Tag: In contatto

Looking Out from the Inside: relating and connecting during a lockdown

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by Irene Balzani

Art feeds on relations, and every artist chooses how to connect with those who are going to look at his or her work. Tomás Saraceno, for instance, does this by “trapping” us in installations that involve our senses and highlight the thin threads that bind us to the other beings that inhabit the earth with us. We are all now starting to realise just how tough it can be when those threads break and when the simple acts of going out and meeting other people disappear from our daily agenda, as our lives are basically played out in the confines of our rooms.

In our work at Palazzo Strozzi we often reflect on the concepts of “openness” and “accessibility” because we are aware of those terms’ complexity, and we try to ensure that our exhibitions can welcome the largest possible number of visitors. Over the years, expanding on our experiments and taking different approaches on board, we have developed a considerable number of accessibility schemes designed to promote the inclusion of people who risk social exclusion, and during this lockdown period we are trying to keep the threads of our relationship with them alive “by remote” through direct contact and proposals. We are talking about the boys and girls with autistic spectrum disorders in our Nuances scheme, the Parkinson’s Disease patients in our Free flowing scheme or the many participants in our Connections scheme for people with mental disabilities and psychological issues.

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With Many Voices  during the Bill Viola. Electronic Renaissance exhibition (10 March – 23 July 2017)
Photo: Simone Mastrelli

The first accessibility scheme that the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi developed was With Many Voices  for people who live with Alzheimer’s and their carers (whether family members or professionals). To tie in with the Bill Viola. Electronic Renaissance exhibition in 2017, we reflected on the meaning of “staying shut away” and of “going out” in the company of the artist Cristina Pancini with a project called Caterina, which took its cue from the observation of two works of art on display in Palazzo Strozzi: a video installation by Bill Viola entitled Catherine’s Room and the predella of a 14th century altarpiece by Andrea di Bartolo showing St. Catherine of Siena with Blessed Dominican Nuns, both of which focused on the theme of isolation and people’s relationship with the outside world.

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Certain moments during the Caterina project
Photo: Simone Mastrelli

The Caterina project was spawned by a reflection on the opportunities available to people with Alzheimer’s for experiencing their relationship with the world. As dementia deepens its hold, the mind gradually ceases to be a tidy, well-ordered room and becomes an unknown space. In parallel, the outside world becomes increasingly difficult to grasp and going out becomes more and more difficult. Relations with others can be reassuring, a source of wonderment or a threat, but less and less a source of mutual identification. Yet we need others, we need the world as it goes about its business outside our own selves, and this lockdown situation is bringing that fact home to us very forcefully. At the same time, “staying shut away” is not just a physical condition, it is also an attitude that can prompt us to remain locked away inside our own minds. We can all feel like Caterina/Catherine at certain times in our lives.

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A moment during the Caterina project
Photo: Simone Mastrelli

The emergency that we are experiencing has catapulted us into an “interior” whose perimeter we can clearly perceive: our own home is our space for action, our daily horizon today. In the course of the project developed with Cristina Pancini, a room in Palazzo Strozzi was transformed into a space for a journey, a pathway for discovering its corners, its ceilings, the objects it contained, in fact anything and everything that can inhabit a space, including our own selves. It was a journey played out as a couple, each elderly participant being accompanied by his or her carer: a journey made of stories and listening, a pathway to knowledge that we might want to repeat today to rediscover our own homes, observing a room to discover its endless panoramas or looking out of the window and telling each other what we see or what we imagine is likely to be out there.

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Caterina, the book
Photo: Martino Margheri

The Caterina project took concrete form in the shape of a specific question asked of participants: what can you tell a person who has been “shut away” for a long time? What is worth looking at or doing after a long period of separation from the world? “I’m asking you this question because I know you have far more experience than me,” said the letter accompanying the notebooks in which each participation could then jot his or her advice. Here are a some of the replies: “find a good sister,” “smell the perfume of a rose,” “never lose sight of the sky and the sea,” “eat a nice ice cream because it’s good for you and delicious. Eat it in the street,” “I’d advise you to turn to the person you like best and look at them with love,” “go away, move, never stop.”
This precious advice was collected, along with the story of the project as a whole, in a book published by Boîte Editions and available on line on the Palazzo Strozzi website (page in Italian).

