AlbumArte presents:
DUPLEX
From Tuesday September 10th, French artist Christine Rebet and the curatorial duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi will be the artist and curators-in-residence at AlbumArte, Rome. The project is part of DUPLEX, an artists and curators-residence-exchange between the Cité des Arts de Paris and AlbumArte | Rome. DUPLEX is part of the official agenda of the TANDEM 2014, a cultural twinning scheme between Paris and Rome.
A project by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi and AlbumArte
Curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi and Maria Rosa Sossai
Produced by Mairie de Paris, Cité Internationale des Arts – Paris, Institut Français, Roma Capitale, Department of Culture of the Municipality of Rome, AlbumArte
Paris – Rome February 1 | December 13, 2014
Artist-in residence in Rome: September 10 | October 12, 2014
PRESS RELEASE | COMMUNIQUÉ DE PRESSE
In the present era of mobility and dematerialization, the artist is ever more often required to evoke the presence of the work, even when it does not physically exist. The concepts of narrative, the representation, and in some cases also fictional invention, have become an increasingly important part of our experience of the artwork.
Thus the artist’s studio can also exist outside of any precise physical place, in a dimension that could be defined as portable. It can be located elsewhere, thanks to the artist’s specific skills and the modalities that are used for transmitting images. Duplex, an experimental marathon of visits made by artists outside the walls of their own studios, is based upon the awareness of this fundamental fact. This novel development was carried out for the first time by the two curators Francesco Urbano and Francesco Ragazzi (who together go under the name of Francesco Urbano Ragazzi), in February and March 2014, during their period of residence in Paris as a part of the Cité Internationale des Arts program, supported by the Mairie de Paris (Paris City Hall). In September 2014 the project will continue in Rome, where it will be produced by AlbumArte and co-curated by its Artistic Director Maria Rosa Sossai as a part of the cultural twinning scheme Tandem Paris-Rome, which is promoted by the Institut Français in Rome.
During the period of their residence in Paris earlier this year, the curatorial duo closely investigated the city’s art scene. Various important figures who are particularly active in the context of contemporary art in the city helped and gave them precious advices for their research. These included: Kathy Alliou, the head of the department of scientific and cultural development of the dell’École Nationale Superieure de Beaux Arts – Marianne Derrien, an independent critic and curator – Elisabeth Lebovici, an art critic and professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales – Claire Le Restif, the director of the Crédac Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry – Christian Merlhiot, the head of the Pavillon Neuflize OBC (Palais de Tokyo) – Caroline Niémant, the curator and founder of the magazine Peeping Tom – Chiara Parisi, the director of the cultural programs of the Monnaie de Paris – Jean-François Rettig, the director of the new media festival Les Rencontres Internationales.
These exceptional consultants brought various artists to the attention of the curators-in-residence, so that they could create a wide-ranging matrix linking some very different kinds of artistic research. This soon led to a genuine marathon of studio visits, in a mental more than in the strictly physical sense, since the meetings were held all in the same place: the temporary bureau of the curators at the Cité Internationale des Arts in the heart of the historic Le Marais district of Paris.
The inversion of the usual practice of the studio visit – which of course does not rule out the more traditional modality in future – is an attempt to put reciprocity and narration at the centre of the relationship between the artist and the curator, re-establishing it as a kind of therapeutic setting. When they are outside their context of production, artists tend to enter a dimension of storytelling: an essential space in which they can reinvent their ways of representing themselves. The curators in their turn, who are no longer hosts, discover new ways of welcoming, receiving, asking, observing, listening and narrating their own projects and ideas. During these months, together with this in-depth look at the Parisian artistic panorama, a way forward for both artists and curators, based on deeper affinities, was gradually constructed, and this will be developed into collaborations in the long term.
