Date: 10 October- 14 November, 2013
Location: RITA URSO artopiagallery, Milan, Italy
Curated by Gaia Tedone
Rotta di collisione explores the invisible trajectories and transitory balances that delineate the boundaries of the contemporary landscape and its iconography, suspended between present and past, earth and sky. The landscape is the stage of the ongoing conflict between nature and history: it absorbs the impact and fragments of past clashes, while exposing the symptoms of upcoming turmoils. The works on display share a common sense of urgency in their distinct research and representation of the human-made landscape as a permeable membrane, where the traces of a specific historical time and horizon are inscribed. In the earth, natural diseases and artificial debris are signs of the landscape's irreversible processes of deterioration. In the air, corps and particles move within the atmosphere as vectors of geopolitical shifts, the remaining of ideologies and of individual and collective experiences. The exhibition, which is structured across the two gallery's floors, reflects such a tension and encourages formal associations and conceptual oppositions between existing works and new productions. On the ground floor, Alessandro Sambini and Alice Grassi present Cumuli 2010 and Phoenix 2009, two photographic projects that consider the identity and appearance of the landscape as a system of evolving natural and cultural elements. Maria Domenica Rapicavoli and Leonora Bisagno address the relationship between landscape and conflict, recuperating the historical and symbolical value of material residuals in the photographic works Tracce#1 2013 and Louvre 2012 and in the installations Crateri (incontro su terra) 2012 and Disrupted Account 2013. On the above floor, the works suggest more abstract considerations on the reprocessing of history and memory. The installation Urss 1976 2102-13 by Leonora Bisagno assesses the legacy of the soviet ideology, while Maria Domenica Rapicavoli's new photographic production continues the artist's investigation on the presence of american military forces within the sicilian air space. Finally, Alice Grassi's recent works Appunti sul volo 2013 are evocative of the idea of balance, resistance and disappearance. There are the first group of a broader series inspired by the famous character of Philippe Petit, the tightrope acrobat who illegally crossed the World Trade Centre in New York in 1974. The artists in the show depart from an in-depth iconographic research and an attentive study of the space which surrounds them to propose a suggestive sequence of images - a montage that bridges real facts and imaginary ones, opening up new interpretative patterns. The landscape, which is at once the backdrop of epic endeavours and the sensor for imminent calamities, turns into an icon. Its heath conditions are at the centre of a broader reflection on the drive towards progress of a planet which moves around the sun alongside millions of asteroids, in the constant risk of an imminent collision.
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