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PICKPOCKET

Fondazione Zimei, as part of its new project Someplace Sometime dedicated to the relationship between art and public space, is proud to announce the exhibition PickPocket, curated by Massimiliano Scuderi. The occasion involves 18 international artists in reactivating of the space of Michetti Theatre. The project, born in collaboration with the Municipality of Pescara, is freely inspired by a 1959 film by Robert Bresson and comes from an idea by the artist Renata Lucas.

In the film, the main character is a young man who tests his skill in various ways at stealing the wallets of unfortunate people in Paris metro, refining his technique day after day. Bresson’s work seems to be the most fitting metaphor in the interpretation of contemporary creativity, always in between radicalism and subjectivity on the one hand, and the idea of the limit on the other, of what is untouchable. Taking possession of something is, in fact, closely connected to the existential condition of loss and lack, as sides of the same coin. This disruptive logic is the foundation of the 20th century avant-garde

The exhibition is made up of different artistic attitudes and processes that range within these conceptualextremes; reality is phagocytised and returned in a new conformation, for a new foundation, creating the preconditions for a model that begins with a staging. The theatre is thus reactivated as a specific context for a great social sculpture in which all participants are involved.

Invited artists:
Leyla Aydoslu
Gaëlle Choisne
Adriano Costa
Caterina De Nicola
Claire Fontaine
Jana Ilková
Invernomuto
Francesco João
Renata Lucas
Marco Pio Mucci
Valerio Nicolai
Berenice Olmedo
Aronne Pleuteri
Ser Serpas
Martin Soto Climent
Andréa Spartà
Santo Tolone
Luca Vitone

SEVEN SEGMENT DISPLAY

Francesco João
curated by Massimiliano Scuderi and Marco Nicodemo

The collaboration between Zimei Foundation and La Saleriana Collection continues, on this occasion presenting the solo exhibition of Francesco João curated by Massimiliano Scuderi and Marco Nicodemo. This appointment continues the program of exhibitions within the prestigious venue of Palazzo Cavallerini-Lazzaroni, Via dei Barbieri n. 7 in Rome, at Spazio Sette Library.
Francesco João (Milan 1987) lives and works between São Paulo, Brazil and Milan and is certainly one of the most interesting artistic personalities of recent years. Aware of the multiple aspects that pictorial practice induces to consider, his research is defined around conceptual aspects of the pictorial language, such as the processual ones and the structures that articulate the image of painting, declining it from time to time, in its different forms. Starting from the deconstruction of the pictorial gesture, the artist questions its principles and means, analyzing not only the basic elements, such as the canvas, as much as the temporal dimension, in a return to the degree zero of painting.
The exhibition divided into two rooms, consists of a series of works bearing the numerical language of the seven segment display-a particular device with ten numerical digits, through the lighting of Seven luminous segments-that constituted in the 1970s the common image of a futuristic time, thanks to the first digital LED devices that adopted its graphic combinations.

An idea of the future that today we read in retrospect with a certain degree of obsolescence, compared to the plastic purposes it proposed. Alongside these works, series of 12 gouaches and acrylics on raw canvas, begun in 2016-in the first room he presents a series of sculptures and ready-mades from objects he owns, made of various materials. With this large installation he declines in sculptural form the themes of transcendence, economics, time and function.
The artist affirms: The aesthetics of SSD refers to the idea of the future as seen from the past: for me it is a subject that represents a pretext for making “painting” because I see painting as something constantly projected forward (avant-garde?) since cave times where, however, “avant-garde” was replaced by a “function,” in that case, propitiatory to hunting and therefore economic. I have always been interested in the relationship between transcendence and economics. A series of objects, carefully chosen by the artist, are arranged in the palace’s frescoed hall to investigate things and data unmediated by consciousness and unenlightened by deciphering and contextualizing their meaning.
What do the DreamCast video game console, produced in the late 1990s by SEGA, and a tipiti, a kind of straw fabric press used to dry cassava roots, have in common? These are objects that, by their nature, will outlast our oblivion1.

curated by Massimiliano Scuderi and Marco Nicodemo

Wor(L)ds

Bob and Roberta Smith, Peter Fend
Curated by Massimiliano Scuderi and Marco Nicodemo

Words create worlds and, at the same time, question them, this is the theme of the exhibition Wor(L)ds, featuring works by artists Bob and Roberta Smith and Peter Fend, curated by Massimiliano Scuderi and Marco Nicodemo.

