For the edition of Art City 2025, the spaces of the Gajani Foundation will be contaminated through the work of two artists called to collaborate together for the first time: Isabella Tortola and Debora Vrizzi. On one side a photographer; on the other a filmmaker and a video artist.
The aim of the exhibition is, as always, to find a dialogue and narrative with Carlo Gajani and his spaces: foundation-gallery and artist’s house. If last year the approach with Francesca Lolli was that of a treasure hunt, this year, on the other hand, a real “art issue” will take place. Part of the furniture and architectural decorations, in fact, will remain visible; the author’s artworks, on the other hand, will be “hidden” through the use of simple transparent sheets.
The cloth becomes, in this way, a symbol of a cancellation that is not meant to be, on the part of the artists and the curatorship, either an occupation within the residence of the famous Bolognese artist or a form of remission with respect to his art. The goal is simply to overturn the vision and gaze of those who, as guests, will enter the exhibition during the event. What would happen if the place we expect to find filled with art found itself emptied of everything? What meaning would it produce in the viewer’s mind? An erasure that is not meant to be a reversal of Gajani’s art, but a real change of meaning, an Emilio Isgrò-style elimination: erasing in order to unveil the paradox, playing with the obvious and on the expectations of those who, for some time now, have perhaps become too accustomed to taking for granted what they have before them. In this way, art, from mere commercial object, from banality, from obviousness regains strength and space, screaming and manifesting itself through its very absence.
To go into more detail, Debora Vrizzi explained the background.
Sara Papini. How did the Blinding Plan project come about?
Blinding Plan began in 2011 as a provocation against the politics that devalue culture in Italy. I asked myself this question “what would a world without culture be like?”
I shot the first Blinding Plan at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, filming some unaware viewers while they were visiting the museum. At a second time, I erased the exhibited works from the walls, leaving the viewers’ gaze to the void instead.
The erasure of the works had the effect of emphasizing the relationship between the audience, the contemporary artwork, and the museums that contain it.
In this first video I wanted to point out how contemporary art is often enjoyed but not understood, experienced with sufficiency or frustration, boredom or irony. Attending the great contemporary art museums (places par excellence of consecration of the work of art and the artist), has now become a cultural pilgrimage, an obligatory ritual that often leaves the public indifferent.
The empty space that remains is filled with metaphors, leaving room for various possibilities for reflection, in particular making manifest the inability to see and understand the art that is proposed to the general public.
The transition from the first to the second video, what was it like to go back and work on the same concept?
Reading the essay The Winter of Culture was crucial to the second video “Blinding Plan The Cathedral.” In this essay Jean Clair questions the proper “shape” to be given to museums, comparing them to churches. At this point, once stripped of artwork, museums became for me great empty cathedrals. Gothic cathedrals were oriented toward the east, to intercept and celebrate the rising of the sun. By comparison, museums look like contemporary cathedrals that have lost their orientation — as if culture no longer has a direction. I believe that museums can still try to be cathedrals: they are among the few places where citizens can celebrate finding themselves, gathering, concentrating, contemplating, ascending to something brighter.
Art City and Gajani Foundation, how do you feel about this experience?
I recently visited the Gajani Foundation, which welcomes the visitor inside an enveloping and stimulating atmosphere. It seems to me a beautiful and unusual exhibition opportunity, conceived by Sara Papini and Giuseppe Virelli.
The exhibition to which I have been invited seems to me to fit well with Art City’s principle of engaging a wide audience and expanding exhibition spaces in the city of Bologna. A principle that among other things seems to me to be in line with the hope inherent in my Blinding Plan project of moving museum institutions to become something dynamic, interdisciplinary that proposes inclusive art and a dialogue between past and present with unusual spaces in the city.
