façade, upon which two “mirror flags” should have been installed to make "the invisible building" recognizable, and the structuring of a path through the different floors. A room should have contained, upon one of the tables that are already present inside the building, a glass of water and a bottle of Novalgina, a painkiller, together with an hidden mechanism that would have created a light and steady vibration to shake the water surface when placed upon the table. Another room was designed to provide the optical illusion of a rhino freely moving inside the space, so to anticipate the top floor switch, where the machinery would have been placed. Classical statues - originals or copies - should also have been present alongside the path, as an archetype of man and as a mirror for the visitor, while at the ground floor, currently occupied by an archaeological excavation, an artist intervention would have been necessary to turn it into a sculptural space.
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