A Story that Never Ends: How it Happened that I Joined The Piracy Project

I am going to tell you a secret.
Come closer, for I will say it softly and never repeat what I said again. My words might melt like fresh snow in the sun; they will be as fragile as isinglass, as slippery as images forming into water ripples. One moment they are there, and suddenly they are gone. You will never remember what you saw.
So, listen carefully, for I am about to tell you of a story that was forgotten, that got lost between the lines. The lines of another story. One, I am sure, you already know.

These are a character's words.
Perhaps one, or two, or none of you might remember this post and my confuse babbling about "characters kidnapping" or "destroying" me. Well, at least now you will have an explanation - and a reassurance that my mind is still here and I need no rehab. Possibly.

Everything started in February this year when I had a chat with artist Eva Weinmayr, whose studio I was visiting with one of the MA course mate. She told me about AND Publishing and The Piracy Project, something she was working on with other people in order to save a library from being shut down because of politics' recent measures of austerity. And here I can't help but wonder why it always has to be creativity and entertainment that are deemed useless in a time of crisis? What a question.
Anyway, Eva illustrated to me the joys of being a Pirate.
The Library she and her crew put together is a very peculiar one, as it is made of books that deliberately infringe copyright laws. Not just illegal reproduction of books, which is an already developed phenomenon in emerging countries where books aren't always available. We're talking about emerging authors beginning to interfere with the content of "closed" - or rather, "complete" - literary works. Borrowing here or there. Improving. Changing. Erasing.
Suggesting a different interpretation.
Using literary material, or the object-book itself, as a ready-made. Period.

"Have you ever read a book twice? Books change, every time you read them." 

And so it happened that I confessed.
I told Eva that, when I was about twelve, I took my favourite book of all times and re-wrote part of the story, inserting a new character in it. This meant copying entire paragraphs from the original book and just slid additional ones in, without changing anything too much. Like an improved clockwork or the falling bricks in Tetris, the two parts ended up matching. However, nobody ever read that because I thought it was a subtle form of stealing. You know, using someone else's characters to make up a story within a story...
'Sounds great!' Said Eva. 'We are calling for contributions.'
'Splendid!' I replied, in my boring academic English. 'There's just a tiny little hitch.'
'What is it?'
'The story is written in Italian.' I explained.
'Oh. That's fine, we're also interested in the issues of language...'
'But I can translate it.' I said, not knowing what I was getting myself into.

Back home in Rome, I dug into my personal belongings until I found the manuscript, buried under a pile of photocopied books from college's times. The plastic spiral binding holding it together showed its age signs by falling off bit by bit whenever I tried to turn a page. I recalled writing it using one of the first Macintosh computers, one as huge and square as an old telly and with the coloured apple emblazoned on it. That meant that the original file surely is lost forever, or perhaps saved on a God-knows-its-current-whereabouts floppy disk.
The story is written in two colours; green for the parts taken from the original book, red for those that I added. On the cover, printed in a curvy font that is no longer listed in Word, the title sits floating on white background in the middle of a frame-like square: A Story in The Neverending Story.

Now, there are lots of people out there who unconditionally love that book, The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende. Me being one of them.
I am sure you know the story or have at least seen the movie(s). Ende managed to write one of those evergreen masterpieces that stay with you even long after you have turned the last page. Not to mention the unforgettable characters in it. Heroes and villains so poignant you almost believe they are real.
But another reason for the book's popularity is that many stories in it are left unfinished, with the author unofficially inviting you to take over and continue - not finish, them. So I hope you will forgive me, Mister Ende, for starting a new story within your book.
It's just that there is a hidden character there, just under the reader's nose. She is like a silver shadow, a whisper between the pages, the secreted song at the very end of a CD.
All I did was just helping her come to life.
However, all a character is made of is just ink on paper, therefore her existence begins, and ends, in the space of a eighty-something pages. She is part of the story, yet she isn't. But if her story will ever be read, you will understand why it was worth writing it.

You are now looking at the final result, once the - not easy - task of translating was done. I have even involved an artist friend who, after having read the story, kindly agreed to illustrate it.
The result is so amazing that I have to show you some more:

Who doesn't want to ride a Luckdragon? 

The Ivory Tower. As you have never seen it.

