SPE - PERFORMANCE AND EXHIBITION SPACE
OPEN UNTIL 16 DECEMBER 2017
Camera #4 - Il Naufragio (“The Wreckage”)
Cecilia Bertoni and Claire Guerrier with Carl G. Beukman
THE INSTALLATION CAN ONLY BE VIEWED ONE VISITOR AT A TIME
The installation can be viewed during the opening hours of the SPE
(Thursday to Sunday, 2 p.m. to 6 p.m.), booking is recommended.
The installation can also be viewed during office opening hours
(Monday to Friday 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.), however prior booking is required.
Construction and technical crew Paolo Morelli and Cipriano Menchini
with Alice Mollica, Daniele Ghilardi and Alfredo Dell’Immagine
Camera #4 - Il Naufragio
The installation “Camera #4 – Il Naufragio” examines how the traditional dichotomy between male and female is imposed, through education, on the wounds that it creates and which remain open, and on the manipulation to which each of us is subjected, and attempts to subvert the experience of the impossibility of man to go beyond all “limit-situations”. According to Karl Jaspers, these situations are like walls against which man bumps, bangs and inevitably founders without the possibility of passing through, situations that cannot be changed, but can only lead to clarity.
A large environmental installation, in which a thick layer of sand covers the whole floor of the room, seep through the stratigraphy and the fissures that hide themselves in the boundaries that separate the two categories of masculinity and femininity. The visitor’s footsteps inevitably slow down and elements are revealed that call into question the certainties to which tradition has accustomed them: dilapidated and disused surgical and measuring instruments; some notebooks arranged on antiquated medical trolleys; a large embroidered and burned sheet on which pink and blue colours arrange themselves like ordered ranks, and then dissolve gradually into a limitless landscape; a series of videos in which a hand, repeatedly and alternatingly, opens and stitches up, the wounds of a cloth. All these elements are contained within the charred walls of the room, in sharp contrast with the blue ceiling which looms above, creating an alienating atmosphere, suspended in a time that is not the one to which we belong. A wreckage in which perspectives change through the sound objects scattered throughout the space. A wreckage of established juxtapositions in which the gradations multiply, expand and become diluted, overturning every solid paradigm.
“Gender has constantly to be reaffirmed and publicly displayed by repeatedly performing particular acts in accordance with the cultural norm (themselves historically and socially constructed, and consequently variable) which define ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’”.
Deborah Cameron
The installation “Camera #4 – Il Naufragio” continues a pathway that began in 2011, with the second stage created in 2012 and the third in 2014, in which two women ponder on their identity, their fears and their loneliness.
Cecilia Bertoni (1961) was born and grew up in Italy, but lived elsewhere. Poetry, musicality, the architecture of the body and of space in movement – or not, and their dynamics – are the subjects of her research. The spaces suspended between life and death, between dreaming and awake, are the scenes in which these subjects play and are played out, like fragments of memory and of longing: the absence of what is no more and what is yet to be. The instruments of the narrative vary between dance, drama, photography, embroidery, drawing, installation and video. They develop in neutral spaces, or give life to a dialogue with the outside spaces in nature and/or are site-specific. Creator of the entire Dello Scompiglio Project which expands the concept of culture to encompass the environment, the landscape, the agriculture and the Cucina (restaurant), she is the co-founder and artistic director of the Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio based in Vorno (Lucca).
Claire Guerrier was born in 1969 in Strasbourg, France. The artist resides and works in Basel, Switzerland. From a theatrical training, her work as actress and director has gradually extended from the composition of the character to the definition of the identity of the performer/artist. In her work, which in particular makes use of video, she combines reality and fiction in addressing essential questions: the body, pain, strength, knowledge, emptiness, and fullness, or, as in Camera #1, #2 and #3, absence and presence…. In her works Guerrier creates worlds between reality and fantasy, narrative and poetic images, in the search for identity and the answers to the meaning of existence.
Carl G. Beukman (1960) was born in Sint Maartensdijk in The Netherlands. He now lives in The Hague. After many years as a bass player, his interests have shifted towards composition and sound design, mainly for the theatre. He is always looking for the perfect combination of sound, image and text within the theatrical and performance environment, and in video. His musical influences come from contemporary classical music and rock. His starting points are often organic sounds, such as recordings of nature (animals, wind, the snapping of a vegetable, etc.). These sounds are then manipulated by the artist and combined with acoustic and synthesized instruments. In this way he tries to create a world that does not exist and, in combination with other art forms, finds his escape from reality!