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IN TOUCHBuilding a new relationship with our audience

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Art at Home: special activities for children, teens and families

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Palazzo Strozzi has always taken immense care to involve its visitors in activities and projects associated with the works of art on display in its exhibitions, but in this strange time we’re living in we all need to stay at home to protect ourselves and others, so we can’t enjoy the same kind of direct interaction with the work of the artists in our shows. That’s why we’ve devised ART AT HOME, a series of proposals and initatives for children, teens and families based on original activities to do at home under your own steam, using everyday materials that are easy to come by.

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Photo: Giulia Del Vento

Palazzo Strozzi ‘s exhibitions always come with a Family Kit, a tool for sharing the experience in a fun and creative way. We’ve devised a special version of the Kit for the IN TOUCH project, consisting of a set of activities inspired by the Tomás Saraceno. Aria exhibition which can be shared at home by children and adults together. Saraceno’s work makes us think about the future and about living together, two concepts that probably seem even more important to us at a time like this when we need to rethink the world around us and our relationship with the other living beings that inhabit it.
The Kit contains five activities that can be done either one after another or a one at a time, say one a day.

Download the Kit (Italian version)

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Photo: Giulia Del Vento

School activities have radically changed over the past few weeks too, so we’ve tailored our offer for students and teachers to cater for that change. We’ve developed four activities initially devised for classes and adapted them for the home. You can do them either on your own or as a family. The activities are a tool designed for teachers of all school levels comprising experiments inspired by a reflection on the future and on the concept of co-existence, both of them strongly inspired by the work of Tomás Saraceno. But the materials and instructions for using them are also a resource for parents who may wish to pursue activities combining thought, fun and sharing in this time of isolation and confinement in the home.

Here are the links to download them:

The Thread That Binds Us All (kindergarten and the first few years of primary schools, ages 4 to 8, Italian version)

The Shape of the Future (final years or primary school, ages 9 to 11, Italian version)

Cosmic Drawing (lower secondary school, Italian version)

The Oracle (upper secondary school, Italian version)

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Photo: Giulia Del Vento

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IN TOUCHBuilding a new relationship with our audience

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Being Together

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by Riccardo Lami

Talking about family means discussing a personal, intimate topic in the life of every individual, a topic to which everyone feels bound in one way or another on the basis of their specific experiences, relationships and circumstances. The way the topic was addressed in the Family Matters exhibition held at Palazzo Strozzi in 2014, which explored how artists handle the topic, does not mean wondering what the family is in their eyes, so much as exploring the way in which it plays a crucial role in everyone’s life, indeed more so today than ever before.

The title of John Clang’s series of photographs, Being Together (2010–14), is an expression that almost sounds out of place in these times echoing with such words as self-isolation, quarantine and social distancing. But at the same time, it appears to meet a deep-seated need that is more topical than ever, the need not to be alone, the need to be part of a “family”: both our birth family and our chosen family.

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John Clang, Being Together (Family), 2010. Courtesy the artist and Pékin Fine Arts, Beijing

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John Clang, Yeo family (New York, Sengkang), 2010, Courtesy the artista and Pékin Fine Arts, Beijing

Clang’s series comprises over forty portraits of families whose members are physically separated from one another, sometimes by even thousands of miles. In each photograph, through the use of a webcam projecting images on a 1:1 scale on the wall, several different people are connected with the place in which one or more members of their family are located. All the photographs are taken through live Internet connections as in any normal video call, and all the settings shown are the real homes of the people who live far away from their families. They are living rooms or sitting rooms, rooms filled with objects that reflect their daily lives. Each portrait creates a kind of “family reunion” in the non-place that is the photographic image, revealing a search for identity and belonging but, at the same time, also a deep sense of extraneousness and alienation.

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John Clang, Goh family (Bellevue, Bedok), 2011, Courtesy the artist and Pékin Fine Arts, Beijing

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John Clang, Lim family (London, Upper Serangoon), 2012, Courtesy the artist and Pékin Fine Arts, Beijing

A crucial aspect of the family portrait is the tension between the public and private dimensions, an element that underpins the work of Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner. In his video entitled Soundtrack (2013) Ben-Ner, his children and a few friends create a sequence of images that are superimposed on part of the soundtrack from the Hollywood movie The War of the Worlds. The alien invasion in Spielberg’s film becomes the soundtrack for a series of unlikely domestic events. The work’s strength lies in its ability to create a short-circuit between reality and the imagination, in which the figure of the family becomes an ambiguous space, safe and dangerous at the same time, the epicentre of the zany irony that dominates the entire video.