The occasion arises from the collaboration between the Zimei Foundation and the La Saleriana association, which will articulate, starting with this appointment, a program of exhibitions within the prestigious venue of Palazzo Cavallarini Lazzaroni, Via dei Barbieri n. 7, in Rome.

The artists involved, Bob and Roberta Smith (1963 Reading, UK), a pseudonym for Patrick Brill, and Peter Fend (Columbus, Ohio,1950)-both operating in a practice close to activism-have constructed critical spaces in which art is considered and employed as a political yet aesthetic tool.

The former, inspired by an encounter with another great artist, James Lee Byars, who at the ’93 Venice Biennale gave him one of his gold stickers bearing the words “Your presence is your best performance,” works not so much in defining a public art as in bringing art into the public. This modus operandi induces individuals to self-determine themselves through art practice-to emphasize his pedagogical intent that he exercises through engagement in schools.

The second, Peter Fend, bases his research on the potential of the world’s watersheds and refounding communities using tools that can be deduced from art history. He remixes history and geography and, bordering on the utopian, rethinks the boundaries of states by focusing on the opportunities arising from the use of watersheds. It is a practice in architecture that meets four requirements listed by Leon Battista Alberti for a city to have air, water, space in which to move and defense.

The Stacks-texts with a metric that punctuates geometries within the page-represent memoranda preparatory to organizing the viewer’s thinking in understanding the future potential for more creative and, perhaps because of that, more ethical communities.

The exhibition is produced with the support of the Spazio Sette bookstore and with Roscioli.

Curated by  Massimiliano Scuderi e Marco Nicodemo.

Parolacce

curated by Massimiliano Scuderi

In his practice, Alek O. (Buenos Aires, 1981) blends the common notion of ready-made with crafts, embroidery and other traditional artistic forms. Poised between transformation and conservation, he strips the common visual aspects of objects and replaces them with geometric abstraction. Inverting the design perspective, the artist favors recreation over creation and deconstruction over construction.

The exhibition, curated by the artistic director of the Foundation Massimiliano Scuderi, tends to favor the author’s reappropriation, beyond the paradigms of everyday life, of a more hidden and less frequented time: The time to show oneself in her reverse. Alek O. is interested in things, and not in objects, because ‘things’ have a broader meaning, they represent everything that is at heart, which can be discussed in public because it touches the common good, as the philosopher Remo Bodei says.

They are elaborate materials, built by man, who works according to artisanal cultures and traditions that are declined in a personal and intimate alphabet, giving voice to new possibilities for others, as evocative and symbolic tools. Alek O. awaits her time by dismantling and reassembling tapestries, building totemic structures, subverting the rules of geometry, replicating ways that link craftsmanship to the historical avant-gardes.
The title refers to the exceptional nature of the swear word, as of a recreational and childish time, an attitude that seems to rediscover the art of periphrasis, that is, the way in which to make reality better understandable while avoiding euphemisms. The bad word represents an elaborate strangeness behind which the most original expression is hidden. The objects, chosen for their emotional quality, are removed from their original and daily use: wood from a bookcase, metal from a discarded key, wool from a sweater or a pair of used gloves. Thus, the works serve as a metonymy for the artist, or for people who have had a connection with the material.

curated by Massimiliano Scuderi

Fondazione Zimei opens the autumn season by presenting the exhibition The Pescara’s recordings, curated by Massimiliano Scuderi, in which the artist Franck Scurti operates a divergent narration of the urban reality through large site-specific installations.

The author, in his work, carries out a resemantization of various elements, which he defines “already socialized”, often belonging to the urban and everyday context. This specific project comes from a research operated on the site and starts from the artist’s idea of narrating the city buzz; which is the background noise – consisting of fragments of materials and building waste – that ‘plays’ plastically in a constant manner inside the urban space and is peculiar of every place.

Franck Scurti, starting from maquettes created by contouring some consumer products’ packaging, as a form of the landlocked void, present between things and shapes, operates through a process of free and spontaneous research with which he rewrites and redefines relations between elements, objects and materials; therefore they find themselves dialoguing with each other, giving rise to new suggestions.

