Invisible cities of Claudia Virginia Vitari, Arts Santa Monica, Barcellona
Art News Turin
04/06/2013The exhibition, “Invisible Cities” will open Tuesday, June 4th, 2013 at 19:00 hours at the Arts Santa Monica art gallery, La Rambla 7.
The introduction of the catalogue, edited by the Berlin Art Projects, is a work by anthropologist Martín Correa Urquiza, founder of “Radio Nicosia”, and the psychologists Márcio Mariath Belloc y Karol Veiga Cabral. Critical texts by Roberto Mastroianni y Elisa Teodoro will be on sale at The Private Space, Barcelona.
On June 11th, 2013 from 19:00-20:30 there will be a performance/open-radio in collaboration with "Radio Nikosia”. On this occasion, the idea is to broadcast a program based on Claudia Vitari’s exhibition, “Invisible Cities” and talk about each Nicosian participant’s experience in the creation of Vitari’s final work.
The exhibition, “Invisible Cities” is a representation of the aim of Claudia Virginia Vitari’s artistic and theoretical research journey which began with her works “Melancholie” and “Percorsogalera”, (works inspired/based on the/her experiences in the Halle an der Saale psychiatric hospital in Germany and at the Casa Circondariale Lorusso e Cutugno de Turin) and of what she has seen in Nicosia (the “non-institutional” experience from “Radio Nikosia”, in Barcelona) and Nicosioans which was fundamental and had a profound impact in the definition of the artist’s interests, poetry and expression.
The exhibition is comprised of seventeen works (fourteen cubes laid on the floor and three exhibitors) and two videos (a documentary done in collaboration with Andrea Testini and a video installation done in collaboration with the artist, Fernando Dominguez Cozar), which will be projected on the Ramblas. Through these works, Vitari rearticulates the scientific cataloging’s logic of lombrosian heritage (which can be seen in the group of the fourteen cubes that give shape to “Invisible Cities – The Mask”) and in the linguistic discourse of the dominant narration on marginalization, the insanity and mental imbalance (in the three narrative modules of “Invisible Cities – Nikosia”).
There is a deep awareness of the anthropological value of the institutions in Claudia Virginia Vitari’s work: The artist is aware and acknowledges that the “realization of what is human” continuously responds to training dynamics and institutional, communicative and symbolical interactions that Foucault would define as the “micro-physics of power” and that can be evidently observed in marginalization practices such as seclusion discourse, mediation and psychiatrization. The “Total Institutions” become, therefore, the exemplary field of study that can simultaneously be the object of artistic analysis and expression with the aim to shed light on the stories, symbolic and material constraints employed by society to organize itself in a “bio-political” manner, and resulting in forms of inclusion and exclusion. With this, Vitari presents an artistic “phenomenon of the invisible”, true to the idea that art should bring light to the senses of all that remains hidden in the shadows, invisible, and make it comprehensible in its deepest dynamics. Thus, the logic of scientific cataloging is, as Stuart Hall would say, “rearticulated”, so that the same issues (scientific and literary citations, patients’ or inmates’ stories, etc.) that legitimize marginalization can become elements of a story about the individuality, courage and dignity of a person. Through her exhibition, Claudia creates a new “order of discourse”, different to that of the “Total Institutions” cage, that acknowledges the marginalized, violated and wounded human beings giving them back their dignity and the voice, that the institutions’ “rhetoric of truth” tend to portray as dangerous, not self-sufficient, criminalistics.
The employment of materials, writings and figuration allow the artist to highlight the symbolic and physical margins that separate inclusion and exclusion: the cubes and iron frames of the exhibitors become a metaphor of the chains imposed by "total institutions". The glass and resin, diaphanous and transparent materials, take the value of a lens through which one could observe more closely the marginalized human beings while producing a gelatinous distance that helps perceive social distance between the "normal "and" abnormal” and rupture culturally organized with the excluded. The screen, meanwhile, provides a view to the practice of writings that the hegemonic discourses produce and that the "regimes of truth" impose and with which they legitimize the marginalization and exclusion and, in turn, symbolically and physically stamp the marginalized human being. Thus, the exhibit presents fragments of humanity (the faces), arising from the "cubes" as footprints of the individual stories of the people or that speak with the writing of the "exhibitors", creating figurative fables (writings, words, portraits) with printed texts by authors such as Erving Goffman, Kafka, Foucault or epic or ancient writings as the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Claudia Virginia Vitari is a "storyteller of forms of humanity". She offers an epic narrative of the everyday life of those who are subjected to the training and institutionalization processes and, aware that the institutions’ symbolic and material links respond to "rhethorics of truth” used to cover logics of power and that people, in some way, can dodge through processes of release based on the narrative and symbolic rearticulation of themselves and the world.
Arts Santa Monica La Rambla 7/08002 Barcelona
Tel 0034 93 567 November 10
www.artssantamonica.cat
Opening: Tuesday June 4, 2013, 19:00 hours
5 - June 15
Tues-Fri 11h-21h
Saturday 11h-14h/16h-20h
Closed Sunday and Monday
Free admission