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Guy Ben-Ner, Soundtrack, 2013
Courtesy the artist and Pinksummer, Genova

Ever since the 1980s, in parallel with his output devoted to other issues, German photographer Thomas Struth has been working on a series entitled Familienleben  (“Family Life”), a series of portraits generated by specific families, with the families of friends, colleagues and acquaintances captured in their respective homes. Typical of Struth’s work is the strong formal control that in this case underscores the focus on each individual detail such as the sitters’ gazes and expressions, their clothing or the setting. Each work becomes a kind of magnifying glass that highlights each family’s specific nature but also its broader exemplary value. Struth asks his sitters to look straight at the camera, concentrating as hard as they can and staying as still as possible. “No smiling boys or girls, no happy mums or dads. What I’m really interested in is giving my audience a place to look at that is a little uncertain and at the same time a little ambiguous.”

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Thomas Struth, The Falletti Family, Florence, 2005
De Pont museum of contemporary art, Tilburg NL

Each picture portrays specific faces and situations but also becomes a model for the clearly defined construction of roles, hierarchies and dynamics. Alois Riegl had this to say about the portrait of a Dutch group in the 17th century: “[The family portrait] is neither an extension of the individual portrait nor yet the mechanical composition of individual portraits into a single whole. It is far more than that, it is the depiction of a corporation.” The individual portrayed is defined by his or her relationship with the other figures, i.e. as the father or mother of…, or the son or daughter of… and so forth. By the same token, people looking at a family portrait feel prompted to unravel the relationships on the basis of their own situation, linking the images to their own life, bonds and family. Unlike individual portraits or group portraits in which the sitters depicted are exalted in the features unique to them, the family portrait does not depict a distant or detached situation but a shared, family reality.

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Thomas Struth, Untitled (New York Family 1), New York, 2001, De Pont museum of contemporary art, Tilburg NL

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Thomas Struth, The Richter Family 2, Cologne, 2002, De Pont museum of contemporary art, Tilburg NL

The idea of the family portrait benefits from a counterpoised revisitation in Nan Goldin’s work. Famous for its heavily realistic, almost diary-like approach, her work has always revealed an inextricable link with her own life story. In her work, the family comes across as the result of an existential need: “all sticking together, based on the individual’s sense of incompleteness.” In her hands photography becomes a relational tool, and her entire career is a journey through images of encounter and connection: “I’ve never believed that a single portrait can determine a subject, but I do believe in a plurality of images testifying to the complexity of a life.” Her strong sense of spontaneity goes hand in hand with a stringent formal control that emerges quite clearly in her use of focus, in her construction of overturned perspective levels and in her careful composition of lights and lines.

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Nan Goldin, Guido with his mother, grandmother and shadow, Turin, 1999, Guido Costa Projects & Matthews Marks Gallery

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Nan Goldin, My parents kissing on their bed, Salem, MA, 2004, Courtesy the artist

In some images Nan Goldin conjures up a generational confrontation within a single family group, while in others she portrays such taboos as parents’ sexuality. As she says herself: “I don’t believe that a single portrait can express what a person is.” Her work does not set out to provide a sitter with a certificate of his or her identity so much as to capture a gaze that reveals a human relationship, transforming it into a memory capable of withstanding the passage of time.

