Artist residency at Fabbrica del Vapore. Now showcasing the artists' unexpected slips.

The second phase of the artist residency project FUTURA kicked off on June 29, 2023. Art as an exploratory resource. Interact. Deflect. Attest, promoted by the City of Milan - Culture with the aim of giving the Fabbrica del Vapore a function as a creative laboratory, a place of creation and production, as well as an exhibition space.

The Ex Cisterne space of the Fabbrica del Vapore will host the exhibition Slip Angles until July 30, 2023: six Italian artists selected for the residency - Benedetta Fioravanti, Valentina Furian, Nicoletta Grillo, Lisa Martini, Giovanna Repetto, Davide Sgambaro - present on this occasion the works conceived and created during the first period of their residency, the result of intense work carried out with project curator Giacomo Zaza and the international guest artists.

The six artists move in various directions, reflecting on the concept of territory and collective force, or the involvement of the visitor and the relationships between gaze and passivity, and dwelling on the confrontation with the phobias that arise in today’s life.

The artistic practices in the exhibition take different courses than a pre-established line and political correctness: they are unexpected slips, diversions, differential poetic and political directions. Hence the title Slip Angles, which refers to the slip angle of a vehicle’s wheels, or that difference between the direction in which a vehicle is pointing and the direction in which it is actually going. “It is exemplary that the artistic experiences in residence at Fabbrica del Vapore can be compared to the angle of skidding: their force of skidding increases to the point of slipping into dimensions where our identity and our body are taken into a shipwreck of the senses,” the curator explained.

Starting from a research on the everyday, Benedetta Fioravanti ’s investigation focuses on the meanings and symbologies rooted in the history and identity of every place, whether it is physical (the urban space) or virtual (the digital archive). Her video images mix personal and collective experiences through interaction with context. They capture a multitude of visual sources from everyday social life, while also incorporating historical-political moments and literary references.

Valentina Furian works with moving images and multi-sensory installations. She places the visitor in relationship with the animal world, introducing it in the urban context, creating imaginative and surreal atmospheres, aimed at bringing out the relationship between man and nature, between ordinary and wild. Furian implements an openness to the wild, lost or hidden world, breaking out of specific social norms.

Nicoletta Grillo ’s work expands the approaches of documentary photography using performative practices and narratives in written or audio form. Her projects reflect on the concept of “resonance”: they subject past events to our present, distant geographies to shareable biographical realms, or single subjects to plurality. Single images combined with other images, or writings, set up a relational poetics.

Lisa Martini expresses herself through various mediums: from photography to performance. She fine-tunes a meta-narrative that unfolds through research based on the observation of relational rituals that characterize contemporaneity. Images sometimes uncovered by chance and reborn from oblivion act as “vectors” of a suspended time, a shared emotionality and an empathic memory, somewhere between fable and reality.

Through a multidisciplinary practice, Giovanna Repetto studies the evolution of man’s relationship with the image and its space, exploring the states between real and virtual. What matters is not the image of something, but it is the something, that is, the environment and the situation of connection triggered by its intervention, that can configure an “atmosphere,” the experience of a current “landscape.”

Davide Sgambaro moves through different productions: from public work to large installations, from sound interventions to performances. Objects become focal points for reflection on the state of precariousness that afflicts the individual in the age of the new economy. Sgambaro discusses the variable trait of reality by bringing to light the imaginative possibilities from minimal gestures and interventions related to human beings and their anxieties.

The third phase of the Futura project, called Attestare, will be held from September 20 to November 5, 2023, at the Fondazione Stelline: here, additional unseen projects by the six Italian artists-in-residence will be presented together with the works of the international artists hosted during the first phase of the project, in an exhibition synthesizing and returning the entire residency experience.

In addition, the entire journey and the two exhibitions (at Fabbrica del Vapore and Fondazione Stelline) will be documented in a book and a documentary.

We thank Careof for their collaboration.

Image: Valentina Furian, Presente (2018; film frame)

Artist residency at Fabbrica del Vapore. Now showcasing the artists' unexpected slips.

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