All watercolours are by lovely Marianeve Leveque.
Also, I pleaded in two languages to other people to have a look at the unmistakable mistakes, and help me correct them. Well then, if I have managed to spark a little of your curiosity and you want to know what this story is all about, or want to learn what other Pirates created, you will have to chase up The Piracy Project Library, currently touring around the world.

I look at the picture of my little manuscript, figuring among more illustrious entries on the Piracy Project on-line catalogue, and smile. It is a great satisfaction indeed to finally seeing it making sense in this new dimension.

Tell me now, my friends: what is your favourite story of all times? 

A Two-Times Exhibition: Silvia Iorio's Odyssey 2010 | Odisseia 2011

Perhaps some of you remember this post.
It doesn't say much, it is just the Press Release of the first show my colleagues and I curated as part of our  MA in Curating the Contemporary at the London Metropolitan University, which we successfully completed this year. Instead, that simple post - and show, is the start of something unique.
Something that needs to be read through the lines to be caught and understood.


But let's proceed in an orderly fashion.
When we involved artist Silvia Iorio in this show, she conceived an artwork, Odyssey, which was to be further developed in the upcoming year. The challenge presented to her to go beyond a clearly defined site, and pierce the walls of a space, was met with the idea of creating a two-times exhibition.
Odyssey is a panel with 160 coloured switches "that people were invited to activate during the opening night, on the12th of May. No light would go off at the same time, though: the artist decided to stretch this event in Time – and Space – by having the Light travelling through the Universe for One Light Year. An unconceivable distance for a human being, as it is the speed at which the Light travels (...)
Through Silvia Iorio's eyes, the journey of Odyssey’s Light reached even the most remote and unknown points of the Universe. The various stages of the journey would have been impossible to document had it not been for the experiences of the people attached to them. As part of the project, the artist created the conditions for those who participated to Odyssey to re-interact with the artwork: every 12th of the month, for 12 months, they received an email with questions about what they were doing at a precise time, what they were thinking, and if their mind and body were “connected”. How many times are we caught in the middle of doing something, but our mind is elsewhere? Yet, mind and body are closely interconnected, like the switch and the light. Through the answers she received and collected, Silvia Iorio was expanding the concept of dislocation and taking it onto new levels."*

Silvia Iorio, Odyssey, 2010, One hundred and sixty switches, MDF, enamel, aluminium and wood, 224 x 118 cm

Now, what happened after a year, namely this year 2011?
The first thing to say would be that artist and curator, too, were dislocated. The artist was in Berlin, the curator in London. The two of them were disjointed, their dialogue possible only through modern technology. As the dialogue between Odyssey and its twin work Odisseia, everything seemed hard and impossible: how can it be that two different events, happening at a different time and place, are brought together and re-connected in a solo show? Initial ideas were discarded and a more complex outcome took form, the barriers of space and time acting as incentives. It couldn't have been just the same panel, with 160 lamp bulbs bearing the same colour as the switches, and lighting up in the same sequence they were activated one year before. Very predictable.
But Silvia Iorio is an artist of many resources, and surprises, as sometimes Science is. 
Therefore, the Light manifested itself through imaginary Celestial Maps, from where unknown stars, which are lost in the vastness of Universe, shine for real for the eyes of those who can see them. 
They shine for the eyes of those who see the created connections. Light came back to Earth, and earth made its appearance in the gallery space. 21 people among many who activated the switches, one year before, were the most regular contributors in answering Silvia's question about their whereabouts. 
Their coloured experiences materialised in the form of 21 light terminals, and here the circle clicks, and closes.


And to think that everything happened by simply turning on a switch!
On September 22, 2011, the exhibition Silvia Iorio Odyssey 2010 | Odisseia 2011, was successfully concluded.

Silvia Iorio - Odisseia 2011, Installation view

Odisseia 2011 - Celestial Map, detail, dimensions variable 

As I told Silvia, I find her watercolours nearly moving.
To imagine corners of Universe no one will probably ever see, but that she was able to evoke thanks to the inspiration of Light travel and people's experience, is a gift. 
The experience of the casual viewer included, of course, the fact that seeing is believing.


P.S.: I am happy to mention another show that successfully featured the Celestial Maps, which are having a great and well deserved success: Silvia Iorio, Age of Time. Edge of Space, part of the ongoing show series Rendez Vouz Mit Kunst at the Restaurant Diekmann in Berlin. The show, curated by Isabelle Meiffert, was on until the 8th of September. An installation view is below and more pictures can be found here.

