Qualcosa è cambiato. Nuovi progetti, vecchie prospettive.

Salve, sono sybin, forse vi ricorderete di me per post come The Kite Flyer, oppure SybinQ Art Projects is Born. Tutta roba che scrivevo mentre ero a Londra, dove ho passato gli ultimi cinque anni.
L'ultimo post che ho scritto risale a Dicembre 2011 e, mentre spazzolo via la polvere virtuale ed elimino le ragnatele dalla rete, faccio il punto della situazione: un anno dopo avrei avuto una figlia (non, ceci n'est pas un mommy blog. Jamais! Jamais!) e ancora sei mesi dopo io e la mia famigliola ci saremmo ri-trasferiti in Italia.

A Bergamo, per la precisione, e non a Roma che è la mia città natale.

Roba che quando racconto questo ad un interlocutore c'è ancora chi mi chiede se sono sana di mente: "Usti! Da Londra a Bergamo? Bel cambiamento, neh?" Eh. Confesso che tale prospettiva non entusiasmava neanche me, che mi occupo di arte contemporanea ed ero scappata a Londra proprio per avere "qualche chance in più." Tuttavia, poi siamo arrivati qui e lo scetticismo iniziale si è trasformato in "umh", un suono onomatopeico a metà tra la riflessione e l'apprezzamento.

Per esempio, ho cambiato punto di vista. Per dire, a Londra, quando aprivo la mia famosa bay window, avevo questo paesaggio:

Paesaggio urbano e poco attraente, si, ma vivevamo a un tiro di schioppo da Oxford Street, quindi, ci stava. Il quartiere di Fitzrovia era la nostra oasi tranquilla nel mezzo del caotico centro di Londra. Però, per dire, adesso apro la finestra della casa a Bergamo, che nel mio giudizio iniziale era La Qualunque cittadina mai frequentata del Nord Italia, ed il paesaggio è il seguente:

Photo Credits: Eco di Bergamo

Quello che ti frega, a Bergamo, per quanto puoi essere prevenuta, sono le colline. La città alta è un gioiellino incastonato dalle mura e tutt'intorno la morbidezza di queste colline, puntinate da chiesette e abitazioni, sembra quasi un comitato di accoglienza.

Ho cambiato prospettiva. Quando arriva una figlia a cambiarti la vita si cerca un luogo che sia a misura di bambino e di famiglia. Ho iniziato perfino a parlare di maternità, in pillole.  Questo però non vuol dire che io sia stata con le mani in mano fino a questo momento: del resto, organizzare mostre e fare il curatore è una specie di mania.

Ecco un progettino a cui ho lavorato l'anno scorso: www.lightingmoodscontest.com
Un parco pubblico. Delle lampade ad energia solare. La sinergia tra arte e nutrimento culturale. Un concorso per artisti emergenti che ha visto vincere la giovane Isabella Mara, che ha avuto l'occasione di lavorare accanto ad altre due artiste storiche come Mariella Bettineschi ed Alice Anderson. L'idea era di trasformare un parco pubblico di periferia in un luogo espositivo, mettendo l'arte alla portata di tutti e ponendo l'accento sull'importanza delle energie rinnovabili.

Un altro bel progetto a cui sto lavorando attualmente è stato annunciato oggi su un altro blog, precisamente Ma Che Davvero di Chiara Cecilia Santamaria, che seguo praticamente dagli esordi. Che emozione! Ecco perché sono qui ad aggiornare in fretta e furia il mio bistrattato blog, nell'attesa che venga trasformato in un funzionalissimo sito web.

E continui a portare avanti gli intenti di SybinQ Art Projects di promuovere l'arte contemporanea attraverso la circolazione delle cultura, la commissione di nuove opere per spazi inconsueti e la creazione di networks internazionali.

Stavolta, per il Book Art Project lo spazio inconsueto è quello di un libro, trasformato in opera d'arte in un progetto unico nel suo genere. Per l'occasione, SybinQ Art Projects ritorna a Roma, al Pastificio Cerere, luogo storico di San Lorenzo, sede di studi di artisti che hanno fatto la storia della pittura Italiana, come ad esempio Giuseppe Gallo, per cui ho avuto il piacere di lavorare prima che la mia avventura Londinese avesse inizio.

La mostra sarà allo Spazio Cerere dal 26 al 30 Novembre 2015, e per me è un po' come tornare a casa, in tutti i sensi. Vi aspetto!

