Marco Di Mauro
WONDER Supplement n. 5 (June 19th 2003) of
ISSN 1127-4883
BTA - Telematic Bulletin of Art
http://wonder.bta.it/txt/a0/00/en/wonder00005.html
italian
The opening of the 50 Biennale of Venezia saw a horde of visitors. They faced these days' African temperatures to know the new trend of art. The famous kermesse, once managed by a public agency now become private, seems to show new directions, that promise positive developments in the near future. No longer one unique curator, but a pool of curators will bring a variety of exhibitions to form an archipelago of realities. The Extra 50 section is particularly interesting. This section was born as integral part of the Biennale, and it is formed by fifteen projects introduced by public organisations and private associations. The name of one of these is Brain Academy Apartment and it is divided in five sections: performance, painting, mail art, computer art, experimental poetry. The project aims to provide worldwide visibility to indipendent artists working on the border of the big shows mainstream. In the section dedicated to performance, which is the most numerous, we would like to draw attention to the presence of Paolo G. Conti and the sadoMARTA (Alex Nasi and Riccardo Vaia), Tiziana Baracchi, Rémy Pénard, Enrico Michieletto, Piermario Ciani and Vittorio Vella.
Paolo G. Conti, after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, in 1977 started his street actions, his mail art, and visual poetry. His performance Cromodestruttura 3 n is based on rythmical correspondence of sounds and colours, played by duo Alex Nasi- Riccardo Vaia. The action is developed behind a transparent mylar screen. «The world is more and more that of description, and performance. - sadoMARTA says - The feeling is everything. There is nothing more. But the feeling is not visual, neither acustic, neither tactile. The feeling is (not).»
Tiziana Baracchi signed the manifesto of the Movimento Iperspazialista and founded, together with Giancarlo Da Lio, the Virtual Museum 3. She played a performance called The New Frontier; with arrangements of words and allusive objects: the apple, versatile fruit without age, is a symbol of the lost paradise; the Beatles represent ethernal music linked to the best moments of our life; a CD collects and distributes music, images, ideas. At the performance took part the guitarist Andrea Liuzza and the young Giulia Da Lio, who presented the experimental poetry project Naif Rejecton. «We artists of the new millennium, - Baracchi observes - focus on the idea. We are not interested in challenging our skills using canvasses and colours, we consider some masters of the past unbeatable. All things have been already painted, and we are only interested in communication. We are already on the other side of the contemporary.»
Rémy Pénard, ambassador of The Republic of Artists, works in Limoges (F) in the field of visual research, graphics and mail art. His performance Sous Le Bois focusses on the destruction of the natural environment, through a canvas 4 x 2 meters wide, where he stamped hundreds of times the image of red shears. They are the instrument Pénard uses to cut the branches of the faggot he then carries back from the wood. The action is accompanied by noises from the wood and the electronic amplification of the sound of the shears.
The Synesthetic Group, founded in 1999 by Matteo Albertin, Antonio Sassu, Massimo Perseghin e Takeshi Shimi, develops the utopian research of a "total" work of art, which unifies all expressive languages. The installation-performance Sleeping on it, presented at Venice Biennale, aims to whet all five human senses. Besides the traditional relation sound color, they try to extend the levels of perception to other vehicles of expression.
Enrico Michieletto introduced the Gondollars performance, sponsored by the Bank of FUN, in the shape of a gondola. Four wonderful girls in stunning costumes, escorted by bank security guards, distribute and exchange fake banknotes, made by the twenty-one artists of FUN. Everybody can give to banknotes the value they want. Maybe the public would like the gondollars taking over the traditional gondolieri. The city would then become less of a stereotype.
Piermario Ciani and Vittorio Vella together participate with the work Saluti da Venezia, developed from an interaction of sounds and images sampled and re-elaborated in the web, with the support of the RialtoNet internet point.
Osvaldo Forno, in the painting section, stands up, proudly confirming his desire to make painting, without renouncing to multimedial techniques,. His work Globo denounces the ruinous condition of the present world and suggests a possibility for recovery and reconciliation through. Utopia? The role of the independent artist must always be ahead the role of institutions, otherwise it becomes functional to the system.
Beyond the exhibition, the Brain Academy Apartment has devised an effective system to draw the attention of the public to independent artists: until November 2, the plotted versions of the showed works and videos of performances are installed in special structures. It is a way to denounce the art market and the marginal condition in which less established artists live.
Gruppo Sinestetico, performance, 2003
Photo courtesy artist
Tiziana Baracchi, That would be something, 2003
plastocollage, cm. 30 x 40
Photo courtesy artist