 

Cover photo: John Clang, Tye family (Paris, Tanglin), 2012, Courtesy the artist and Pékin Fine Arts, Beijing

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Dining with Pontormo: recipes, concerns and conviviality

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by Ludovica Sebregondi

A hypochondriac, a lunatic, “a trifle wild and strange”, “fickle” or capricious, “inspired and a recluse”: that’s basically the description we’re given of Jacopo Carucci, who was born in Pontormo (Puntormo or Puntorme, the village near Empoli after which he was named) on 24 May 1494. According to Vasari he “never went to festivals or to any other places where people gathered together, so as not to be caught in the press; and he was solitary beyond all belief.” He even displayed an introverted demeanour in his own house, a “building erected by an eccentric and solitary creature,” in which the bedroom was reached via a ladder which Jacopo could winch up to prevent anyone else from entering the room without his knowledge. The building was situated in what was then the Via Laura (now Via della Colonna). It didn’t have much in the way of street frontage but it opened out onto an inner courtyard where Pontormo had a vegetable garden (“I bought canes and willow binding for the orchard”) and fruit trees (“I planted the peach trees in the morning”), and where he sought cool shade in the summer heat (“No sooner had I risen and dressed on Sunday morning than I went down to the orchard where it was cool”).

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The kitchen in the house where Pontormo was born. Photo: Comune di Empoli

So here we have a man who would have felt very much at home in the “quarantine” situation we’re all experiencing right now. He was a loner, especially during the extremely long stretch that he spent locked away from dawn to dusk behind the planks of a sealed workshop that he set up in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence from 1546 until his death on 1 January 1557. We know quite a bit about the last period in his life – from 11 March 1554 till his death – from a diary in which he jotted down all sort of things about his art, his world and his era. It’s a working notebook, a memoir and a crucial source of information about the eating habits of his day, all rolled into one.

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Diary of Jacopo da Pontormo, 1554–6,
Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, ms. Magl. VIII, 1490, c. 67r

Despite his introverted nature, Pontormo had a number of very close friends: thinkers and craftsmen, workers and entrepreneurs, and of course his pupils, including his favourite, Agnolo di Cosimo, known as Bronzino. He ate with them at home and at the tavern, choosing lamb, “black pudding and pig’s liver,” “fried lamb’s liver,” “pork boiled in wine,” “vermicelli,” “boiled pigeons,” “a duck,” an “India hen,” “chicken and veal,” “doves,” “chicken and hare,” “woodcock” and “farciglioni” (waterfowl), a “roll of sausages” and thrushes. He said that “wonderful pancakes” made him a happy man, but he was irritated when bad food made him feel ill: “this evening I ate some poor meat, which didn’t do me much good at all.”

When he was on his own, he’d make mutton broth or (boiled or fried) kid’s head, “offal,” or vegetables such as “good cabbage cooked by my own hand,” but he also ate bread with dried figes and cheese, or peas in the pod with ricotta. He was mad about eggs, “fried,” “in the pan” or “à la egg fish” as omelettes were known in Florence on account of their shape, or eggs with peas, asparagus or artichokes. Greens played a major role in his eating habits –  some he grew in his own orchard while others he’d buy at the market – but they were always a “filler”, in other words he’d eat them with bread which was his dietary staple, as indeed it was for most of the population at the time.

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Peas in the pod and pecorino. Photo: James O’Mara/O’Mara Mc Bride

To tie in with the exhibition entitled Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, Diverging Paths of Mannerism held in Palazzo Strozzi in 2014, the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi sponsored Maschietto Editore’s publication of Pontormo’s Table. Recipes by great chefs: timeless ingredients and artistic inspiration. Prompted by the consideration that the raw materials of Tuscan cuisine haven’t changed in five centuries, nineteen of the region’s star chefs were asked to come up with a recipe using the same basic ingredients as Pontormo mentions in his Diary. Nineteen star chefs, that is, and one very special figure, Dom Sisto Giacomini, a bibliophile and restorer of books, who offered a recipe in the tradition of the Certosa del Galluzzo monastery just outside Florence, for Trout in Egg White with Marjoram Leaves and Borage Flowers.

Gut a trout, wash it and stuff it with a clove of garlic and a small branch of rosemary; grill it on charcoal and fillet it. Pour a good glug of Tuscan extra-virgin olive oil into a frying pan and add the egg white, a pinch of salt, a few leaves of marjoram and some borage flowers. Place the trout fillets in the pan and place over the heat until the egg white has cooked through.

The recipe is intended to conjure up these words in Pontormo’s Diary: “On Sunday, the 10th of said month, I lunched with Bronzino and in the evening at 11 of the clock I dined on that fat fish and several small fry and I spent 12 soldi, for Attaviano was there; and in the evening the weather began to turn after several days of fine weather without rain.”