© Chiara Cecilia Santamaria, Ma Che Davvero

The Eighth Labours of Hercules

Imagine you are writing a text for a catalogue, something of academic nature, developing one aspect of a potential show.

Imagine the selection of the books to prepare your dissertation, starting with database research and meticulous investigation of the footnotes, to find further references.

Imagine a thorough reading of all the sources, including books you never dreamed of approaching like Hal Foster, The Return of the Real. Fabulous, but your brain asked for mercy and your neurones went to the gym to potentiate their evidently weak connections. You still are not sure about what you've actually read.

Imagine to sit in front of the computer, staring at the screen, because the paragraphs you took two days to organise don't really make any sense and you know that.

Imagine to continue reading the books over and over again, desperately trying to find the connections you are seeking.

Imagine to finish writing at 10 pm of the night before Consignment Day: your eyes are as big as a satellite dish and the curve of your back has increased of at least another couple of inches.

Now, imagine to do all of this in another language.


> Washing the Christmas tablecloth at the end of January? Curator's Stuff

Falling Slowly: the three works show

Exercising is vital.

I have been neglecting the blog and writing terribly lately, but in the rush up to Christmas things picked up and distraction is not an option, otherwise mistakes occur.
I have to say that they do occur even without distractions, but that's another story.

Talking about University and MA instead, I would like to report here an "exercise" that our tutor gave us:
Choose three artworks and make a show out of it, completed of an exhibition plan.


That is what I came out with and, I must say, I really like the idea of a small, virtual show.
The title would be Falling Slowly, taken from a song:

Take this sinking boat and point it home / We've still got time

Raise your hopeful voice / you had a choice / You've made it now

Falling slowly sing your melody / I'll sing it loud

Glen Hansard, musician

These would be the artworks on display, in an ordinary, four walls room:

John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851 ca, Oil on canvas, 76 x 111 cm

First one to be seen from the entrance: it's quite a large work and has to make its impact. Not to mention the incredible importance that it had for many future generations of painters, so the spot of honor is definitely for it.

Lee Miller, Dead SS Guard in Canal, Dachau, Germany 1945

This small photograph goes in front of the Millais. I am very interested in the dialogue between the two mediums, painting and photography. And that is why the third selected work is:

Yigal Ozeri, Priscilla in Ecstasi, 2006, Oil on canvas, 20 x 26 cm

This one would go on the bottom wall between the two mentioned artworks. 

The text accompanying the show would be this:

John E. Millais’ Ophelia is the depiction of a tragedy: an exceptionally young woman, who was driven crazy by death and loss, lets herself drown while singing until the very last moment. From painting to photograph, Lee Miller’s most famous war reportage picture of a dead SS soldier in Dachau’s canal has often been described by the critics as a contemporary take of the above painting. In the middle, here it stands Yigal Ozeri’s small work: at first sight it does look like another photograph but is, in fact, an incredibly detailed painting; the reprise of Ophelia is, this time, turned from agony to ecstasy, with the techniques of the other two works fused together in a confusing, hybrid result.

The dialogue between the three pieces moves on from the investigated technique to explore the meaning of a fall: according to Eduardo Cycelin, who in turn drew from Deleuze, “falling is the most vivid of sensations, and it is here where one recognizes the feeling of being alive. The staging of death is not its content, but rather indicates the place where the tension of representation is highest and the fall most rapid.”
These look like Apollonian, perfectly represented forms: from the obsessive precision of the Pre-Raphaelite painting to the photograph’s automatic depiction of reality, culminating in the surgical exactness of a painting copied from a photograp; at the same time, they seem to hem in the expression of our Dionysian bestial selves, the intensity of the sensation expressed by gaping, singing mouths and culminating, at the end of the fall, in the self-contemplative silence of death.

It would be nice to hear your opinions: is this a show worth seeing?

OPEN CALL

ARE YOU AN ARTIST? 
ARE YOU A CURATOR? 
ARE YOU BOTH?

WE NEED YOU!

SybinQ Art Projects is currently looking for London based artists and curators who would like to be in the performance Meeting Ring by Marco Dalbosco.

"What could be the action that puts in relation a collective meeting with art?

What is the act that artist and curator have in common? Is there a specific moment to highlight in which these two entities relate to one another?

The answer could be a collective meeting of artists and curators in which the most common gesture of one meets/collides with the most common gesture of the other.

Curators and artists, unaware of each other’s role, will meet on a hypothetic ring to make their own action according to the role defining them, everything under the gaze of curious and passers-by. 

