Tempo Imperfetto. Giulia Palombino

The Fondazione Filiberto Menna—Centro Studi d’Arte Contemporanea, in collaboration with the Province and the City of Salerno, founding members of the Fondazione, are pleased to announce the project FULIGGINE, by Giulia Palombino, the second installment of the cycle Tempo Imperfetto, curated by Antonello Tolve and Stefania Zuliani. The exhibition, which will open at the Museo Archeologico Provinciale di Salerno (via San Benedetto, 28) on Wednesday, June 11, 2014 at 5.30pm will be on view from June 12 to July 11, 2014 (daily, except Mondays, from 9am to 7.30pm).

With a language abundant of fantastic elements gently juxtaposed to the collections of Salerno’s Museo Archeologico Provinciale, Giulia Palombino artistically exploits the notion of digging in order to create an imaginary «recovery of unique archaeological finds: thin traces of moving graphite, lines drafting the silhouette of people and objects that disappear and reappear».

Together with a revealing text working as a joyous aid to move along this path—a narration devoted to what has been defined a sort of «archaeology of the impossible» (Volterri) and that invites the observer to an uncanny (unsettled, unusual, unprecedented) and surreal world—Palombino presents two new video-animations: Fuliggine [Soot] and Il custode dei contorni [The Contour’s Guard]. There, thanks to the gentle and tender lining of the pencil, the various objects displayed in the museum stage a unique choreography, a poetic doing and undoing of images and fragments that yield the sense of a memory in constant transformation. As residue as well as matter, soot is for the artist an ephemeral but at the same time dense image of the process that relentlessly consumes all objects and changes their meaning, as it turns anything into a find, a trace, a wreck, more and more fragmented, to the point of being unidentifiable. Soot is seen simply as dust which can become, as in this very case, a sign or an illegible writing, and can form new geometrical shapes, new sequences of images that suggest how from dust itself unexpected stories can be born, as well as some wondrous creatures that, like the Arab phoenix, do not fear death.

Finally, an Untitled work made with graphite on contact paper and a series of small picture frames taken from the video-animation Fuliggine close the exhibition: the result is of a pleasing, and sometimes childish, comparative itinerary gently touching upon the museum’s collections and creating a fairy-tale where the nostalgia for the past becomes an unexpected and fragile nostalgia for the future. The Foundation’s President Prof. Angelo Trimarco

«Fuliggine», progetto site-specific di Giulia Palombino, nell’ambito del progetto «Tempo Imperfetto», a cura di Antonello Tolve e Stefania Zuliani, prodotto dalla Fondazione Filiberto Menna. Museo Archeologico Provinciale di Salerno (in via San Benedetto, 28),  inaugurazione, mercoledì 11 giugno alle ore 17.30. Fino all’11 luglio 2014.

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[toggle title=”Giulia Palombino • biography”]Giulia Palombino was born in Naples (1985) and grew up in Caserta. She graduated in Visual and Performing Arts at the IUAV in Venice, and then earned a MA in Illustration at Central Saint Martins in London. Through drawing, video-animation and collage, Palombino creates a surreal and delicate world, permeated with subtle irony. In the last years she has been living in Berlin working as artist and collaborating as independent illustrator and organiser to several publications, films, documentaries, and no-profit projects. She took part to several exhibitions, among which: Two-Headed Monster (Berlin, 2013), You Call It Pink? I Call It Blood, (Berlin, 2013), Black’n’white (Berlin, 2012), Colectiva 23 (Barcelona, 2012), Scope Miami 2011 (Miami, 2011), Showtime (Castello di Monteriggioni / Siena, 2011), FITAX 1500 Trade Art for Art (Berlin, 2011), Phantasmagoria (Berlin, 2011), Ziguline Poster Edition (Rome, 2010), LOVE PHARMACY, with Violeta Caldrés (Salerno, 2010), The Boyfriend Project (Berlin, 2010), Avventure minime. Miocinesia nell’arte d’oggi (Salerno, 2010), The Venture (Berlin, 2009), Now Here Nowhere (Berlin, 2009), Central Saint Martins Final Show (London, 2009) e Central Saint Martins Work in Progress Show (London, 2009).[/toggle]