_________________
(*) Extract from the catalogue's text. You can read the full version on the Galerie Mario Iannelli's website.

New Art Criticism_04_March 2010

New Art Criticism is no longer on-line, therefore I thought to copy and paste my contributions to the former website here. It is mostly exhibitions reviews and I hope you will enjoy the reading!

BERLIN: PHIL COLLINS AT THE TEMPORÄRE KUNSTHALLE

Some say to have fallen in love with the Berlin at the first sight. 

Personally, the grey sky, the hard icy snow pushed to the side of the broad streets and dotted with dog’s dung, and the strong sense of the actual passage of a devastating war, did make an impression, but it wasn’t love. I might call it sympathy.

It takes two strong legs and a good sense of distance to walk from popular Friederichstraße, passing Check Point Charlie, to the boulevard called Unter den Linden, that links the Brandebourg Gate with Alexander Platz. From the middle of this road, both huge monuments lay small and indistinct at each end. You feel very small in Berlin: it takes a long time to take in the buildings, the geography of the city, to recognize its distinctive European flavour, but to fail in trying to classify it in comparison with the other capitals.

The Temporäre Kunsthalle is in Schlossplatz, close to the so called Museum’s Island: it’s a small, square building that seems to be built out of dark mirrors. It stands on its own, not surrounded by anything else, giving, exactly, this sense of temporariness. When I stepped in I found a library, and two people taking bookings: there was a film program called Auto Kino!, devised by the British artist Phil Collins, and it seemed to be very successful because there were just a few places left. I am told that I had car number five, and at first I thought I misunderstood the language; but no, when I walked in the other room I realized that the huge inside was transformed in an old Drive-In, with second hand cars lined randomly in a semicircle. There was even a Volksvagen van equipped with a pop-corn machine, and I happened to be in it. The number was clearly written on the plate, 005. The comfort of the seat and familiarity of the inside of a vehicle made me temporarily forget why I was there and, with the screen still blank, I almost dozed off when someone else stepped in, on the passenger seat. The situation changed: there was an urge to say something, at least to introduce myself, just to be able to mentally justify being inside a van with a total stranger. But then, the projection begun and I occupied myself with eating caramel popcorn, because, I thought, it was part of the performance.

Drive-Ins were very popular in America during the 50s: a place to run away with your sweetheart and forget about morality for at least a couple of hours. Having one in Berlin, where the weather never did allow that kind of outdoor cinema to spread, was a sort of unique experience. The program run from 5th February to 14th March 2010, and on the 24^th of February I could see Ich Deutsche Behorde (22 mins, 1981), by Ezra Gerhardt and Alf Bohmert, and Die Bewerbung (60 mins, 1997), by Berlin-based filmmaker Harun Farocki. The screening was focused on immigration and job interviews issues: the first movie, a documentary, was about the slight racism underlining the first immigration wave in Germany during the eighties. Foreigners were admitted in an office one by one, their footprints and picture taken, like they were mere criminals. They would leave without any certainty of a Visa. Farocki’s movie twisted the argument and unveiled a behind-the-scene workshop about how to be successful at a job interview. I learned that putting the hands on the interviewer’s desk is invading his space, that fidgeting gives a very bad impression, not to mention staying still. My car companion got bored and left before the end; I took the chance to make myself more comfortable, aware of the fact that Farocki’s movies make you unable to leave just until the end. I also couldn’t help but do some other car-spotting: people were enjoying themselves. As a temporary experience in a Drive-In cinema that never existed, they, like me, were having an afternoon out of the ordinary.

New Art Critcism_03_August 2009

New Art Criticism is no longer on-line, therefore I thought to copy and paste my contributions to the former website here. It is mostly exhibitions reviews and I hope you will enjoy the reading!

WATCHING THE FALL

I was surprised when I red on the Guardian Week End an article by Oliver Burkeman, claiming that nowadays we should need “a revival of the artistic genre known as memento mori ” which was, in short, the continuous presence of a skull and a still life to remind us that our time on Earth is precious because we all shall return to ashes, one day or another.