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Dom Sisto Giacomini at the Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino exhibition, standing in front of Pontormo’s Visitation (1514–16), Photo: James O’Mara/O’Mara Mc Bride

 

Top: Pontormo, Self-portrait, detail from the Deposition from the Cross, 1526–8, Florence, church of Santa Felicita, Capponi Chapel

Jeff Koons: Italy you can do this!

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“Italy, you can do this!” – with such words Jeff Koons addresses Italy within the Palazzo Strozzi online project IN TOUCH. The American artist will be the main subject of the next Autumn Palazzo Strozzi exhibition and his message shows awareness of the Coronavirus emergency but at the same time incites trust and underlines the strength of the Italian people. The extraordinary value of Italy’s cultural contribution to the world becomes for him a tool to face this crisis in his outcome, exhorting to make Italy a guide for a new “way in the future”.

I know that Italy is going through a lot right now and you have tremendous strength and you’re able to face the coronavirus and eventually will be able to defeat the virus. Italy is such an amazing country and as people you’ve gone through so much and you will defeat the virus. Culturally, the whole world is so appreciative of everything that you have given to us. And in the future, Palazzo Strozzi and all the other wonderful Italian institutions will also be able to give humankind a light, a direction in which we’ll be able to find our way in the future.
So, we thank you Italy for all your cultural contributions.
Palazzo Strozzi, thank you. I look forward so much to the future of your museum. Italy you can do this!

Scheduled at Palazzo Strozzi in autumn 2020, Jeff Koons. Shine is a groundbreaking exhibition dedicated to the American artist, the largest exhibition of his work ever hosted in Italy. Developed in close dialogue with Koons himself, and curated by Arturo Galansino and Joachim Pissarro, the exhibition will bring to Florence some of the most celebrated works of this master who, from the mid 1970s until the present day, forged a reputation as one of the most important figures of the global contemporary art scene.

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Jeff Koons, Rabbit, 1986, Collection Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Photo by Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago, © Jeff Koons

An artist that have entered our collective imagination, largely thanks to his unique and deft ability to marry high and popular culture, Koons regards “shine” as a key feature of his artwork. Indeed, “shine” is far more than an ornament and becomes the very substance of his art, as this reflective property brings together appearance and essence, splendorous and gleaming, being and seeming: an ambiguous game that characterizes Koons’s work in questioning our relationship with daily reality and with the very concept of a work of art.

Heaven in a Room

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by Ludovica Sebregondi

While many of us may be experiencing our home right now as a place where the current emergency is forcing us to stay holed up, isolation can be a life choice for some people. In fact it was just that for centuries. Think of the hermits who used to shut themselves away in tight spaces or even had themselves walled in, or the monks and friars who sought and found a space for meditation and prayer in their narrow cells. Artists have revisited and reinterpreted these spaces both in the past and today, often depicting them as immaculate “perspective boxes” in which human individuality is enhanced in a meditative reflection.

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Andrea di Bartolo, St. Catherine of Siena with Four Blessed Dominican Nuns (detail), 1394-1398 circa, Museo Vetrario di Murano.

Andrea di Bartolo (Siena, recorded 1389–1429), for example, in the predella for his panel painting of St. Catherine of Siena with Four Blessed Dominican Nuns, dated c. 1394–8 and now in the Museo Vetrario in Murano, shows the religious in four scenes of daily life in the cells in which, as Salvatore Settis writes, the narrative imparts “a meaning and an intensity” to solitude “designed to prompt the observer to identify with that visible example of piety” through an “intense relationship with the divine with which the narrative is infused.”

The painting was shown at Palazzo Strozzi’s Bill Viola. Electronic Renaissance exhibition in 2017, when the video artist’s work was displayed alongside the old master works that had been his source of inspiration, accompanying the development of his artistic style.

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Bill Viola, Catherine’s Room, 2001. Courtesy Bill Viola Studio.