Through random actions in this virtual ring, these two figures will be forced to confront one another choosing actions that either identify or defy their roles."

(Marco Dalbosco)

The performance will take place on WEDNESDAY 13 OCTOBER at 1:30 pm in the East End and will be featured on the Fitzrovia Map, produced by MD in collaboration with SybinQ Art Projects, along with all the other special events happening in the area during Frieze's week. 

Should you be interested, please send an email with your name and contact details to: curatingcontemporary@gmail.com

You will then be emailed the address of the performance and a few instructions: all you have to do is showing up on the date and have some fun! 

Deadline for applications: Saturday 9 October

Sometimes, I forget that a blog is a very powerful tool for promotion. If the stats are not fooling me (and I have remembered to disable the tracking of my own page views), there are quite a few people out there reading the stuff I write. Well, first of all, thank you.
Secondly, if you would like to join us for this performance (and some networking afterwards in front of a beer), even better.

Window of Opportunity

Duccio Di Buoninsegna, Flagellation, 1308ca
Tempera on wood panel,
Museo dell' Opera del Duomo, Siena, Italy

Definition of "Window of opportunity" from an on-line source:

Idioms: Fig. a brief time period in which an opportunity exists.

What we see in this image is what our friend Duccio must have thought to be an incredible breakthrough in the much sought-after use of perspective in painting at that time. Like Giotto, Duccio was a pupil of Cimabue, the undisputed pioneer of the creation of the third dimension according to the biographer and first art historian Giorgio Vasari.

It was the XIV century in Italy, and religious painting was greatly influenced by Byzantine examples in which flat, uncanny figures of Madonnas with Baby floated about with no chiaroscuro in their clothes nor any shadow on the ground. In short: no sign of humanity was to be recognised in such icons representing the Divine, and the Italians did what they do best: copying, and re-elaborating in better quality. Little by little, the use of perspective opened a window of opportunities in figurative representation, bringing Gods and Saints back to reality, down from the heavenly sphere to mingle with the common people who, in turn, felt closer to them.

Now, this image nowadays makes us smile a little, because we can see that something is wrong with it: Pilate is neither inside nor outside, with his arm outstretching in front of the column; we can tell the construction of the "box" hosting the scene is weird, whereas the layers of the attending people land on no floor, like cards laid on a table. Despite Duccio's efforts, the image is still flat; it would have taken at least another century to get, for example, to this.

After all this I hope interesting stuff, you may be wondering why I have chosen this particular image and am posting this particular post. First of all, Habda was inspired by the image - during one of her visits to the National Gallery - which can be used as a tool leading to develop free interpretations of the concept  "wrong perspective". This triggered a whole series of thoughts that the other curators and I are going to develop into shows, in another window, starting at the end of September. 

Apparently, windows really are receptacles of opportunities at the moment. 

Regarding the wrong perspective, let me tell you something more: it's not that Duccio wasn't aware of the wrongness of his image; he deliberately chose to emphasize Pilate's death sentence through the gesture, even if this literally had to come out of the scene. In my opinion, this makes a huge conceptual difference. On the basis of this, what would be the wrong perspective, his or ours?

A goodbye and a rehearsal

In the picture: SITE GALLERY, Centre for Contemporary Art, Sheffield

Call me an hopeless romantic.

Call me even pathetic, but when a show ends, a show you worked on with enthusiasm and dedication, you do feel a bit sad. 

Yesterday, Martin Westwood's Flat-field went down from The Bay Window and the curtains were replaced, making it an ordinary window again. 

The project is not finished of course.

More artists will come, in fact one per month until December, and right during these days, just before the holidays, I am working on the next project and press release, which you will soon find published on this blog.

We had a glorious rehearsal moment yesterday. 

OK, I am disclosing just one thing about the next project: it's a video.

How do you project on a window? By using normal tracing paper. This allows the image to be seen from the other side, too. Well, this was just in theory, and yesterday it was the moment of truth (I must confess I was a bit concerned).

I would have liked someone taking pictures of us staring at the window from the other side of the street, dumbfounded. Not only it works, it's mesmerising.

Can't wait for the opening. Hope you are curious, too.

Coming Soon...

The academic year at University is now finished.
The first term passed as fast as light, I think we are realising it now after the rush, struggle, and of course concentration into finishing our assignments.

I am now working on something opening in two days.

It's a show of course, but with different parameters: it's called The Bay Window Project.



It's time to use this blog again!