Today, “Young Italian Artists. Contemporary Art Stories”, grows further with the work and reflection by Agnese Spolverini. This space of Arshake, conceived by Antonello Tolve and curated with Elena Giulia Rossi, is dedicated to key players in the contemporary art world, who are under 35.
I’m an artist because I don’t know how to use words, because I would like to speak, I would like to talk, I would like to cry and I would like to make myself heard. But I was not born with the gift of writing or a good ars oratoria.
I began, therefore, to play with the world and its forms, to humanise the things around me, to take moments – lived or imaginary – and create open-ended situations with them.
I took my own intimacy and made it into scenes, objects and images.
I like to think that this intimacy with which I confront other people is not only mine but is made up of topoi that everyone is familiar with, of often forgotten places and moments that we do not fully experience or to which we aspire but which are always located elsewhere with respect to the life we are living.
Just this morning I was reading an article which discussed intimacy as a fundamental condition for a true relationship with the other. I believe that creating a relationship leading to the recognition of the other represents one of the cornerstones of my work, but I’m not interested in doing it in a discursive way, through the instruments of transparency, but by conveying ambiguous, subtle – sometimes cruel and sometimes tender – whispered emotions, speaking evocatively, never through direct presence. I occasionally try to stage the power of a secret dimension – erotic, but not pornographic. I often like to imagine what I do as a conversation between two lovers, the work and the spectator.
I’m part of a generation that more than any other experiences precariousness, not only in their work but in all aspects of life, where mobility becomes a value but is too often an obligation rather than a choice. The house, which should represent the intimate place par excellence, is discovered to be only a temporary container and, for this reason too, I often use domestic elements in my installations. Looking back at my research, the word “nostalgia” comes to mind. Nostoi, in Greek epics, are the tales of heroes’ homecomings, where nostalgia contains the pain felt from being far away. The melancholy that runs through my work also speaks of a return home that is, however, a return to another place, a secret place that for many of us exists only in an imaginary, ideal dimension.
Agnese Spolverini, April 21st,2020
