Anténa – solo show by Martin Chramosta 3.04 – 18.05.24

progettokoleos · Bohemia a desert country by the Sea

Anténa

mostra personale Martin Chramosta

c/by g. olmo stuppia

PRESS KIT (IMMAGINI, COMUNICATO ENG-IT-TEDESCO)

ANTÉNA

solo show by Martin Chramosta

c/by g. olmo stuppia

Cassata Drone Expanded Archive – Salone Cassata Drone Attico Via Malta 21

Vernissage 3 april h17-21 via Malta 21, 90133, Palermo

due to safety reasons, RSVP is mandatory by email press@cassatadrone.org

Mostra gratuita con libera offerta,

visitabile dal 3 aprile al 18 maggio 2024

from 4th of April until 17th of April , free entrance with no reservation 4pm to 7pm

Chiara Butola +39 327 229 8161

IBRA DEME +39 3512875772 +39 +39 351 248 0259

from 17th April up to 4 of May upon reservation only press@cassatadrone.org

PRESS RELEASE

“come un automa , mi accostai a lui,

trassi dalla mano i due dolci e glieli offersi, e gli dissi: questi sono per te , questi sono per te , da parte di Madar”

p. 65, La civetta cieca, Sadeq Hedayat, Ed. SE, 1993, milano (trad. dall’inglese a cura di Marco Guardaschelli)

THE EXHIBITION

An owl, a swallow, a triton, a snake and other mythological animals surround an iron ‘Anténa’ – a sculpture produced ad hoc for the exhibition – faithfully following the line of the sea horizon that overlooks the Khalsa, our neighborhood. The monumental sculpture that gives its name to the site-specific exhibition nucleus of Chramosta, once again opens up the space of Cassata Drone in Via Malta 21, learning how to inhabit and transmit peacefully. The terracotta medallions act as totemic activators challenging the verticality of the “sculpture-aténa”, 345x185x69cm .

They defy time and represent a new zodiac, deconstructing the necessities of the Gregorian calendar. The solo exhibition of the Swiss-Bohemian artist feeds on reminiscences, journeys home and memories of the family archive welded to the symbolic architecture of Prague. He presents his first solo exhibition in Sicily in Palermo. The antenna is the dominant apparatus of our age, just as Muos antennas propagate data fluidised in the ether to satellites that guide machines and ideas of death. The antenna propagates the cabaret signal and the 5G signal.

The Internet of Things lies on antennas, propagates and pretends to unite us, it is the new electricity. It is a fibre cable of light that becomes air and then returns, accomplices the ‘damned’ repeaters on the ground, crashing us to the ground. The rest is taken care of by ‘the blood of our flats’, the tamed light force. An “antennification” that glues us to the era of “overflow politics”, anaesthetised by information trauma.

The sculptural elements present a primordium: a soaring transmission to the sky. Iron welded by fire and the shapes of an inner alphabet, from which he sees a swan, the White Swan.

A sculpture that becomes a radio antenna also transmitting in fm and via web, a continuous vocalisation: Bohemia, a desert country near the sea….

An Easter ritual like the Palermitan ‘cassata-quas’at’ filled and decorated with pistachio and ricotta arabesques by the hands of Knight Guli for the Universal Exhibition in Vienna at the end of the 19th century. A turning back that is the only way to a future of optimism and peace. Broadcasting is always welcoming, piling up words, listening to Radio, loving enemies and friends, reviewing the more than eighty writings of Radio Benjamin or Carlo Emilio Gadda.

Chramosta presents in Palermo a monumental iron sculpture in the centre of the attic, inspired by the antenna of the famous Czech shopping centre ‘White Swan’, with a Soviet-fantastic flavour, narrating a sublime and private odyssey. An intimate memory of a paternal tale that becomes a counter-postcard; a need to de-mythologise borders and aggression through the militaristic use of forms and metal. A filiform volcano.

A new cosmogony materialises around the public, between slender elements and transmissions obscured by the intrigues of power. An existential gradient between landscape architecture and urban tension in the space of the ‘crooked palace’ bombed by the RAF in 1943. An exhibition that tries to stitch together the lacerations between south and north, east and west, welcoming the best ingredients like a fine ricotta paste. From the sanguine iron to the sweet taste, from the shape to the rational architecture of the ‘Palazzo Storto’ to the ‘geological basin’ of Sicily, of the Cassata Siciliana and the need to transmit and radiate. An inalienable force of the human being: the fury of utterance. From tribal totems to the deadly antennas of Muos, for example: a need to communicate with the celestial, as ancient as it is topical: a need for community and single glances, to channel the magical impulses of history.

Once again, ‘quas’at’, a colour-sensitive bowl with an Arabic name, becomes a refined aesthetic container; unfolding before the eyes of the audience, accompanying them on an imaginative, fantastic, delicate journey.