Andrea di Bartolo’s polyptych inspired the video entitled Catherine’s Room (2001). Five colour videos arranged horizontally, like the panels of a predella, frame the room of a woman going about her daily chores throughout the day, always alone. Each screen shows a different moment of the day: morning, afternoon, sunset, evening and night. On the wall of the room there is a small window through which we catch a glimpse of the branches of a tree portrayed, in each screen, at a different moment in its yearly cycle, from when it blossoms in spring until it has shed all its leaves at the end of the year. Thus the videos do not only show us a full day with the changing light, they also show us the course of a year through the different phases of vegetation and the course of human life from waking up (signifying birth) to going to sleep (representing death).

Settis explains: “In Bill Viola’s installation, Catherine is not the saint of that name; this predella neither accompanies nor presupposes a religious icon. It is the tale of a woman’s actions captured in the intimacy of a solitary life, to some extent involving a sanctification of the daily routine as suggested by the implicit, yet strong, reference to the predella format and to the religious and narrative tradition that this entails. Thus the leading lady’s flowing gestures are transposed onto an almost ritual plane, thereby drawing our attention to her individuality. Catherine’s ego is expressively indicated through her body language, a solitary presence in a space built to resemble the stage of a theatre: always the same yet ever changing according to the way it is furnished. Alone with herself, as indeed is each one of us as we observe her, Catherine deserves our gaze for that very reason. Her solitude resembles us, her room is ours.”

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Marina Abramović, The House with the Ocean View, 2002-2018
New York, Abramović LLC, Courtesy of Marina Abramović Archives e Sean Kelly, New York, MAC/2017/072. Credit: Ph. Attilio Maranzano

That same solitude was also doggedly sought by Marina Abramović in The House with the Ocean View dated 2002, a performance that the artist herself tells us was spawned “by my wish to understand whether it is possible to use a simple daily routine with its rules and restrictions in order to purify myself.” The artist lived in three suspended interiors for twelve days without eating or speaking, before an audience in the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. Marina writes in Walk Through Walls: A Memoir: Becoming Marina Abramovic: “It was shortly after 11 September, people were in a receptive frame of mind and crowds of spectators came along, remaining seated on the ground for a long time, observing and reflecting on the experiment in which they were immersed. The visitors and I intensely felt each others’ presence. There was a shared energy in the room, and the heavy silence was broken only by the ticking of the metronome that I kept on the table […] I did everything – sitting, standing, drinking, filling the glass, having a pee, having a shower – with a sluggishness and an awareness that bordered on a trance.”

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Left: Andrea di Bartolo, Caterina da Siena fra beate domenicane (detail), 1394-1398 circa.
Center: Bill Viola, Catherine’s Room (detail), 2001.
Right: Marina Abramović, The House with the Ocean View, reperformance Tiina Pauliina Lehtimaki, 4-16 December 2018 Palazzo Strozzi.

The House with the Ocean View was re-performed in Italy for the first time by the performer Tiina Pauliina Lehtimaki in Palazzo Strozzi from 4 to 6 December 2018. Tiina, like Marina back in 2002, lived in silence for twelve days in three small rooms suspended inside the Marina Abramović. The Cleaner exhibition. Each one of the rooms appeared to echo the “perspective boxes” in Andrea di Bartolo’s predella, but also the scenes in Bill Viola’s Catherine’s Room. “Purification,” the effort of isolation and the practice of asceticism that we see in them appear to forge a direct, echoing link among the three works. What emerges from all of them is an attempt to imbue daily life with a sacred quality and to rethink our actions, even our most humdrum actions, by imparting new value to them: a reflection on strength of will and on the possibility of imparting new meaning to our lives in a new perspective.

Marina Abramović: my heart is with you

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“Italy, I love you. And my heart is with you”. With these words Marina Abramović greets the Italian people in an exclusive video for Palazzo Strozzi, sent as a personal contribution to the project IN TOUCH. The Serbian artist joins Ai Weiwei and Tomás Saraceno by sending a message of solidarity and encouragement emphasizing how Italians are demonstrating “great courage and great feeling of community and humanity” and that the COVID-19 crisis represents an emergency now global that must serve us as an opportunity to rethink our relationship with the planet: “human consciousness must change, our approach to the world and the planet must change”.

This is my message to Italy and to the people of Italy which I love deeply. I know this is a moment of crisis and the virus is everywhere but at the same time from the disasters we have to learn a lesson. And the Italian people are showing great courage, great feeling for community and humanity. We are going to fight this together. It is something is going to pass but what is really left is a very valuable experience that human consciousness should change, our approach to our world and our planet should change. This is the lesson that we have to learn. Italy, I love you. And my heart is with you.

