Tuesday,
February 6th from 7 pm to 11 pm
Evening event with Performance and Video-screening:
Francesca Grilli, Stefania
Pedretti
Curated by Francesca Cogoni
Coordinator and Project-Assistant at Sparwasser HQ
Main room 8 pm – 9 pm (ca. 50´)
Performance by
?Alos (Stefania Pedretti
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Basement 7 pm – 11 pm
Video-screening by
Francesca Grilli
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LINKS: Francesca
Grilli and Stefania
Pedretti
The video artist and performer Francesca Grilli (1978, Bologna, Italy)
will present two of her latest works: Arriverà e ci coglierà
di sorpresa, a video documentation of a performance presented at
the International Prize for Performance (Centrale di Fies – Trento,
Italy) in 2006, and 194.9 MHz (digital video, 2006, 5’
22). Both works are based on memories, which are elaborated and shaped
by Francesca Grilli according to her own personal vision, in order to
create an alteration of space and time, a sort of “transfiguration
of the everyday life”, permeated by the interest in displaying “situations
where strength and fragility coexist”, as the artist herself declares.
The musician and visual artist Stefania Pedretti (1976, Vigevano, Italy),
member of the female performance group Allun and of the indie-noise band
OVO, will appear as her alter-ego Signorina ?Alos and show her culinary-musical
performance ?Alos - One Girl Cooking Music, in which the audience
will be engaged in a multisensorial experience and fascinated by her versatile
talents. Halfway between concert and theatre, the performance focuses
on the idea of “stealing private moments and making them public”.
The performance will be followed by a presentation of ?Alos’s first
video Sola! (2006), shot with the support of Francesca Grilli.
Representing a more private version of the artist’s public performance,
the video Sola! comes after several years of friendship and artistic
collaboration between Stefania Pedretti and Francesca Grilli, who since
their first meeting in Milan have been involved in various common projects
and exhibitions in Italian art galleries and cultural spaces.
Awarded second prize for “the capacity to evoke a sense of solitude
and abandonment in a poetic way with the inventive use of the space and
timing”, Arriverà e ci coglierà di sorpresa
(Eng.: It will come and take us by surprise) deals with themes of ageing
and the approach of death. The viewer is introduced to a pair of elderly
ballroom dancers that move along a dark, empty hall under a flood light,
moving to the rhythm of various melodies. Meanwhile, a huge projection
of a bright coloured dance hall is shown in the background. As the artist
herself states, this project “comes from a memory, a common scenario
in the area where she grew up, Emilia, and part of her family history”.
The aim of Francesca Grilli is to point out the vitality and fascinating
appearance of the two characters rather than remark on their old age –
as if they could dance on and on with persisting devotion, facing the
ghost of the passing of time, until finally, death arrives (as the title
suggests). “I’ve always thought that death was just an idea.
I like to think of death and of growing old only as a constant illusion
of life, as if they will never come. As if you never see the end”
says the artist concerning her work.
194.9 MHz is the final action/reaction result of a series of
interviews made by Francesca Grilli with all members of her family. After
her initial introspective research oriented to making closer family connections,
she drew inspiration from an episode of her father’s life. 194.9
MHz thus focuses on the relation between the artist and her father,
Franco (the title, indicating a radio frequency, refers to her father’s
birth year). The voice-over narration in the video is in fact that of
the artist’s original interview with her father. It recounts a painful
childhood trauma, when after his little brother’s death, Franco’s
mother forbid listening to the radio at home. Drawing on this memory,
Francesca Grilli created a performance in which, with a radio antenna
on her back, she climbed a mountain (which in a metaphorical sense for
her represents stability and eternity) till the top, where she finally
placed the antenna. As the artist has declared, behind this performative
work is the intent “to assign art and narration the roles of therapy
and gift”, the attempt to find a “possibility to deal with
so painful an issue in a constructive way”.
In the performance One Girl Cooking Music, ?Alos presents herself
as a “lonely, unlucky, romantic and dreamer-woman” –
a character who grew out of characters in Stefania Pedretti´s painted
works in 2003. ?Alos is indeed the mirror image of the word of “sola”,
which means “alone” in Italian. The scars on her face and
the welts that cover her body recall experiences from her past (thus in
Stefania Pedretti´s work as well, the surfacing of memories plays
a substantial role). Moreover though, these “blemishes” stand
for a critique of the current prevailing aesthetic sense characterized
by the pursuit of beauty at any cost. Beauty could also coincide with
a wound, a particular imperfection, the artist wants to remind us.
The audience is offered the complete act of cooking a vegetarian candlelight
dinner and invited to follow step by step the preparation of the meal.
All this is accompanied by a musical performance in which ?Alos sings
and plays the guitar in her unique and fascinatingly personal style.
The main purposes of this ironic performance are to parody stereotypes
of the female condition, and to carry the audience into a parallel dimension
by stimulating the viewers’ subconscious. According to Stefania
Pedretti, “another world exists beyond ours, a world hidden inside
every mirror". One Girl Cooking Music is the first in a
series of performances in which the artist will question typical female
roles, activities and duties.
January
13. till end of 2007
Köken
Ergun, Ho Tzu Nyen and Künstler
By utilizing the exhibition
space as a stage to accommodate moments of authenticity - or a scripted
choreography of ideas - we suggest with the festival to look at different
artistic positions working within performance and other 'staged' productions.
NEU
Köken
Ergun's "the flag" awarded best short film at Rotterdam Film
Festival
Ho
Tzu Nyen video reviewed in Blaue Augen