“We dedicate an exhibition to young Italian artists every year as we consider this part of the yearly exhibition programme to be a fundamental element in our main mission as a foundation” says founder and president of the foundation Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
The exhibition is part of ENVIRONMENT YEAR at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, meaning the environment not only in ecological or environmentalist terms but also referring to the space that surrounds us, the environment in which our daily lives are developed and transformed. This year’s exhibition and events programme will be connected to environmental issues up till the beginning of 2008.
For Ambient Tour, the exhibition space has been split into three sections so as each artist could privately and independently develop their own project. The exhibition is not a group show in actual fact, instead it reunites three independently thought up projects specifically for the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.
The artist Flavio Favelli (b. 1967 Florence, lives and works in Savigno, Italy) has the tendency to choose enclosed spaces and investigates the links between places, objects and memory. His project for the exhibition, My Deep Dark Blu (Abissi), develops from his conception of the environment as oppressive and uncanny. The works in the show, created by the artist through the montage of found objects, recount fragments of personal experience and collective history. The artist’s inspiration for the whole exhibition comes from the DC9 airplane that crashed in the sea near Ustica on 27 June, 1980.
Favelli has dedicated one piece in particular to this tragic incident, in the form of a work made to measure for the airplane - the only remaining witness to this unsolved mystery. Photographs, sculptures, a series of Italian and Mediterranean maps and analysis on the relationship between the body and the environment through a selection of prototype clothes created specially by the artist are the elements that complete his project.
Christian Frosi (b. 1973 Milan where he lives and works) welcomes us to his project room with 10 capital Os. Through unstable and open systems that cannot be controlled, like granular forms and gasses, the artist creates an environment in which the public experiences the gap between real and imaginary spaces.
The project develops from Duna (Dune), created by pouring sand on a lightweight structural form that enables the sand grains to invade the space as an impalpable, suspended matter, transforming its perception. An inflatable zeppelin flies above the dune, suggesting a different point of view. These two sculptural objects are surrounded by small, abstract objects, which are meant as contemporary, commonplace, playful forms. Among other works, there is also the video work Ricostruzione approssimativa di un Manifesto Spazialista per la televisione, trasmesso il 17 maggio 1952 dalla RAI di Milano (Approximated reconstruction of the Spatialist Television Manifesto, screened on May 17th 1952 for RAI Television in Milan), which is the imaginary and experimental simulation of an existing video inspired by Lucio Fontana’s Spatialist Manifesto.
The artist Deborah Lingorio (b. 1972 Brindisi, Italy, lives and works in Berlin) project is entitled Flussi (Flows) and is dedicated to the Italian coasts of the Mediterranean: bioclimatic architecture and sea environments seen through the reflections and the images collected by the artist in 2006. Five videos, photographs and maps create a physical and mental journey. In one word, Flussi is able to express many concepts: flows of energy, stream of consciousness, sea currents, biological cycles, air currents, the course of history, the flow of data, mental associations, cultural waves, social trends, migratory flows.
Images and sounds are gracefully merged within the exhibition space, like a symphony of different elements born from the interaction of sound, images and video to a complex environment filled with events and narratives.
Participating artists Christian Frosi, Flavio Favelli, Deborah Logorio