Marina Abramović represents one of the most famous and influential figures of contemporary art world. With her works, in over 50 years of career, she has has revolutionised the very idea of performance art, putting her body to the test to probe her outer limits and her potential for expression. Marina Abramović. The Cleaner exhibition in 2018 represented a unique moment in the history of Palazzo Strozzi for its ability to engage people and to reflect on concepts such as vulnerability, empathy and trust, which today resonate strongly and take on a new value of inspiration and reflection.

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Photo Alessandro Moggi

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We’re all in the same boat

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by Riccardo Lami and Ludovica Sebregondi

“We’re all in the same boat” Marina Abramović wrote on the poster that she designed for the Barcolana regatta in Trieste in October 2018 and which was also displayed on the façade of Palazzo Strozzi for the duration of its exhibition entitled Marina Abramovic. The Cleaner, reflecting on the fact that “we are all on the same planet: those who love the sea love the land, and those who love the land love our future.” That slogan, originally coined in an environment-related context, is now taking on a broader significance in 2020: a message of mutual trust and hope together with a reflection on the need to forge a common front at such a difficult time. It has been quoted on countless occasions in recent weeks, first and foremost in the social media. On a wall in the popular Sant’Ambrogio market in Florence, it even appeared on a poster signed with explicit acknowledgement of its origin: “D’après Marina Abramović”, with the “B” of the Barcolana being replaced by the “C” of Covid-19.

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Left: Marina Abramović, We’re All in the Same Boat, manifesto per Barcolana 50, 2018.
Right: Michela Carlotta Tumiati, Lima, 2020.

Reflecting on her life and on the world in which she lives, Marina has always shone the spotlight on crucial aspects of the human condition, succeeding in communicating with the present better than any other artist, interpreting its inconsistencies and its urgencies. Faith in the community and opening up to others are goals that Marina reached over time, from her initial performances in which she probed her capacity for individual resistance, via the performances that she created with Ulay. One of those that appears to us today to be particularly strong and relevant to the present moment is Rest Energy (1980), an extreme portrayal of trust, in which Marina’s life was in Ulay’s hands for four minutes and twenty seconds, creating an unforgettable image of tension, a metaphor or our relationship with others. “I held a large bow and Ulay pulled back its string, his fingers holding the base of an arrow pointing straight at my chest. We were both in a state of constant tension, each of us pulling in their direction, with the risk that, if Ulay had loosened his grip, I could have ended up with an arrow in my heart. In the meantime, a small microphone was fixed to our chest so that the audience could hear our amplified heartbeat. And our hearts beat faster and faster.” (from Walk Through Walls: A Memoir, 2016).

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Ulay/Marina Abramović, Rest Energy, 1980, Amsterdam, LIMA Foundation.
Courtesy of Marina Abramović Archives e LIMA, MAC/2017/034

Over time, the flow of energy, the deep exchange that previously existed between her and Ulay embraced a growing number of people searching for “total vulnerability and openness to the audience.” Her manifesto symbolising this is The Artist is Present, a performance held at the MoMA in New York in 2010, in which over 1,675 people took turns to sit opposite the motionless and silent Serbian artist and to stare at her for as long as they wanted. On that occasion Marina perceived people’s “immense need to have even just a contact.” In March 2020 her words reflecting on our relationship with others are more topical than ever.

“Towards the end of The Artist is Present I felt a mental and physical tiredness that I had never felt before. Also, my point of view, everything that had seemed important to me before – daily life, the things I liked and the things I didn’t like – had completely changed.” Just as she has done throughout her artistic career, Marina reflects on deprivation in order to assign fresh importance to the essential things in life. Isolation, silence, the disappearance of a direct relationship with others help us to grasp the importance of staying in touch and of valuing the gaze and the presence of the people we have before us.