THE PROJECT AND ITS ALPHABET

Anténa is an artistic research project between Bohemian and Sicilian culture curated by g. olmo stuppia and supported by KulturBasel and insists on unravelling the violent game of the politics of transmission (mythological, technological, ethnographic), to make it an artistic apparatus, a device for dissemination and education. The device configured by Martin Chramosta for Cassata Drone has a visual edge of nostalgia, of travelling to family, of returning home. Like tasting an ancient food, nourishing one’s heart and body. A sculpture that embraces and propagates a signal. dialoguing with the history Cassata Drone Expanded Archive and its political and iconological attempt to dismantle piece by piece the necessities of the armed gaze, to make art, beyond the simplifications and polarisations.

Proposing instead an intimate look with art, creating yes a sculptural touch but also a non-belligerent look. A multiple eye and look, on how the largest and most militarised island in Europe is perceived and how it is perceived: Trinacria.

The Swiss artist propagates his signal with the language he holds most dear: sculpture on metal and terracotta. If it was proto-artists who painted the caves of Marettimo and Lascaux, it is in a prism of ‘primitive’ decomposition that Chramosta’s visual alphabet is inscribed, flowing from the Danube to the Mare Nostrum, surrounding his Anténa with symbolic medallions to seal a magical time, a fantastic pseudology capable of attracting to itself, of charging even the architectural schematism of the Soviet era with affection, to offer a singular reinterpretation.

Around the docile signs, a new existential coinage: a cycle of terracotta medallions. The artist state:

A series of medallions depicts motifs from the Mediterranean environment, birds in flight, beings beneath the waves. This is a templum that we are defining in the space of Via Malta, and whose signs we are perhaps trying to read. We point our metaphysical antennae at their messages. The antenna also listens.

The augur used to use the crozier to designate a square area in nature, called a templum, which – sometimes facing east – could be read as a sign.

sometimes facing east – was used for observation. Here, the augur practised contemplatio, i.e. he was attentive to the various signa (“signs”). There were two main classes of signa, auguria impetrativa (“requested signs”) and auguria oblativa (“unfavourable signs”). There were also five different types of sign, one of which was ex quadripedibus (“of the quadrupeds”).

Like the pagan gods before Hermes stole knowledge from the nymphs, Chramosta plunges into a delicacy, into a long savouring of the sculpture’s ferrous perfume – into an almost ephebic and playfully erotic tension, slouching along the swan’s neck, immersing himself in a reverie that manufactures a furtive gaze. Like the gaze of the owl probing the dark, looking for prey that is not to be murdered, but rites of liberation of mind and body.

Transmission occurs by touch, ‘the sanguine smell of iron’. The hand of Hephaestus beating in the heart of Etna.

BIO

Martin Chramosta

ENG

Martin Chramosta studied at HGK Basel as well as at the Academy of fine Arts and the University of applied Arts in Vienna. He holds a Master from the Institut Kunst at HGK Basel. Several residency programs at institutions such as the Darling Foundry in Montreal, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and Quartier 21 in Vienna. Chramosta was fellow at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome in 2022. Selected for the Swiss Art Award and the Swiss Performance Prize, he was awarded the Kunstkredit Basel, the Kunst Preis Riehen and a work grant from Pro Helvetia. A monography was published as part of the „Séléction Cahiers d’Artistes 2023“. His works are in public and private collections. They have been shown in Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, the USA, Russia and Switzerland. Martin Chramosta works mainly in the field of sculpture, drawing and performance.

ITALIANO

Martin Chramosta ha studiato alla HGK di Basilea, all’Accademia di Belle Arti e all’Università di Arti Applicate di Vienna. Ha conseguito un Master presso l’Institut Kunst dell’HGK di Basilea. Ha partecipato a diversi programmi di residenza presso istituzioni come la Darling Foundry di Montreal, la Cité Internationale des Arts di Parigi e il Quartier 21 di Vienna. Chramosta è stato borsista dell’Istituto Svizzero di Roma nel 2022. Selezionato per lo Swiss Art Award e lo Swiss Performance Prize, ha ricevuto il Kunstkredit Basel, il Kunst Preis Riehen e una borsa di lavoro da Pro Helvetia. Una monografia è stata pubblicata nell’ambito della “Séléction Cahiers d’Artistes 2023”. Le sue opere sono presenti in collezioni pubbliche e private. Sono state esposte in Austria, Canada, Repubblica Ceca, Francia, Germania, Italia, Stati Uniti, Russia e Svizzera. Martin Chramosta lavora principalmente nel campo della scultura, del disegno e della performance.

LINK

Archivio Nazionale Elvetica

ProHelvetica

g. olmo stuppia

artistic direction Gaetano Stuppia

official link

www.cassatadrone.org/chramosta

Artist: Martin Chramosta

graphics Roberto Vito d’Amico

press Camille Orny press@cassatadrone.org

invigilator Ibra Deme, Chiara Butolo

Co-Producer and network : Arianna Marcolin