LUDOVICA CARBOTTA Portfolio- Selected Projects Ludovicacarbotta
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LUDOVICA CARBOTTA portfolio- selected projects [email protected] My practice focuses on the physical exploration of the urban space and on how individuals establish connections with the environment they inhabit. Hovering on the boundaries between reality and fiction, recent works combine installations, texts and performances reflecting around the notion of site, identity and participation. Specifically I am exploring what I call fictional site specificity, a form of site-oriented practice that considers imaginary places or embodies real places with fictional contexts, recovering the role of imagination as a value to construct our knowledge. With imagination we can actually create a place to belong, but this will be inevitably affected by the reality of the language that constitutes it as an object. By combining installations, texts and performances, I produce body of works that take the form of medium-scale environments. Faustine Pipistrello, Baix Empordà - Catalunya September 7, 2019 coordinated by Xavier Ristol, David Bestué and Enric Farrés Duran photo: Roberto Ruiz voice: Eulàlia Rovira performer: Rasmus Nilausen, Ludovica Carbotta https://pipistrello.hotglue.me/?2019_Ludovica%20Carbotta/ LUDOVICA CARBOTTA [email protected] http://www.ludovicacarbotta.com/ El trabajo de Ludovica Carbotta (Turín, 1982) se centra en la exploración física del espa- cio mediante la superposición en él de trazas de realidad y ficción, una superposición o mezcla que sacude nuestra experiencia al acceder a su obra. En esta ocasión nos invita a conocer a Faustine, inspirada en un personaje extraído de La invención de Morel, una novela escrita el año 1940 por Aldolfo Bioy Casares. Una de las escenas recurrentes del relato es la visita que hace un fugitivo a un acantilado para espiar a una mujer que obser- va el atardecer cada día, Faustine. Ludovica extrae del texto esta situación y la traslada al interior de la cueva, haciéndonos partícipes del momento en el que el fugitivo se dirige por fin a ella, a través de un monólogo que combina fragmentos del relato original con otros escritos para la ocasión. En la cueva el cuerpo de Faustine se diluye con la oscu- ridad y las rocas sobre las que se apoya, de hecho no sabemos qué está vivo y qué es inerte, qué es sujeto y qué objeto. Recuerda esas islas misteriosas que al acercarnos a ellas descubrimos que en realidad son el lomo de un monstruo marino. Por otro lado, la relación un tanto frustrante entre las demandas amorosas del fugitivo y la indiferencia de Faustine parece remitirnos al de la propia escultora con su obra. Son muchos los mitos que nos refieren a los intentos en el ámbito de la escultura por modelar una figura tan perfecta que llegue a adquirir vida propia, y ese parece haber sido el intento de Carbotta. Ha construido a Faustine, la ha trasladado cuidadosamente de su taller al interior de una cueva, y ha redactado un texto que, como un encantamiento, debería otorgarle un alien- to de vida. Esta declaración de amor, de la que somos testigos, no obtiene respuesta. Las obras recientes de Ludovica Carbotta combinan instalaciones, textos y representa- ciones que juegan con las nociones de lugar, identidad y participación. La artista enfoca su atención especialmente en lo que ella llama especificidad de sitio ficticio, una forma de práctica orientada a lo que considera lugares imaginarios o combinación de lugares reales con contextos ficticios, recuperando el papel de la imaginación como valor para construir nuestro conocimiento. Carbotta ha estado trabajando en los últimos años en un proyecto de largo plazo llamado Monowe, una ciudad imaginaria donde solo vive una persona. Se trata de un no lugar, al menos en el sentido físico, pero sin embargo presente en el tiempo porque aparece y desaparece. Una ciudad diseñada para que habite una única persona, aislada de cualquier contacto con el mundo. Tras visitar a Faustine, nos queda la duda de si se trata del único habitante de Monowe o si podría pertenecer a una cueva, una isla o al mar. El sentido último de lo estatutario. Faustine de Ludovica Carbotta ha sido organizado por Pipistrello, un proyecto artístico que se desarrolla en espacios no habituales, en esta ocasión en una cueva acuática lla- mada cova d’en Gispert. https://pipistrello.hotglue.me/?2019_Ludovica%20Carbotta/ Faustine, 2019.Installation view / Islas Formigues Palamos, Baix Empordà - Catalunya Faustine, 2019, polystirene, putty resin, rope, wood, sponge .Islas Formigues Palamos, Baix Empordà - Catalunya Faustine, 2019, polystirene, putty resin, rope, wood, sponge .Islas Formigues Palamos, Baix Empordà - Catalunya Faustine, 2019.Performance / Islas Formigues Palamos, Baix Empordà - Catalunya Faustine, 2019.Installation