Mobili is the opening exhibition of Nosadella.due. The six international artists Flavio Favelli, Boaz Kaizman, Simon Moretti, Pantani-Surace, Reynolds/Jolley, Vedovamazzei transform the spaces of the house with site-specific installations in every room: so Nosadella.due presents itself to the public becoming a place for artistic experimentation, residence for artists and curators, container and content, housing and asylum of creation.
ArteFiera, the first citizen of Nosadella.due, is the setting for the event.
With Personal (2007) Flavio Favelli interprets an atmosphere to create another personal setting. The artist places over an old parquet another one bearing traces of its past. A new tale is placed over an already narrated story, as the present does with the past. Either elements contaminate each other, so that Favelli’s furniture seem to live through mementoes and memories deposited on them, personal, collective recollections, unknown but always existing. His work on the memory springing out of objects with respect to one’s thoughts and the need or inevitability to keep it, in order to give a meaning to situations, images and feelings. In this research, the house, the furniture, their often unnoticed structures, become the place of conservation and development of memory: “the house which rests its foundations on the notion and practice of “inhabiting”” – writes Stefano Pezzato inhis work – “the house with all its structural components, such as floors, walls, doors and objects inside it, furniture and furnishings, namely the silent witnesses of whoever resides in it, has always been the focus of the artist’s interest and research” .
Maleesh (2004), by Boaz Kaizman, is a video which is also a painting. Drawing and decorations unfold on carpets losing their consistence to become supports of history and tradition. This ancient artistic expression, carpet weaving, is not a mere ornamentation, but it has an intimate and religious meaning. Decorations become the alphabet letters of a language belonging to Iranian people and their history. David Galloway’s voice narrates of a people, their culture, struggles and sensibilities, while speaking about their post as director of Tehran’s contemporary art museum. A museum commissioned by the Queen and the Shah of Persia in 1977 as a gift to their people, to renovate, modernize, perhaps contaminate, the specific and well-rooted artistic tradition of the East with the West’s. Kaizman, an Israeli who has emigrated to Germany, and living there as a foreigner, unravels a discourse on his origin and identity. The language, either written or spoken, becomes a component of the work, as the objects which testify of a story, a passage, without reply: the memory of things, situations, of one’s and everyone’s tradition, human values which Kaizman wants to keep alive.
Simon Moretti’s work is multifaceted. At the entrance door of Nosadella.due, the artist has posted a sign inviting visitors to stop, to look and to enter. Entering means putting oneself in relation with a shred space and adopting new relational modes. The artist’s research in fact aims at analyzing the meaning of social and communication relations. The artist’ attention paid to different points of view also derives from his propensity to work with other artists for projects involving curator’s work (like Dadadandy, www.dadadandy.com, inspired by the Dadaist spirit, a bit irreverent and eccentric). All his works relate with the circumstance and the place for which they have been created, by exploring their meaning and history. Two gatekeepers in Nosadella.due defend the location as it were a place of worship. The eye contributes to engender respect and reverence, the focus, the attention, the goal. The neon, where references to modernist language and symbols are present (not a mere homage, but rather visitations in an updated, playful and always personal approach, derived from original ideas of different currents) becomes the hymn to the value of the residence, the temporary place of dwelling and sharing of guest’ artists’ projects and ideas.
Voglio sentire il rumore di tutte le cose… (2007) which the duo Pantani-Surace have created for Nosadella.due, by renewing and parodying a previous work, grasps all the feelings of tenacious caducity inhabiting a room where the flavour of an implacable tradition is still present. The frailty, secrecy and precariousness of daily living enter the room with unnoticeable but inexorable insistence. Sensitivity and curiosity of the two artists towards changes, modifications and subtle, minimal and elusive aspects of day-to-day reality, as a response to the sound of increasingly majestic and sensational actions, makes every work a unique poem always enchanting and amazing us. A poetics condensing and summarizing everything into the essential, the transient, the moment constantly renovating itself, like a drop which, in its obstinate falling, washes out and corrodes a crystal. Their research focuses on things and phenomena seen as constantly happening processes; Alberto Mugnaini has define their art “ars fluendi”: in fact their work change, are consumed and translate under the viewer’s gaze in a set timeframe. This is the ephemeral seed found inside every artwork.
Patrick Jolley, Irish photographer, and Reynold Reynolds, American artist filmmaker, have been worked since 1995 in film-making. Nosadella.due presents for the first time in Italy their latest piece Sugar (2004). Already in their famous trilogy, “Seven Days ’til Sunday” (1998), “The Drowning Room” (2000) and “Burn” (2001)” they presented domestic sequences of everyday life lived in extreme settings. The images of Sugar are even more intensively claustrophobic, and stage the alternation of domestic drama engendered by the repression and paranoia of everyday life, with short forays into horror atmosphere. The characters in their videos are always the protagonists of scenes of everyday delusions in front of an implacable fate freezing them into powerlessness. Sugar is a real cinematographic narration, a film where, through quotations and references, delusions, anxieties spring into life, as visions of a mind trapped in a life generating marginalization and multiplying one’s corpse.
The duo Vedovamazzei have chosen harsh lines to make the warm sitting room of Nosadella.due starker with the work Milioni di morti fanno meno male di una zampa ferita (2006), recently exhibited at MADRE of Naples. Disturbing in its contradictory and duplicity aspects, Vedovamazzei’s work reverts “the rigidity of conventions” of reality and life, through the unveiling of the tragicomic aspects of human life. Seven old chairs frayed by cat’s claws symbolize the domination of collective selfishness, which in today’s world of comfort and wellbeing seems to highlight a dimension at all cost individual, not caring of its community. Their research and thinking penetrate deeply in the present, to show often ridiculous as well as dramatic dynamic and multifaceted aspects. The strength of the two artist resides once again in their inexhaustible ability to evoke an endlessly imagined universe, moving them away from any classification, leaving room only for wonder. Their ability in “telling intelligent lies” translate an artistic expression with a precise intent, of fostering thinking and taking the responsibility of questioning everything and raising doubts, discussion, without ever opening to explicit brutality. The two artists call themselves “visionaries among charlatans”, and intend reverting, changing and demolishing knowledge, habits and common sense in the life of contemporary man, to offer an alternative analysis by digging into the irrationality of everyday living.
