Silvia Giambrone. Certe Cose
With Silvia Giambrone’s exhibition Some Things, La Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio is presenting from Thursday 15 September 2022 to Friday 7 October 2022 the first in the series of Project Room shows, in the spaces at Via Crispi 18. With the Project Room, the Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio is taking the project in a new direction, with the aim of turning it into an observatory of contemporary Italian art. The artists are invited to intervene through projects of experimentation and research into the most pressing themes of the present day.
“Certe cose sono come la Bellezza
che è morta da tempo: solo l’acqua profonda del pozzo può lavarle e destarle.”
Emanuel Carnevali
Objects do not always retain their original functions. Once they have lost their neutrality, the meaning that is assigned to them changes. They can become ‘Some Things’, conveying to us sensations and emotional resonances that are wholly unaccustomed. At times, those same objects become symbols of unease. At others they are bearers of common values and cultural legacies. Like an embroidered collar, or a couple of pieces of cutlery. ‘Some Things’ are silent and alone, concealing underlying mechanisms of power and subjugation. The works on display have no need of a link to connect them. They exist as entities in their own right. By combining the aseptic structure of the video-performance with the light box hung on the wall, the artist’s aim is not so much to establish a single discourse covering all the works as a reflection on what ‘Some Things’ mean to us, stirring a different echo in each of us. In this way Cutlery (2016) brings us back to a domestic and familiar setting, but one that is at the same time ambiguous and disturbing. In Atto unico per mosche (One-act Play for Flies, 2018), produced by the Fondazione Pietro e Alberto Rossini of Briosco, the idea returns of resonance and correspondence between persons and objects, space and time. The protagonists of the film are two women, who relate to one another without meeting. Collar 6 (2022) presents the x-ray of a familiar and universally recognised object like an embroidered collar as a sign that penetrates into the body, one whose symbolic power makes its cultural origin evident. The act of embroidering, in fact, historically seen as a traditional female practice, becomes an object-sign, which in Judith Butler’s view is performative and writes itself on the body, constructing its identity.
The new course taken by the #Project Room format makes it possible to get right to the heart of the artist’s creative process: Silvia Giambrone opens this exhibition with a reading of a number of poems and texts, including Emanuel Carnevali’s ‘Some Things’. They are a series of writings in which the artist has found a resonance with her works, which are an expression of the introjection of relationships of power. In this way the public is invited to participate in the artist’s emotional experience.