The current pandemic has forced the world to move aspects of life, both professional and personal, online. Art is constantly searching for spaces where it can be presented and communicated. Finding ways to inhabit the “liquid space” is not as simple or immediate as it seems. What makes sense in a physical space may not automatically make sense in a virtual one.
GABA.MC – the Gallery of the Macerata Fine Arts Academy – has managed to solve this difficulty. GABA.MC is a powerful space attached to the historical Palazzo Galeotti in Macerata, which has been hosting exhibitions by the Fine Arts Academy since 2015. Thanks to an important collaborative project, the Gallery was successfully translated online, placed in between worlds and dimensions. The challenge has started with “Sbagliando s’inventa”, the current exhibition curated by Antonello Tolve. The project is dedicated to Rodari, whose playful and enlightened spirit continues to teach us a lot, starting from the importance of mistakes – a theme that is also the title of one of his books, now a classic: La Grammatica degli Errori (The Grammar of Errors).
“Starting from several key ideas or even from some of his nursery rhymes, short stories – affirms the curator – novels and insightful articles, the five artists (Michelangiolo Bastiani, Daniela Di Maro, Chiara Passa, Tamara Repetto and Cristian Rizzuti) selected for this exhibition – which also aims to be a tribute to Rodari on the centenary of his birth – are all linked to a modus operandi of an extremely potent new-media matrix, oscillating between the material and immaterial, between real passages and the infinite possibilities of the virtual.”
We now enter the space and visit the exhibition.
Chiara Passa’s GIFs, from the Picture in Picture series created in 2014, open the space. These are De Chirico’s metaphysical settings contaminated with unexpected elements, a ‘fantasy bomb’ as Rodari said in his Esercizi di Fantasia, imagining the effect of contaminating common spaces with unexpected elements. The GIF format finds itself at home in the virtual space and online connection. The arrangement of the three works in the room restores their delicate proportions allowing the works and space to breathe in the physical sense of the term.
The large room that opens on the left displays the works by Tamara Repetto, originally a series of drawings dedicated to clouds, characterised by the irregular structure of her fractal geometries, evolutionary models naturally common in man. They hang on the walls like wall drawings with the same lightness as clouds.
Let us retrace our steps and continue into the space where Daniela di Maro’s video, Pollination vs Pollution (2018) can be seen. This is a visual sound work that reflects, in her collaboration with the students of the Brera Academy, the dialogue praised by Rodari. In this case the work was also recognised by the award of a prestigious prize during the Festival at MAXXI in Rome in 2018.
Move forward, on the left, we come across Cristian Rizzuti’s triptych. This consists of drawings that, in the original installation, were made by a robotic arm in real time, imagined as a musical score performed in dialogue with four musicians and two performers. Signs and colours are generated from migration data, captured during the summer of 2019 by analysing migration flows on a global scale, from Africa to Europe and from southern to northern Europe. The error in the marks drawn by the arm and their importance in the project highlights what Rodari held dearest: mistakes, because “you invent through your mistakes”.
In the last room we find the installation by Michelangelo Bastiani, an artist known for his work with holograms. This work is a translation of an interactive video projection conceived in 2012 for an exhibition space in New Jersey, where one of the artist’s preferred elements, water, can be found. In its fluidity and consistency, water represent a common feature between nature and technology. The translation of the work into the dark space is completed by sound effects that leads viewers to empathically imagine the dripping water.
So there are many ideas and encounters between the physical and the virtual, between ways of imagining contents and formats. Everything meets in a single language, that of the computer, which also gives shape to the architecture of the space, to the vitality of the works, to the sounds, to the lighting and to the captions that bring back to life several beautiful extracts from Rodari’s writing. All in the name of the magic of error because “you invent through your mistakes.”
«Sbagliando si inventa». Gianni Rodari nel paese degli artisti, curated by Antonello Tolve
GABA.MC – Galleria dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Macerata, 29.10.2020 – 15.01.2021
You can visit here the online exhibition
Organization and online setting of the exhibition, coordinated by Matteo Catani, Professor of Digital Application for the Arts, were realised by Beatrice Ferretti, student of Methodology of Communication for Multimedia Art and by Pierpaola Reato student of Photography for communication. Artists: Michelangiolo Bastiani, Daniela Di Maro, Chiara Passa, Tamara Repetto e Cristian Rizzuti.
images: (Cover 1) «Sbagliando si inventa. Gianni Rodari nel paese degli artisti», Flyer (2-5) «Sbagliando si inventa. Gianni Rodari nel paese degli artisti», curated by Antonello Tolve, GABA.MC – Galleria dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Macerata Installation view-online, 2020.
