(Dedicated to the art-gallery manager Maria Colao)
Works about the City by Carlos Garaicoa, Armin Linke-Paola Di Bello, Alberto Garutti, Donatella Scalesse and Lorenza Lucchi Basili are exhibited in Paliano.
The research of these artists concentrates on a mapping of the different ways of feeling and experiencing cities in their rich cultural and human sides. It ranges from the video recordings of Sao Paulo’s outskirts (Linke-Di Bello), to the pictures of New York skyscrapers (Lucchi Basili); from the fascination of the delicate air prospects built with threads on a cedarwood table (Garaicoa), to the color of canvasses overflowing in their surroundings (Scalesse), or to the symbolic image of Istanbul, narrated on a big poster displaying the lit-up bridge on the Bosporus ideally connecting the East to the West (Garutti).
Starting from the actual material works, and broadcasting through the Internet, RadioArteMobile, becomes the virtual and transversal meeting place where artists get together ideally rather than physically, and thanks to a series of telephone interchanges manage to add new facets to the subject of the City. Lawrence Weiner filtrates the meaning of its own research begun in the Sixties’ mainly in relation to the work carried out in the public spaces of New York City. Ken Lum, reached in Vancouver (Canada), tells about the stimuli of living and working in a melting-pot city, crossway of races and cultures while the economist Pier Luigi Sacco talks from the location about the financial reasons of the recent artistic growth in Minneapolis and Vancouver.
The Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa -whose work is based on architecture and the city, the latter seen as an ephemeral structure half-way between reality and utopia – puts a call through to the artists Luis y Miguel working in Havana, and gets them to jam evoking city sounds.
From Albania Anri Sala joins in with a description of the ferment and the ideas currently animating this area of the Balkan region and the artistic interventions in the urban fabric of Tirana.
The notes of the Fifties’ song by Renato Carosone “Istanbul-Costantinopoli” represent Bruna Esposito’s live contribution. The architect Stefano Boeri dwells on the project in progress with Multiplicity telling the story of the development of the huge built-up area of the Milan hinterland through the most sensational news items of the past few years.
Francesco Careri of the Stalker, driving in the Rome surroundings, speaks from his mobile phone and tells about those “long nomadic passageways”, that are non-structured zones parallel to the town, the routes of refugees and irregulars.
Zineb Sedira contacted in London sees herself in relation to the metropolis as a place of interaction and meeting of different cultures.
Luca Vitone, always committed to the issue of cities, believes the city of today to be the centre of relations and historic recording of contemporary life, the space where the foreign and the natives are confronted .
The counterpoint of the city as the place of sociability and interchanges is the focus of Pietro Capogrosso’s researches whose theme is the bunker seen as a desire for total isolation, that carries with it the privilege of observation from an uncontaminated place.
In RAM’s intentional absence of images, voice is the investigating tool for exchanging words and information.
Lorenzo Benedetti- Matteo Giacomelli
