Artegiro Artist Residency 2016

2016-02-03

Artegiro is delighted to announce the 2016 artist in residence in Conzano and his project: Giovanni Gaggia, with the project Omnes ad Unum.

The residency will take place in Conzano between 16 May and June 11.

Giovanni Gaggia’s project has emerged amongst many valid proposals put forward by numerous international artists. Artegiro’s selection has honored the relevance of a project where artistic practice and research are specific to the region’s context as well as the contemporary relationship between artist and reality.

In Omnes ad Unum, Gaggia continues his artistic practice, investigating the relationship with the viewer, place, history and the current sociopolitical situation, “with the conviction that art today can only be relational, time specific and site specific” In Conzano and the Monferrato region, the intense migration occurred at the end of the 1800’s towards South America and Australia, took place next to the displacement of Casale Monferrato’s Jewish diaspora, a town at only 15 km from Conzano. Today that community has greatly reduced in number due to the Nazi-fascist persecutions during the Second World War.

Gaggia speaks of his role as artist as “the one that, through encountering the Other, unites and narrates memories that are dormant or distant within most of us, although vivid in the survivors’ emotions. My concern is narrating stories of abandonment or of escape, constructing a dialogue with those who experience a given territory, those who inhabit it, with those who are able to make available, even via my own work, the opportunity to relive, re-experience symbols or traditions not totally lost. My action stretches in time; it is created only with people, it is made of photographs, recorded dialogues, woven textures”.

For this reason, Giovanni Gaggia will look for Conzano and Casale’s textile traditions in order to stitch together a narration “ made of thread and needle, partly in a place partly in the other, entering and leaving private homes, inviting everyone to live out with me the place that I will inhabit during the residency, weaving with people a close knit.”

The relevant question at the heart of the Artegiro Artist Residency is in fact the exploration of the increasing involvement of artists in documenting, invoking the notion of artist’ agency. In this exercise, the artist continuously trespasses the boundaries between reality and fiction. Mark Nash, who has intensely worked in this direction with Isaac Julien for example, in particular during Documenta 11 with Okwui Enwezor, repeatedly poses the pertinent question that Artegiro welcomes, concerning what type of socio-political and personal reality is proposed through art nowadays.

The growing involvement of the artist in this sort of documentation invokes indeed the artist ‘agency, a phenomenon which Artegiro observes, which does not stop at a “border crossing” between reality and fiction, but at contrary, in the narration of the self creates instead another space of articulation of the shared reality.

As Gaggia proposes, quoting a statement close to his heart, “art cannot change the world ma can change individuals”. On these grounds, the Artegiro Artist Residency hopes to prove the paradox that Nash finds in today’s aesthetics practices as limited and incomplete nor surrogate for its referent making room to a fetish, or simply another commodity.

Particularly important in this edition of the Artegiro’s residency, thanks to Gaggia’s opening, is the realization of the main element characterizing this residency: the collaborative dimension with other artists. During the residency in fact Gaggia will be accompanied at different times by various guests, artists and curators, first amongst them the artist and musician Roberto Paci Dalò. Ye Shanghai’s screening, the exceptional film and musical opera by Paci Dalò about the European Jews diaspora in Shanghai during the second world war will be a necessary part of the journey Gaggia will undertake through public and more private moments in private homes.

The residency will have as its base Villa Vidua in Conzano.  

Artist Bio

Giovanni Gaggia was born in Pergola (PU) in 1977 where he currently lives and works. In 2008, he founds Sponge ArteContemporanea of which he is the director. Giovanni Gaggia’s work is above all a pursuit of balance between performative and drawing gestures. His poetics, always abiding by to the body, were developed in those special places, his home ground, becoming more definite with time. In particular such poetics center on the image of the heart, a heart in the flesh, main actor of gestures of intense emotional impact. A more delicate research has followed, equally powerful, highlighted by the recent dedication to embroidery. Amongst Gaggia’s solo exhibitions and events: 2015 – Inventarium, GALLLERIAPIU', Bologna, intexere tempus, curated by Diego Sileo, lavatoio at Palazzo Lamperini/ galleria Rossmut, Roma. Inventarium, curated by Serena Ribaudo, Canto217, Palazzi Costantino / in Napoli, Palermo. 2014 - Centrum Naturae (double solo show), curated by Roberto Paci Dalò, Scalone Vanvitelliano / Chiesa della Maddalena, Pesaro. 2014 - Et Curis (double solo show), curated by Loretta Di Tuccio, critical presentation by Fabrizio Pizzuto, galleria Rossmut, Roma. 2013 - Sic Dulce Est, curated by Cristina Petrelli, Palazzo di San Clemente / Archispazio, Firenze. 2012 - Where is your brother? (double solo show) curated by Davide Quadrio and Studio Rayuela (Flavia Fiocchi e Francesco Sala) SpongePill- Casa Déclic / Guastalla Pilates, Milano. 2011 - I need you a cura di Claudio Composti, Spazio NovaDea, Ascoli Piceno / Corpo fisico, corpo etereo (doppia personale), a cura di Roberta Ridolfi, Factory – Art gallery, Berlino – Germania. 2008 - Aforismi Simpatetici, a cura di Chiara Canali, Museo dei Bronzi Dorati, Pergola (PU). 2007 - Di spirito e di Carne, testo critico di Roberta Ridolfi, Factory-Art gallery,Trieste. Image: Giovanni Gaggia, Konopèion, photo by Leonardo Aquilino.