In fact, contemporary art seems to be all about it now, everyone can confirm: from Damien Hirst’s skulls to Rachel Whiteread casts’ of time’s traces, from Polly Morgan’s taxidermy sculptures to Andy Warhol’s own pop skull to culminate in Chinese artist Zahng Huan wearing a meat suit. There is a continuous referral to the inevitability of death and decay by a long list of other living artists.

I won’t be saying that the subject is starting to bore a bit, especially in the hands of a talented young artist as Amelia Whitelaw. A graduated from Chelsea College of Art and Design, Whitelaw is certainly bringing Process Art back to its old glory, with a sprinkle of the old beloved vanitas we seem to always be so much in need of. In Whitelaw’s sculptures, art is not a finite product to sell like too many around at this time, but a creative process, a displayed page on which several different paragraphs can be written.

This is about the first time I saw Amelia Whitelaw’s performance: The Courtauld Institute of Art, February this year, a group show called, incidentally, Time and Time Again. Whitelaw was commissioned an installation for the five-storey stairwell and produced one of her now renowned dough sculptures. The images show 200 kg of dough starting a descent from the ceiling into four different sized nets, which limited and conditioned its vital movement. The dough was captivating; its fleshy-like, slow movements seemed to belong to an organic being trapped by unanimated structures built by men. At the beginning, its advancing through the first net was nearly imperceptible. Only tiny bits were lost, falling into the second net like a sketch of a left trace. And I found myself mesmerized by that moment, holding breath at each falling. I felt part of it, I saw time unfolding, and I saw the beauty of a simple yet powerful symbolic thing as the dough. Flour, water and salt, equally proportioned. Nourishment and matter. Effort. Effort to reach its goal, the last net, guided by the force of gravity and, why not, Fate.

After a couple of hours, the dough freed itself into a stalactite-like shape, longing for its next stop, while other bits of it were already reaching the end of the journey. But time was too short for it, water evaporated, mixing with people’s breath, and the dough dried out.

Dust to dust. 

End note: Amelia - Newton - Whitelaw's recent show reviewed on Dazed Digital.

24 June 2011: She Devil 5, Rome > Kate Street

In a young Curator's career (or "career"), there are certain occasions for celebrations. You know, little small satisfactions, like when you select a talented video artist whose work is then included in a group show, and the screening happens to happen - hear ye! - in your hometown's Public Museum: the MACRO - Museum of Contemporary Art Rome.
Your name, together with those of other 12 remarkable colleagues, shines in small white letters on a black panel, and your little critical text is printed on paper handouts, and passed from hands to bags.

I saw Kate Street's work for the first time at Nettie Horn and always wanted to realise a project with her. Some fortunate circumstances made this possible in grand style, and for it I am grateful to the artist and to Italian gallerist Stefania Miscetti. But let's skip the chatting and go straight to the copy-and-paste of what the event was all about, plus some pics of the evening.

This is the Press Release:

SHE DEVIL was devised in 2006 by Stefania Miscetti for Italian and international female artists and curators, from the youngest to the most successful. Different works and critical perspectives coexist in a multivocal discourse which reveals the many facets of the female world and vision. This broad spectrum of activities and aims can be seen in the exhibitions that have been organised over the past years, which have included 40 video works and involved 24 curators, as well as a special international edition held in Bucharest in 2009.

As part of its summer 2011 exhibition cycle, MACRO is hosting a new edition of the project, now in its fifth year, an event that is perfectly in line with the galaxy of cultural and artistic proposals that have defined the identity of the Museum over the past few years. On the opening night the videos in this new edition will be presented in the conference room of the Museum's new wing, the nerve centre of the New MACRO exhibition area. The wing, too, was designed by a woman, the architect Odile Decq, thus it is the perfect setting for the presentation of the video works.

The Fifth Edition is curated by: Antonia Alampi, sybin - susanna bianchini, Benedetta Carpi de Resmini, Dobrila Denegri, Maria Garzia, Laura Giorgini, Maria Cristina Giusti, Caterina Iaquinta, Manuela Pacella, Cristiana Perrella, Lydia Pribisova, Elena Giulia Rossi, Chiara Vigliotti.

Thirteen videos by International female artists were presented, among which Kate Street's Flowering, 2010 (duration 1'29''). It was the only video animation on display.