view and performance / Islas Formigues Palamos, Baix Empordà - Catalunya Faustine, 2019.Performance / Islas Formigues Palamos, Baix Empordà - Catalunya Monowe, 2016-ongoing In the last three years, I have worked on the project titled Monowe: an imagina- ry city, designed for one person only that manifests itself with different elements (such as infrastructures, architecture portions, textual documents, etc.) poised between a ruin and an open construction site. It replicates the current urban individualistic way of life, radicalizing it to the dimension of one single person. Its shape is always different as the artist presents only a fragment of the whole each time. Somehow Monowe brings the mechanism of a gated community to an extreme level: it is a place so exclusive that it becomes a sort of prison in which the only citizen decides to live spontaneously. Key element in the project is a lone inhabitant of the city -sometimes physically appearing in the space, sometimes just leaving behind small traces- who despe- rately tries to regain possession of both the objects and the space. The character’s behavior seems compulsive, when moving and changing the order of things intuitively, devoid of a consistent line of reasoning. This incessant and frenzied ac- tivity has a rather clear goal: far from any human contact and social constrains, the inhabitant alters the reality of things and deform it according to personal preferences, insights and taste in a spasmod- ic process of self-affirmation. The project Monowe is influenced by the theories of philosopher Peter Pal Pelbart that reflects on forms of isolation as a state from which to abandon social norms, rules and logics that have been tak- en for granted in society. Although the notion of isolation is usually considered as a negative concept, I am interested in the potentiality of isolation as a circumstance from which to conduct actions of self awareness and to operate processes of self-affirmation, aiming to overcome prescribed social norms. According to Pelbart, fighting off the exhaustion of our contemporary age of connective excess is possible, embracing examples of pos- itive solitude. (Peter Pal Pelbart, Cartography of Exhaustion Nihilism Inside Out, 2015, Univocal Publishing, MN) Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents the solo exhibition of Ludovica Carbotta (Turin, 1982). The exhibition centers on her ongoing project Monowe, underway since 2016, in which the artist has conceived and constructed an ideal city: an urban model Ludovica Carbotta created for a single individual. Through a plurality of expressive means, sculpture, Monowe installation, documents, sound works and performative actions, Carbotta gives shape to an evolving organism. Here, fiction and reality coexist in a dialectic relationship. Informed by various sources of inspiration, utopian and science-fiction literature, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin architectural theories, and sociological analysis, this project results in a sophisticated April 15 – September 29, 2019 reflection on the contemporary civilian and her condition of isolation–as an effect of Curated by Irene Calderoni external forces, a strategy of self-protection, part of the legacy of a catastrophic past, or an opportunity for future survival. photo: Gianni Ferrero Merlino e Giorgio Perottino Up until now, the city of Monowe has always been presented in fragments, whether displaying architectural remnants or elements with specific functions, such as the entryway, the factory, the museum, or the watchtower. These elements bring into play the social use of these architectures as institutions, a dimension put into crisis by the solitary status of the inhabitant. Thus, the city offers the opportunity to analyze, in abstract, the rules and conventions rendered obsolete by the disappearance of the community. For this exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Monowe will be presented for the first time as an overview, in which the individual fragments are temporarily brought together in a fabric of complementary relations and functions. Following its original presentation at MAXXI, the motif of the museum reappears in The City Museum, 2016, a living place of memory undergoing a constant process of elaboration, sedimentation, and renegotiation. Presented here is also the fragment of a new building, the Tribunale, 2019. This courtroom is a materialization of guilt and judgment, a stage upon which the concept of justice makes its appearance in a surreal trial, in which all of the roles collapse into one: the accused and the accuser, the witness and the judge. Almost as if in a backward tracking shot, these architectural structures are included in a maquette, an architectural model which reduces the scale of the elements in order to widen the