The collaboration between BiM and C41 opens the door to the creation of a space dedicated to art and experimentation, as an integral part of the regeneration process implemented in the Bicocca area. It will therefore not only be an encounter with Milan but also with the internationality of the stories that will temporarily inhabit the building, under the curatorship of C41.
This intervention comes to life in two spaces within the BiM complex: the first floor, which constitutes the actual gallery (C41 Gallery), and the ground floor, dedicated to a preview of all the contents, also accessible to those just passing through (C41 Panorama).
C41 Gallery is an experimental space in which to explore the boundaries of contemporary visual culture. Throughout the year, a select group of artists will inhabit the space, creating a site-specific contribution that will temporarily transform the very nature of the gallery. The limited duration of each intervention, as well as the overall project, will make it possible to investigate uncertain territories without presuming to dominate them but rather to explore and share them.
C41 Panorama is a place that offers a closer view of things that are happening far away. It is an invitation to stop, to discover more. To take the time to be transported elsewhere. It is a space that contains many other spaces but also an invitation to discover what’s happening on the first floor. An exhibition before the exhibition, where you can change the order of things to discover what lies behind them.
C41 Panorama opens to the public today, March 29, with two site-specific installations. The first one, Beyond the Horizon, is a permanent artwork created by Patrick Tuttofuoco; the second, Tutto ciò che genera luce è destinato a esplodere, includes a series of temporary works created by Leonardo Caffo (philosopher) and Valentina Viviani (artist)—together Mater Matuta Studio—under the curation of C41.
In Patrick’s work, created with neon tubes in shades of white and fuchsia, the experience of vision and the perception of the landscape are exhausted, together, in that imaginative line that defines and delimits them. Faced with the curvature of the horizon, the gaze finds itself attracted to what it cannot capture, constrained in its reflection—alive in that precise space-time. It is within this tension, attentive and vigilant, that a panorama takes shape. Tuttofuoco bends this line of light, symbolically exposing the two poles that inhabit the phenomenon: the human gaze and its subject, its natural counterpart. The classical profile, portrayed with open eyes, meets and merges with the formal and erotic perfection of the orchid. The work becomes a witness to what is happening beyond itself, inviting the viewer to a meditative attitude, predisposed to the admiration of the panorama.
The intervention by Leonardo and Valentina, together with Mater Matuta Studio, is instead outlined around the theme of emptiness and waiting and transforms the space into a place that questions itself. The contents displayed on the ground floor are the result of the exploration of the areas in progress, experienced by the philosopher and the artist as a “residence in the unfinished”.
Caffo and Viviani investigate emptiness, dividing their research into three moments: a meditation session that reconsecrates the lighting company formerly based at the site of intervention, seeking to show how every place is in itself sacred and playing on the ambivalence of illumination; a conversation between different languages, to show the emptiness of communication today and the need to try to understand each other even when the other’s point of view is clearly incomprehensible; and finally a performance to show how the presumed emptiness is actually an alternative version of full, where remains and dust become a playground aimed at restoring fullness, above all to our relations with places, “because the absolute and fullness are everywhere”.
The audiovisual outputs live in three different monitors and respectively tell the three moments. On the wall in front of the monitors, there is instead a series of author photographs created to translate the dynamic process that generated the intervention into a static image. The installation is supported by bibliographic research jointly curated by Leonardo Caffo and C41, which gives critical strength and conceptual solidity to the entire operation.
Caffo and Viviani thus created the “zero exhibition”, the starting point of the entire activation, which will see the German artist Isabelle Wenzel as the next protagonist (May 8, 2023).