It is in this spirit that, out of the over 100 artists that the two curators met, one was selected to continue this interesting dialogue by means of a residency, due to take place in the autumn of 2014 in the newly inaugurated headquarters of AlbumArte in Rome. Invited by the president of AlbumArte Cristina Cobianchi and the artistic director Maria Rosa Sossai this artist in residence will be Christine Rebet. Born in Lyon but a New Yorker by adoption, Rebet will develop the discourse that she began in Paris with the two curators regarding the idea of the “spatialization” of the drawing. In fact this French artist’s work mainly concerns the drawing as a means for reading and interpreting the repressed traumatic forms of history, which are then transformed into installations, sculptures, animations and performances.
The culmination of the process of research and creative exchange is the final exhibition Meltingsun, which will launch the new exhibition space of AlbumArte located in Via Flaminia 122 on Tuesday, October 7th at 6:30 p.m.
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Christine Rebet lives and works in New York and Paris. Her work is based on the drawing and it develops into forms ranging from animation to the environment, installations and performance art. At the heart of her work is the elaboration of historical traumas in the context of a personal reinterpretation and a consequent reanimation. Rebet studied in Columbia University and Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, London. She has exhibited and held performances in various international contexts including: SITE, Santa Fé; Sculpture Center, Long Island – New York; Le Magasin, Grenoble; the Shangai Art Museum; Parasol Unit, London; the Kamel Mennour Gallery, Paris; Taka Ishii, Tokyo; X-initiative, New York; the Cartier Foundation, Paris; Unge Kunstneres Samfund (UKS), Oslo; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn – New York; the Gregor Podnar Gallery, Slovenia; the James Fuentes Gallery, New York; the Guild and Greyskhul Gallery, New York; the Wexner center for the Arts, Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Her films have been presented in various events and festivals including the Berlinale Short Film Festival, Berlin; the Oberhausen Short Film Festival; the Scotia Novia film festival, Canada; the Chicago film festival, USA; Expresion en Corto, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico; Trip to the world of drawing animation, Japan (Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, Nigata, Nagoya and Fukuoka); the Nemo Film Festival, Paris; Animà Festival international de Cinema de Catalunya, Spain; the Jakarta Film Festival; the BFI London Film Festival; the MIFF Manchester International Film Festival; Festival International De Curtas, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; Murat Art – French Short Film Festival, New York; the Singapore International Film Festival.
Francesco Urbano Ragazzi is a curatorial duo founded in 2005. Invited to the Cité Internationale des Arts by the Mairie de Paris in 2008, the two curators subsequently elaborated their own residency formats: Spot – studio dal Vivo sponsored by the City of Venice (2010), Mirroring, funded by the Emirates Foundation (2011) and Prima Visione, for the National Gallery of Cosenza (2013). In the same period the duo was part of the curatorial team of Art Enclosures, a series of residencies for African artists established by the Fondazione di Venezia. Francesco Urbano Ragazzi has recently organized several exhibitions and projects with a practical workshop-based approach, such as the Internet Pavilion of Miltos Manetas for the Venice Biennale (2011 and 2013), Io Tu Lui Lei at theFondazione Bevilacqua La Masa (2012), L’Ile Flottante, a section of the fourth Sinopale (the International Sinop Biennial, 2012), and Dolomitenhof Resort in the context of the Dolomiti Contemporanee festival (Sass Muss, Belluno 2011). Francesco Urbano Ragazzi has given lectures and held performances in various public and academic contexts, including the IUAVand Ca’ Foscari Universities (Venice), Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (the Zurich University of the Arts), the Macro museum of contemporary art (Rome) and the theatre of the François Pinault Foundation (Venice). The duo has also collaborated with various institutions, such as the Swiss Institute in Rome, the Italian Ministry for Equal Opportunities, “Venice Agendas – Panel Discussions in and around the Biennale”, Futura – Centre for contemporary art (Prague), the Apalazzo Gallery (Brescia), and the Manà Gallery (Istanbul). The curatorial duo has collaborated with the following online and offline magazines: Purple, Nero, Undo.net,Flashart, South as a State of Mind.
