AlbumArte presents
Allegra ma non troppo
Solo show of Sonia Andresano
Curated by Daniela Cotimbo
From June 24th, 2020
Opening moment from 5.00 PM to 10.00 PM
Entrance will be regulated by means of a planned access program via booking*
until July 17th, 2020
From Monday to Friday 4 PM – 8 PM on reservation at info@albumarte.org
AlbumArte presents the solo show of Sonia Andresano titled Allegra ma non troppo curated by Daniela Cotimbo. It is the first exhibition AlbumArte is not forced to postpone due to the containment measures of the health emergency. Over the time spent in social confinement, the exhibition has obviously changed, incorporating new content. Sonia has always said she feels at home at AlbumArte and she is now returning to it in a moment of silence – so difficult for the whole world – feeling the desire to reopen its door, to rearrange the space again and try to revive it, even in the sadness of this moment, in the belief that art is always a solicitation to look to the future. The exhibition will be visitable on reservation until July 17th. We thank Alan Advantage for the support.
There is a life of places that goes beyond our daily perception. An incessant flow of connections to which we do not always pay attention and that determines our relationship with space: it can be a noise, a crack in a wall, an electrical appliance with mechanical movements that intercepts its interstices. Everything invites us to rethink our need to live as a continuous revisiting of places and relationships, aware that everything flows around us and that we ourselves are agents who constantly move from one point to another. The house then becomes a hyper-object, a viscous entity that changes shape, place, but which continues to represent an attractive pole of our experience.
Allegra ma non troppo bears witness to this new exploration, a clear reference to the musical language from which it derives the idea of a movement, physical and interior, the guiding thread of the artist’s research, mediated by the need for rest and introspection.
To shoot the video that titles the exhibition, Sonia takes refuge in the white walls of AlbumArte on the first day after the end of the lockdown. Her gaze gently returns to every interstice and speck of dust, every little thing out of place, every trace of absence; yet what comes out of the video is a living space, inhabited by the sound of birds and the movement of the branches. Once again, the artist uses the language of the video, with its long times, fixed shots, and clean cuts to narrate a need to get back to things. Sound, another recurring element, accompanies the movement of the gaze, underlining it and making it organic; it is an ambient sound which is amplified, becoming a significant artifice. The work represents the umpteenth stage of a research path, a continuous movement in search of new forms of relationship with things.
During her young life Sonia changed many times home and city, each time carrying boxes, memories and objects, but she also had to tear down walls, forget, go further. Each of his movements has been accompanied by this need for exploration aimed at establishing relationships with spaces and places, which are always, first of all, relationships with themselves. The project recounts this continuous crossing through works carried out over a two-year period (2018-20). Each crossing, each intersection, each attempt to define their role within the space is a way of answering that question which alone is the basis of any signifier.
The video che ci faccio qui? (2019) recounts the domestic vertigo of a robot vacuum cleaner that seems to be looking for a home by moving around the perimeter of the space, created inside one of the premises of the Fabbrica del Vapore in order to remodel, in a domestic key, a place born as a tram factory.
Circumscribing a place while passing through it, staying on the perimeter of the “houses of others”, wandering in space hitting its baseboards in the desire of somewhere else. Between the private dimension and the public building, the robot acts on the margin, with calculated but random movements, through a personal and collective vision, thanks to spatial memory.
Moving is like traveling, living in places of passage, and leaving again. I go inside, press a button and the trammammuro (2018) – lift in Neapolitan – carousel starts. In the narrow space of the elevator shaft I go up, down, dress, move.
Look back but through, look at the road traveled with no reflection: veicolo cieco (2020), two sculptures with cloudy transparency make the path little visible and proceed towards the cancellation of the traces left behind. Visibility does not increase but decreases. Placed in two blind corners of the space, they accompany the viewer in blurred memories. Sopraluogo (2019) is the continuation of mosca bianca: a photographic logbook in which the insect moves within an abandoned place. Used as a self-portrait, the fly landed in the Viafarini Archive and in a disused factory, resting among things, among others, in the archived memories, above places. Frozen in that waiting before the flight, observing and pondering its next movement. With this exhibition we re-open AlbumArte after the lockdown. We do not know when we will be able to fully enjoy the places, we think belong to us or simply contain us, meeting and exchanging reflections and sharing moments of everyday life. What we can say with certainty is that as we return to look around us today, nothing seems as it was.
Thanks to Alan Advantage.
*In compliance with the rules of phase 2 of the health emergency, during the inaugural day and for the duration of the exhibition, entrances will be regulated with an planned access program through booking. It is mandatory to wear a mask for the duration of the visit. Body temperature measurement and hand sanitizing at the entrance. Limited number of visitor.
PRESS RELEASE >>> INVITATION >>>
CURATORIAL TEXT >>>