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Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present, 2010, New York, Abramović LLC.
Photo Marco Anelli. Courtesy of Marina Abramović Archives e Sean Kelly, New York, MAC/2017/071

“Are we so alienated from one another? How has society managed to make us so distant from one another? We send each other text messages without ever meeting, even though we live just around the corner from one another. That is how people’s solitude is formed. That chair didn’t stay empty for a single second. Visitors in the queue slept outside the museum, waiting for hours and hours, even to be able to come back again. What was happening? I look at you, I feel you, you’re being photographed and everyone else is looking at you, they’re scrutinising you and you don’t know where to look, other than inside yourself. And just when you’re really inside yourself, that’s the very moment when all your feelings and emotions rise to the surface and overwhelm you. That is why people start crying: it’s an all-pervading experience. That doesn’t happen in the privacy of our own homes because we’re no longer in touch with ourselves. But on the stage that I created for the purpose, something really did happen, something different that I’d never done before.” (Marina Abramović)

Tomás Saraceno: Reducing our movement

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Tomás Saraceno takes directly part to the project IN TOUCH with an exclusive video-message. Starting from the description of one of his artworks, Particular Matter(s) Jam Session, the artist invites us to reflect in a new way on ideas like sharing, awareness and solidariety.

“Our movement influences how fast or slow particles drift through the air. Reducing our movement, and slowing the particles will help everyone to stay safe. In solidarity with Palazzo Strozzi, Italy and the World, let’s move differently for better times.” (Tomás Saraceno)

 

Hello, my name is Tomas Saraceno. And I want to talk about an artwork which is exhibited at Palazzo Strozzi. It is an artwork that consists of a light beam, that illuminates what is floating today through the air. There are millions and billions of particles that move and their movement depends on how we move.
If for example, I talk very close… or I move, some of the particles in my pullover… you can see these particles are released into the air. And if I talk a little bit further from it these particles start to move much more slowly.
What you hear, in Palazzo Strozzi – you what you can hear now this video – is the sound these particles produce when they move. That means every time that I move faster, you can hear the sound moving faster. It’s this “beep beep beep”… If we move slower, the particles produce a different sound. This means it is a way to sonify the way how we are moving through the earth or the movement of particles into the air. This means, if in this time we need to move slower, the sound would be different and the particles will move slower. This means in solidarity for all the people in Italy, in Europe and in the world.
We hope we can become conscious about our actions. How the air it moves today and how much our movement can influence the way… Of how also we can restrict this movement of some of the particles that became so harmful for many people today on the planet earth.

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Tomás Saraceno, Particular Matter(s), 2020. Installation view of Aria, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2020. © Photography by Ela Bialkowska, OKNOstudio

A visionary artist whose multidisciplinary practice encompasses art, social and life sciences, Tomás Saraceno (Argentina, 1973) creates immersive works and participatory experiences that suggest a new way of living in our world by forging connections with such non-human phenomena as spiders, dust particles and plants, which become players in his works and metaphors of the universe. As his work unfolds along a path from the courtyard to the exhibition halls of Palazzo Strozzi, Saraceno interacts with the historical context by creating an original dialogue between the Renaissance and the contemporary world – a shift from the idea of ‘man at the centre of the world’ to the concept of ‘man as part of a universe’ in which a new harmony can be sought.

AI WEIWEI: Stay home, stay together

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Ai Weiwei sends a video message to Florence and Italy as a personal contribution to the new Palazzo Strozzi project IN TOUCH. A reflection on the Coronavirus emergency, with a clear statement: “Stay home, stay together“.

Hello. In this very difficult moment I wish you all well – as we all know Coronavirus is a challenge of this special time. Many people are suffering. There’s no border, no nationality or different class or religion can really escape from this almost very democratic virus. As we know there is no clear solution for something happened very unpredictable and also mysterious – with so much uncertainty that deeply affects our life, and many many people already lost their life.
And the same will continue for a while. This makes us understand that life is fragile and we can never really take this peaceful life for granted and we have to fight, we have to struggle. That requires solidarity, requires understanding, scientific research but more it requires our perspective on life itself.
Life is a struggle and life is full of surprise and I think this moment we need to be fully aware of the situation and to have some kind of positive attitude: stay home and stay together.
Thank you.

A dissident artist with a leading voice, Ai Weiwei represents one of the most influential personalities of our time. In 2016 he was the protagonist of  AI WEIWEI. LIBERO, a greatly successful exhibition that launched a new course dedicated to contemporary art at Palazzo Strozzi.

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