In Kate's work, nature is always scary or uncanny. In Flowering’s case, the artist used childhood memories, in particular the belief according to which, if you swallow a plant’s seed, this grows up in our stomach. We see the plant filling the frame and engulfing the figure; its expansion creates an intermittent, not linear time suggested by the images that converge one inside the other in an uncertain, non-fluid way. The animated sequence makes one think of a complex association of thoughts, which is a characteristic of femalès nature; sometimes, our same guesswork overpowers us and it is hard to swallow it back inside, to dominate it. At the same time the ending, though not encouraging, suggests an exorcism of these fears, which is favoured just by going through such violent experience. As it happens also in her precedent works, Kate Street’s guideline is the different and possible meanings that some images’ associations generate in the viewer.

Kate Street, Flowering, 2010, video still. Courtesy: The Artist

She Devil 5 is on until 8 January 2012 at MACRO, precisely in the V-Tunnel.

I went back home for the opening, and the Museum was packed with people visiting also the other shows that are currently still on. It was nice to see familiar and unfamiliar faces around.

Show me the Shoes you wear and I will tell you what kind of Curator you are: Curator's Stuff 

The Bay Window Project: Russell Chater

THE BAY WINDOW PROJECT, 2011

Artists in a Frame

curated by sybin

RUSSELL CHATER > SPECTATRE

From: Monday 19 September 2011

SybinQ Art Projects

The Window on Cleveland Street, London, W1T 6DP. MAP HERE.

t. 07913717999

e. curatingcontemporary@gmail.com

The Bay Window Project: Patrick Mimran once said that art is where you least expect to find it. A window that becomes a container for contemporary art pushes the boundaries of public and private, transforming an ordinary space into a place for public art. Unaware passers-by will stumble upon it, becoming unintentional witnesses of the evolution of site-specific art in a non-institutional environment.

The third artist invited to exhibit in The Bay Window is RUSSELL CHATER

A recurring interest in contained and transitional spaces pervades much of Chater’s practice. Works question the boundaries between inside and outside and the familiar and the unfamiliar - seeking to explore spaces and states that are ‘between’ or ‘beyond’. Familiar scenes are often denied their context or purpose, resulting in the viewers’ focus shifting from the immediate to the subliminal.

For The Bay Window Project, Russell presents the work SPECTATRE (Various elements, dimensions variable. Courtesy: The Artist and SybinQ Art Projects)

Inspired by the conditions presented by the private/public space of a common bay window, SPECTATRE (a word suspended between spectator and spectre) draws on the language of a shop window display. The site-specific installation is both kitsch and eerie as a spot-lit mannequin is revealed to passers-by from its theatrical stage. The piece is also surreal – presenting as it does a commercial shop-window arrangement in a domestic apartment window.  Indeed, the work draws on its surroundings, with a nod to the artistic displays of the gallery directly below as well as the numerous shop windows of central London. Ultimately, however, the work can be read as a (self) portrait – raising questions about what we hide and what we reveal, the private and the public. Fundamental relationships of figure/space, light/dark, surface/depth are framed, and wider readings around reflection and in particular the gaze are evoked. The work also acts as a kind of companion piece to a large-scale painting that the artist will be showing at London’s City Hall later in the year.

The display runs daily: 19 September - 6 October 2011

FINISSAGE PARTY on Wednesday 5 October 2011

Please join the artist and us at the Jet Lag Bar, 125 Cleveland Street, London W1. From 6:30 pm.

Russell Chater is a graduate of the MA Fine Art course at Central Saint Martins and has exhibited extensively in both the UK and abroad. Galleries include: Galerie Zurcher (Paris/New York); Grey Area Gallery (Brighton); Unit 2 Gallery/Whitechapel Art Gallery (London); Galeria Espacio (Valencia); Museum of Science and Industry (Manchester). Russell has also co-curated a number of exhibitions and was previously a Co-Director of Dalston Underground Studios. The artist lives and works in London. Upcoming exhibitions include shows at London’s City Hall and Schwartz Gallery, London.  

For further information please see: http://www.re-title.com/artists/russell-chater.asp

The Bay Window Project: Catherine Bertola

THE BAY WINDOW PROJECT

Artists in a Frame 

curated by sybin 

CATHERINE BERTOLA > Home from Home

From Wednesday 10 August  

SybinQ Art Projects

The window on Cleveland Street

London W1T 6DP

t. 07913717999

e. curatingcontemporary@gmail.com 

The Bay Window Project: a window that becomes a container for contemporary art. Beyond the white-cube display, the artwork forcefully enters the private sphere of a flat to be seen by an extemporaneous, unaware public. The aim is to map the evolution of site-specific art in a non-institutional environment. 

