Cleo Fariselli SAMUS VIRIDIS - X9
GAP - Global Art Programme Waiting for Expo 2015
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Global Art Programme, Waiting for Expo 2015 è un programma internazionale di scambio culturale tra l’Italia e altri paesi partecipanti all’Expo Milano 2015, Nutrire il Pianeta, Energia per la Vita. Iniziato nel 2010, il programma offre ad artisti italiani e stranieri l’opportunità di compiere un’esperienza di residenza di due mesi in un paese ospitante allo scopo di realizzare un’opera sui temi inerenti l’Expo (salute e nutrizione adeguata, ambiente ed energia sostenibile, geo-architettura). Ogni anno gli artisti stranieri selezionati soggiornano a Milano nella residenza Open Care, gestita da FARE, mentre gli italiani svolgono il loro periodo di residenza nei paesi stranieri che di volta in volta sono individuati come partner annuali del progetto. Ogni singola residenza termina con una mostra di presentazione del lavoro dell’artista selezionato e la pubblicazione di un diario che raccoglie le sue impressioni e il suo vissuto attraverso diverse forme. Il programma, che proseguirà sino al 2015, si concluderà con la mostra di tutte le opere prodotte dagli artisti partecipanti, all’interno della programmazione culturale di Expo Milano 2015. Il progetto è stato ideato dall’Associazione Artegiovane Milano, con il patrocinio di Expo Milano 2015, in collaborazione con l’associazione FARE, Open Care e Frigoriferi Milanesi. Il progetto si è potuto realizzare grazie al sostegno di Camera di Commercio di Milano, Regione Lombardia, Fondazione Cariplo e Comune di Milano, Settore Cultura, Moda, Design.
Cleo Fariselli SAMUS VIRIDIS-X9
GAP – Global Art Programme Frigoriferi Milanesi - Open Care Milano, ottobre – dicembre 2013
Cleo Fariselli
notes on the work
My latest material experimentations involve Agar, a gelatinous substance obtained from algae. It was first discovered in XVII Century in Japan,where it is called Kanten. It had been chiefly used as an ingredient in desserts throughout Asian cuisine, but the particular application which inspired me dates back to modern times, when it has become widely used in scientific laboratories as a solid substrate to contain culture medium for microbiological work. In 2004 I painted, with transparent Agar gel supplemented with sugar, simple geometric shapes on the walls of the exhibition space: like oversized culture media, the painted surfaces became fertile fields open to the proliferation of the microscopic life forms that populated that place. The contrast between the clean, minimalistic appearance of those glossy, transparent surfaces on the walls and the invisible swarm of microscopic organisms that actually inhabited them, was to me an attempt to trigger, in the spectator’s mind, an imaginative process of rÊverie toward the real -though little considered- dimension of the infinitely small. It was an intervention intended to affect the perception of an interior by intensifying the vitality of some of its parts. I was also interested in the potential of creating works open to explicit processes of self-transformation. I worked with Agar again in 2013, when I was invited to participate in Global Art Program in Barcelona. These recent experiments involved natural colorants and self-standing supports. The decision to work with colours has derived both on aesthetic and physical properties: depending on the chemicals and nutrients that make up each colour, Agar substrates become suitable for the developing of different micro-organisms. In scientific terminology this is described as a selective growth media.
Furthermore I was looking for a more explicit link to painting, as a medium classically associated to a desire for transcendence. With their humid, smelly, organic appearance my Agar paintings aim to celebrate, though with irony, a state of contemplation toward materiality itself. The transparency, smoothness and waterproof features of plexiglass allow Agar to transform itself to its fullest potential, highlighting the way in which it evolves and dryes up, changing colours, developing curls, cracks and mildews. Former Agar sessions do not leave any trace on plexiglass: the same support can be painted countless times, in a sort of self-determined seasonality. Ownership is only possible in terms of options: to realise the work, to start a process, to contemplate it. This possibility, embodied by the supports, is, along with the manual ability to create the paintings, the only thing that can be actually owned and physically transmitted. A suitable parallel can be drawn with the garden, whose conception shapes itself in that middle ground between our innate desire for order and the acceptance of spontaneity. The garden is the pursuance for a balance between design and wilderness; it can be seen as an appropriate metaphor to describe the dimension of artistic practice, and this project is pretty emblematic in this sense. ‘The picturesque’ was one of the most powerful and effective aesthetic ideals related to the garden and to the perception of the landscape in general. “The idea was aligned with a certain type of painting, the ‘landscape’ genre, and our current use of the word landscape as an appreciation of the world as if it were a visual artefact is just one example of the way we have absorbed ‘the picturesque’ into our view of the world, perhaps without realising it” .1 The picturesque ideals may in fact be traced to a number of more or less stereotyped models of landscapes, among which I would include those strange, exotic or alien ambiances which genres such as Fantasy and Science-Fiction have made familiar to us. The imagination of landscapes of this type is surreally present in contemporary collective imagery, as the current environmental crisis has made the classic sci-fi scenario of exodus to other worlds a concrete hypotesis. Many TV programs of popular science, rather than promoting environmental awareness as a solution to improve the situation on Earth, foster space colonization as a plausible, even inevitable solution.
A reflection on sustainability and the environment must necessarily engage the questioning of the imagination that accompanies our perception of the landscape and, more generally, of the planet in which we live. In this regard, art has enormous responsability. With their moist, chanÂŹgeable, gelatinous and oddly-coloured organic appearance Agar paintings recall the imagery of a stereotyped alien and exotic materiality; nevertheless, they are totally terrestrial. Like elementary special effects, they are not meant to deceive but to fascinate, by treating common things with a renewed sense of wonder. The link between the way the Picturesque refers to images as a parameter to approach environment and contemporary obsession with images and representation is intriguing. The presumed coincidence between image and object is having a renewed attention in the world of art, through the awareness of the spread and dissemination of a work of art through the internet and the press media; a process that mostly happens through photography. Photographic documentation is an important aspect of this research because it testifies the evolution and very existence of works destined to vanish in a short time. This makes both the fruition of the Agar paintings as physical objects and the photographic documentation of them very engaging. On the one hand, the concrete fruition of the work is not mediated / influenced by idealized images of it, entrusting completely on direct experience; on the other, the photographs are freed from the task of strictly documenting the object, and thus can be explored and enjoyed as an independent level of work. In this publication are presented the photographs that accompanied the studies and creations of the first Agar paintings I realized on plexiglass during my stay in Barcelona; these experiences conveyed in the final exhibition SAMUS VIRIDIS-X92. The publication includes also the realization and evolution of another Agar painting I realized at the headquarters of association FARE, Milan, in February 2014. _____________________________________ 1 The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities, John Macarthur, Routledge, 2007 2 2013, Espacio Saint Pere, curated by BAR project
Thank you: Andrea Kvas, Marlie Mul, Costanza Bergo
Untitled, 2004, agar-saccharose gel on wall, variable dimensions installation view, Viafarini, Milan, photo credit Linda Fregni Nagler
photos from studio, Barcelona, october-november 2013 *
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photos from the exhibition SAMUS VIRIDIS - X9 Barcelona Espacio Sant Pere, december 2013 * photo credit Roberto Ruiz
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in collaboration with Andrea Kvas
the work in Barcelona had to be dismantled before the Agar ended its cycle. These photographs show the material detached from the supports.
installation views, FARE, Milan, february 2014
edizione a cura di Artegiovane Milano impaginazione e grafica Stefano Redaelli Milano Febbraio 2014