Camilla Gurgone and Giulia Di Franco
Curated by spazioSERRA
Critical text by Silvia Maiuri
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On display from 21/04/2022 to 19/05/2022
Opening Thursday 21/04/2022 at 19:00
Lancetti railway station, Milan
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Camilla Gurgone (Lucca, Italy, 1997) and Giulia Di Franco (Teramo, Italy, 1998)
Camilla Gurgone lives and works between Milan and Rome. In 2020 she graduated in Sculpture at RUFA (Rome), currently attending the MA in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA (Milan). Since 2022 she has been part of the Omuamua collective.
Giulia Di Franco lives and works between Rome and Istanbul. In 2020 she graduated in Painting at RUFA (Rome).
Both develop installations in function of the public, preceded by performative actions carried out in solitude or by others: in the case of Gurgone by loved ones and strangers, for Di Franco by animals and natural elements.
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Silvia Maiuri (Messina, Italy, 1991) is a theatrical critic for Il Pickwick magazine, curator and member of the Collettivo Flock, a curatorial group that operates in Sicily in the field of contemporary art. As press office she managed the communication of theaters and festivals, as well as participated in international festivals such as the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Santarcangelo dei Teatri and Roma Europa Festival. After graduating in Sciences of Cultural Heritage at the University of Milan, she obtained a master's degree in theater criticism from the Silvio D'Amico National Academy of Dramatic Art. In 2019 she completed her studies with a diploma in art communication at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo.
We thank Lumache della Brianza and Betonwood for giving us the opportunity to collaborate, and for following us in the planning and realization of the site-specific exhibition Uncertainty excites me.
Uncertainty excites me
Uncertainty excites me is the site-specific exhibition by Camilla Gurgone e Giulia Di Franco proposed within venerazioneMUTANTE, the exhibition season of spazioSERRA dedicated to the transformation of site-specific works during their permanence. The exhibition is visible from Thursday 21 April 2022 to Thursday 19 May 2022 at the Lancetti railway station.
The artistic researches of Gurgone and Di Franco develop through the documentation and the narration of events that take on new forms with the passage of time. Gurgone's work starts from the desire to annotate one's daily life and to create stories by cataloging events that have occurred and their reorganization. With her works, the intimate daily sphere is called into question, it is reconverted with temporal paradoxes that cannot be controlled by man. Di Franco studies the mutability of forms, observing nature and natural events. She is constantly looking for elements that reveal the density of time, that make memories and objects fragile and unstable. In her works she shows how the weakness possessed by objects left to decompose is actually capable of giving life to new compositions that are equally attractive.
The site-specific installation Uncertainty excites me consists of a central structure on various levels made of wood fiber, in which several hundred snails of different species live and, during their stay, they will feed on the work and change it. Around the structure and inside it there are plants, sculptures, flowers, images on paper: materials entirely edible by the snails which, strongly attracted by cellulose, eat everything that contains them.
The wooden structure becomes an imaginary island ruled by gastropods, which freely inhabit the space, surrounded by all the elements necessary to conduct their life cycle. The photographs and sculptures appear as holy cards and fetishes created by the snails themselves, intended for the representation and worship of their species, but at the same time they are material to feed on. The printed images portray fleeting memories, destined to become nourishment for the snails, real obstinate and voracious consumers who nullify anything. Silvia Maiuri writes in the critical text accompanying the exhibition: "As in a ritual of absurd veneration and cancellation of the present, which immediately becomes the past, the inhabitants of the island engulf what we could interpret as their totems. The present, in fact, has to do with uncertainty, as the title explains, a fascinating uncertainty that excites".
In Uncertainty excites me Gurgone and Di Franco turn spazioSERRA into a terrarium, from whose windows the public becomes part of a process of undoing the past that slowly transforms, giving life to a new present, but also becoming nourishment for the future of the gastropods themselves. Maiuri writes again: “Uncertainty excites me tells all this in the limited space of a glass “greenhouse” in the Milanese underground. An underground that has the same importance as the above in this city that lives and moves quickly, tending to produce and consume objects of worship, fleeting languages, of short duration, effective for the time of use, soon to be replaced by other languages, which respond to new needs".