Deserted island, exhibition view, Raqs Mediia Collective, Stefano Cagol, g. olmo stuppia , Fond. Zucchelli, 2024 pic. by OUUUUU
press coverage
Deserted Island
(on dropping bomb*shells)
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Group exhibition of time-based media art at Fondazione Zucchelli
February 1 – 4 2024
Open daily 12pm – 10pm
Opening: February 1, 7pm – late
Vicolo Malgrado, 3D, 40125 Bologna
Performance of Arianna Marcolin: February 3, 6pm – 8pm
PORTANOVA12
Via Porta Nova 12, 40123 Bologna
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Artists
Raqs Media Collective
David Birkin
Genny Petrotta
g. olmo stuppia
Hussein Nassereddine
Stefano Cagol
performance by Arianna Marcolin
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Organised as part of ART CITY Bologna 2024 on the occasion of ARTEFIERA, curated by Carmen Lorenzetti feat. OUUUUUUUU in collaboration with Studio Stuppia, with support of Galleria d’arte PORTANOVA12 and produced by Cassata Drone Expanded Archive.
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EXHIBITION
“drop a bombshell, idiom: to surprise everyone – ‘Taylor Swift borrowed a few seconds of her MTV VMAs speech for Video of the Year to drop a bombshell: Her 10th album, Midnights, is coming in two months, on Oct. 21.”
Merriam Webster Dictionary
This exhibition curated by Carmen Lorenzetti OUUUUUU and organized by Cassata Drone Exapanded Archive with Stuppia Studio as part of ART CITY Bologna 2024 is showcasing a selection of time-based media works by seven international artists and art collectives. Deserted Island (on dropping bomb*shells) draws its base between environment, war, censorship and mass-media. The show is conceived revisiting certain historical and future events. Through this research of different but interconnected histories, the presented artworks create a simulacrum of serenity before and/or after the storm (bomb).
Almost 50 years after the terrorist bombing of Bologna, it is time to rethink the concept of the bomb, violence and war in the context of contemporary geopolitics. Who are the victims of inhuman terrorism and who are those, who benefit, that are to blame? As we come to the breaking point of the neo-colonial model, the continuous multi-faced fight for sovereignty, freedom, creation and justice has to take a turn as well. Through clear political language, art must take a stand for justice. We remember. They do not want us to be free. They are counting on impunity, but we will drop a bomb*shell.
“By their fruits ye shall know them.” Matthew 7:16
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EXHIBITED ARTWORKS
Charade, 2018 (single channel video, 8 min) is a video by David Birkin filmed in collaboration with the human rights organisation Reprieve, together with over 50 actors, artists, musicians and performers. The work is a response to the British Prime Minister’s attempts to conceal a secret directive authorising military intelligence agents to engage in criminal activity. For the video, each performer was asked to mime whatever crime they believe intelligence agents may be licensed to commit, using the rules of the game ‘charades’ to convey each syllable silently.
Kumeta, 2023 (single channel video, 7 min 55 sec) is a video installation by Genny Petrotta that tells the story of the Repubblica Contadina (the Peasant Republic) that was founded in her home town Piana degli Albanesi towards the end of the Second World War under the leadership of her grand uncle Giacomo Petrotta. In an artistic intervention about torture and state repression, Genny Petrotta invited the two sculptors Francesco Albano and Simone Zanaglia to polish and smooth a rectangle portion of the rock facade of the marble quarry that overlooks the village
Sposare la Notte, 2022 (series of 4 short films, 31 min 18 sec) is a performative project by g. olmo stuppia that consists of four eco walks in public space that form chapters in which autobiographical experience and artistic research merge in a visionary synthesis. The four “walkscapes” are created to discover the esthetics of the vast province and its impact on the territory, using the cities of Venice and Palermo as examples, and documented on film.
Deep Breath, 2019 (film, 25 min) is a short film by Raqs Media Collective shot in the depths where the Saronic Gulf meets the Aegean Sea, marking a fragment of an aphorism that has to do with forgetting. The phrase that Raqs inscribes onto the seafloor and then films with the help of three divers, sign-posts an interval between the resting place of two shipwrecks; one ancient, another not. Together they might have transported a cargo of all the old and new things that defy memory, had they kept sailing.
Two Birds, Sleeping, 2022 (sound and video Installation, 9 min 37 sec) is a piece of audio poetry by Hussein Nassereddine in which the artist considers how to envision a place that is no longer present, and imagine how to manifest it into existence verbally. Nasserredine expands upon a record that imagines his family’s village in the South of Lebanon, repeatedly razed by violence and political upheaval in the last century, focusing the conversation with his brother around ancient literary testimonies, stories and songs of places long gone, reimagining the shifting landscape through experiments in sound, video and text.
Mònito – Monition – Mort Nucleàire, 1995 (sound installation, 14 min) is a sound piece by Stefano Cagol created on the occasion of the last atomic experiment carried out by France on the Mururoa atoll in the mid-1990s. It starts from an original recording of a nuclear explosion and, through a progressive slowing down, arrives at a dilation of the audio wave to the nth degree. What emerges is the “soul of the bomb”, which appears, absolutely unexpectedly, similar to a symphonic, tragic and chilling composition of a stringed instrument, such as a cello.
A Waltz for Sarajevo, 2017 (participatory performance) is a performance work by Arianna Marcolin that invites the audience to literally put themselves in other people’s shoes. Inspired by the Markale Massacres, the work raises awareness of the violation of human rights in wars through the evocative and social act of dancing wearing other people’s shoes. The victims of the Markale Massacre lost their shoes. They also lost their shoes in Bologna at the station, at Piazza Fontana in Milan, in the Ustica massacre, from Kiev to Gaza, to Sudan.