The second artist invited to exhibit in The Bay Window is CATHERINE BERTOLA. 

Bertola realises site-specific installations engaging with everyday debris, from dust to the delicate patterns found on blinds or net curtains that keep our domestic sphere private from the outside world. The debris speaks of a distant past, of untold and invisible stories of places and people. Her work is included in the Government Art Collection and it has been displayed widely in National Museums and abroad. 

For The Bay Window Project, Catherine presents the work Home from Home (Self-adhesive vinyl on glass, dimensions variable. Courtesy: The Artist, Workplace Gallery and Galerie M+R Fricke) 

In 2001, Catherine Bertola first installed Home from Home in the windows of three pubic houses; the Forth Hotel, Trent House and Newcastle Arms in Newcastle Upon Tyne. Net curtains are associated with suburbia and the home, not just used for decoration but also as a barrier between public and private – allowing the occupants to look out but preventing passers-by from looking in. In that instance, the installation brought a touch of intimacy to the hedonistic heart of the city. This year, the work was featured again in the group exhibition Cult of The Difficult, curated by MA Curating the Contemporary students at the London Metropolitan University in collaboration with the Government Art Collection.

Home from Home was installed in the Cass Gallery’s main window, creating a suspended screen that interrupted, in a way, the overall view of the show from the street. Drawing from the concept of copy and paste and associating it to the analysis of the same artwork in different contexts, Home from Home now reaches what could be its natural environment: a bay window.

The site-specificity of Bertola’s work is translated in an installation that may go unnoticed, sitting between the actual function of an ordinary blind and its status of artwork that has been collecting traces from different places. 

The display runs 10 – 31 August. 

Catherine Bertola (Born in 1976 in Rugby, UK) lives and works in Gateshead.

Selected Solo Shows: 2011 – To be forever known, Bronte Parsonage Museum, Haworth; 2010 - Scion, Beacon Art Project, Barrington Court, Somerset, UK; 2009 – Unseen By All But Me Alone, Workplace Gallery, Gateshead, UK; 2008 – Over the Teacups, M+R Fricke, Berlin, DE. Selected Group Shows: 2011 – Cult of the Difficult, Cass Gallery, London UK; Personal Tempest, Neue Galerie, Innsbruck, Austria; 2010 – Walls are talking: Wallpaper, Art and Culture, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK; 2009 – Out of the Ordinary: Spectacular Craft, Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, UK. 

Will come next: RUSSEL CHATER in September

Further links: 

The Government Art Collection

Workplace Gallery

Galerie M+R Fricke

Previously in The Bay Window: Davide D'Elia > Tropical Aryballoi. If you have missed it, have a look at it.

MARCO DAL BOSCO > Scala 1:18

SYBINQ ART PROJECTS, in collaboration with LONDON METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY, is pleased to invite you to:

SCALA 1:18 a performance by  
MARCO DALBOSCO

Presented by sybin > susanna bianchini

TUESDAY 14 DECEMBER 2010

from 6:30 pm

Unit G15

London Metropolitan University

41 Commercial Road

London E1 1LA

RSVP ESSENTIAL at curatingcontemporary@gmail.com

Italian artist Marco Dalbosco presented the performance Scala 1:18 for the first time as a parallel event at Manifesta 7 (Rovereto, Italy 2008). Setting its contents in the factory ambient and analyzing its obsessive and repetitive production process, the performance involves five women, dressed and combed the same, repeating all the same gestures, steps and sequences enhanced by a projected video of machines at work. The entire operation seems to have a liberating aspect that redeems creativity from job alienation; in fact it focuses, at the same time, on the issue of repeating and modulating mechanisms, set behind the creativity myth. The performers look like they are free, whereas they always come back to the starting point; they become metaphor for our own way of thinking, which sometimes may be constructed and constricted.

Following Guy Debord’s idea of society as a spectacle, instead of turning the production system into a show it is the alienation of the individual, the suspension of a thinking being and the unavoidable conformation of the mass that underline Dalbosco’s work. The choreographer Gloria Ploritch and her students, all from the Italian Northern Region of Trentino, have been working all along with Dalbosco to give shape to this performance, never before presented in the UK.

