Lucca, Francesca Banchelli's Afternoon installation at the Scompiglio

A large installation that takes its cue from French philosopher Alain Badiou ’s theory of the event to take the public to a desert without place or time, where singular encounters take place and something new and unexpected happens every time: this is Afternoon by Francesca Banchelli (Montevarchi, 1981), curated by Angel Moya Garcia, the work that can be admired until July 16, 2023, at the Tenuta dello Scompiglio in Lucca. Or rather: it is possible to enter the work, the feeling is that of being inside one of Francesca Banchelli’s paintings.

The Tuscan artist’s work focuses mainly on the languages of painting and performance, which are often articulated in multifaceted installations. In these complex devices, the artist’s interest in the subject of time often emerges as a way of investigating the potential of narrative, understood as a kind of storytelling, a rhythm or situation that generates movement and could contain a whole constellation of moments, encounters or events.

His imaginaries include dreamlike visions of coexistence among different living beings and between them and natural objects, which hold time within them, or those inanimate ones through which we understand ourselves. A perception of reality that becomes an awareness of these relationships on a physical, emotional and psychological level in order to seek the complexity of theevent. Banchelli uses time as a key to finding balance in the encounter between the self and the world, a reconciliation between the individual, the collective, nature and the happenings on earth. For her, it is essential that art is not only a value in itself, but that it can activate certain situations, maintaining a strong tension, a direct relationship and involvement with the viewer.

In this sense, an event, observed from a philosophical point of view, happens in certain contingencies or in certain places that cannot be defined concretely. It is a revolutionary instant in which the possibility of surprise, generated often by an encounter that occurred in an unusual measure, derives in a vacuum where equilibrium is lost, followed by a return to normalcy but with something more, a knowledge, a response, a learning. And it is in the destabilizing aspect of this encounter that all the performative research that Banchelli presents in a cadenced manner within the exhibition is based.

The environmental installation Afternoon, while starting from Badiou’s reflections, nevertheless wants to emancipate itself from theoretical thought through an imaginative vision that observes and reflects on the rarefaction of the place where the event can happen. Afternoon is an alienating landscape, an alienating, abstract territory where a thought, an era, a moment ends and begins again, where some performers (Sara Capanna, Barbara Carulli, Chiara Casiraghi, Giulia Gilera. Ana Luisa Novais, Emanuel Santos, Michele Scappa and Luca Zanni) meet and always make something different happen. It is the garden that germinates the event, a fundamental and sometimes invisible world, a space of the imagination without yet a name. In the space, a series of silent corridors, ephemeral and extremely fragile architectures, interrupted and fragmented environments or actions that activate the installation, reveal a situation in which the complexity and lightness of the evolution of human presence on Earth coexist contextually, without paradoxes. A work in which the visitor is called upon to ambulate, to walk, to observe, to confront the noise of his or her own steps in order to enter a suspended world in which anything can happen, in which he or she is also called upon to provoke, to experience or to cause the event.

Afternoon follows a precise schedule: the performance takes place on May 6 - May 20 - June 17 - July 1 - July 15 from 3 p.m. until 7 p.m. For information: www.delloscompiglio.org

Courtesy of Tenuta dello

Courtesy of Tenuta dello

Courtesy of Tenuta dello.

Lucca, Francesca Banchelli's Afternoon installation at the Scompiglio

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