The exhibition is accompanied by a text by the Curator. 

Scala 1:18 is the closing event of SybinQ Art Projects for the year 2010.

INFORMATION ABOUT THE ARTIST:

MARCO DALBOSCO lives and works in London. Selected Events > 2010: Scala 1:18, London Metropolitan University, London (UK) and 26cc Space for Contemporary Art, Rome (IT); Meeting Ring, SybinQ Art Projects, London (IT);Incerti Arredi # Office Sales, Cesare Pietroiusti’s Studio, Rome (IT). 2009: 1h Art Project, London (UK). 2008: Scala 1:18, Manifesta7, Parallel Event, Rovereto (IT). 2008: Incerti Arredi, Paolo Tonin  Contemporary Art, Turin (IT).

GLORIA POTRICH lives and works in Rovereto, Italy, where she teaches Contemporary and African dance at the CDM – Didactic Centre for Music, Theatre and Dance. Her research started from Expressive African Dance passing through Contact and Dance Theatre to arrive to a research-based type of dance characterised with a bond with live music. 

SUSANNA BIANCHINI lives and works in London. By using the pseudonym of sybin, she curated various shows and created SybinQ Art Projects, a nomad space devoted to the promotion of exhibition projects, especially with young artists. This is mainly through the commissions of new artworks and the creation of unusual shows settings, outside the so-called “regular” exhibition’s parameters.

This event is possible thanks to the support of the Provincia Autonoma di Trento (IT), Cultural Association Ordine_Sparso (IT), London Metropolitan University and Levent Bozdere (UK).

More information on www.marcodalbosco.com

As Time Goes By

Alice Anderson's Doll has been in the Bay Window for almost three weeks.
I remember a conversation I had with the artist when we were planning the installation:

sy: You know, I am scared to death by that doll.
AA: I know. She is very strong.

Dolls are tricky, mysterious, sometimes quite frightening objects.

My aunt had a doll once. The doll was dressed in pink, had dark skin, glass eyes, and a frozen smile showing little white teeth. She was seated in a rocking chair, next to a tall dresser with an unnerving ticking grandfather clock on it. When visiting her as a child, I would cross the bedroom at the fastest pace just to avoid looking at her. That grin and those eyes weren’t just fakes: there was something eerie about that lifeless double of a human being, something that didn’t quite fit. It wasn’t just the same old story about it coming to life at night: she always had a sparkle of life of her own.

I saw the same sparkle in Alice's doll, exactly as I have previously written: I remember walking past that doll at one of Alice’s solo shows and, strengthened by my adult condition, almost ignoring her until, out of the corner of my eye, I clearly saw her grinning. It wasn't a kind smile, rather a mischievous one.

And, for The Bay Window Project, the Doll and I were going to stay very close.

I was already imagining horror movies-like scenes, with me wondering at night to go to...that place and finding the Doll in a different position from the one she was supposed to be.
I know: I watch too much TV.

On installation day, Alice came with a different doll and told me her story: she was made from the same mould used for the first one but, nonetheless, came out as an "older" version of it and the artist herself. 

Like a mother. Less mischievous, and perhaps more worried. She, too, is dressed in pink, but is not smiling at all.

In spite of the role of the mother in Alice Anderson's work, where she is the one trying to put an end to her daughter's existence, I am finding the doll's presence strangely reassuring. 

She sits and sits and sits and sits... and sometime I feel for her solitude. She looks at the world, often overlooked, and unable to interact. On the opening day, when Alice was checking the Doll's position looking at the window from the street, some kids saw her and commented: "Oh my God, WTF is that?! A doll! FKN scary, man!" And I can quote another reaction from my friend Wonderland, a mommy blogger, who was in London last week, took a picture of the doll in the window and commented: "Now I can say that I visited this person's house and survived!"

The only thing that the Doll wins over is, in fact, time. She will stay the same, whereas everything around her changes. Like a vampire or Dorian Gray's portrait in reverse.
Now, you may be wondering why I chose this conclusion and perhaps that's easy to guess: the post was initiated on the 20th of November, my birthday. As the day passes, I change slightly, a little bit more, with no one noticing.