Inside the exhibition, rather than narrating reality, Franck Scurti aims, through the tool of irony and unexpected association, to counteract the evidence of the visible to go beyond the sensory reality.

You are invited to engage with the installations, and to actively experience the suggestions given by the works.

Abitare è essere ovunque a casa propria

curated by Massimiliano Scuderi

The relationship between the interior and exterior of man-made environments, and the many implications that govern our way of inhabiting contemporary towns and cities, is the main theme of the retrospective exhibition dedicated to Ugo La Pietra. Born in Bussi sul Tirino and Milanese by adoption, La Pietra – an eclectic figure always on the borderline between languages ranging from art to radical design, passing through architecture – has, since 1962, developed an approach aimed at clarifying and defining the relationship between the individual and the environment. One of the most important examples of lucid reflection on the critical aspects and the potentialities of the urban environment, his proposals for the alternative use of everyday spaces still represent an inexhaustible source of inspiration for new generations of creative people.
The theories and experiences of the historical avant-gardes regarding the fusion of art and life form the backbone of his work in which the thought of art becomes the place of participation and the promise of emancipation of a community to come, involving ethics, aesthetics and politics.

The exhibition, curated by Massimiliano Scuderi, presents a large selection of works by the artist and architect from the 1970s to the present day. In addition, in the garden of the Fondazione Zimei, starting at 9 pm on the same day, it will be possible to see the film “Riappropriazione della città” (Reappropriation of the city), presented in 1977 by Ugo la Pietra at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, in which he attempted to demonstrate how we can reappropriate ourselves of the city by means of behavioural and mental operations. An attitude that leads his work back to a situationist matrix in which we can hear the echoes of certain theories of creative subversion in everyday life such as those expressed by Michael De Certau or Jacques Ranciere. Interventions aimed at the reappropriation of urban space as a personal living space. Already by the second half of the 1960s, as he himself declared in an interview, various artists began to operate outside the art system. It was then that operational horizons opened up, the result of reflections on a theory of the artist’s work in the social sphere, outside institutions and galleries… The idea was to work inside the social sphere, seeking the instruments to bring out its contradictions.

The exhibition will remain open until 2 September and visits are subject to the restrictions imposed by Covid rules. Booking is required.

The exhibition curated by Massimiliano Scuderi takes inspiration from the ambiguity between design and art, and its title reflects precisely the minimalist tradition, which is now given a Mediterranean twist by the two artists. Campostabile want to offer the eyes of their visitors a series of large site-specific works, which stem from the experience of the space and the specific features of the architecture, where sculptures do not prevail over the space, but rather interact with it through everyday experiences. This results in a blend of expressions which are graphic and plastic, tangible and ethereal, but new shapes are also created through gesture. A series of the most diverse techniques were used to create objects and images as fragments, pixels of a creative cloud, where each corpuscle expresses an idea, an input, a hunch. Ranging from metal images to large colourful prints, Campostabile mix high culture with underground culture in painting and design, sculpture, fashion and more. Their works inevitably blend metaphysics with oriental compositions, and glimmers that shine new light on the memory of the early pop art works by Richard Hamilton and Edoardo Paolozzi.

Fabric structures, like architectural dresses with coloured geometrical shapes, are reminiscent of classical drapery. Colours are made using alchemy-esque techniques, borrowed from molecular cuisine and inspired by local landscapes, thus obtaining the yellow from saffron, blue from red cabbage or red from chili pepper. This is a painting and sculpting process that draws from the tradition of sampling and the new aesthetics to take out elements, fragments of existing things which are then reimagined into areas of painting.

Jordi Mitjà, Peter Fend, Petra Feriancova, Julius Koller, Kveta Fulierova, Hans Schabus

curated by Massimiliano Scuderi

The Fountainhead is the title of the exhibition that opens the Foundation Zimei. Born in Pescara in 2014, The Foundation’s main aim is to promote contemporary art and to enhancement and support of young artists and curators.
The exhibition curated by Massimiliano Scuderi is inspired by the famous novel by Ayn Rand and intends to be a reflection on the close relationship between art and vital flows, between ethics and aesthetics, autobiography and utopia, also including the lights and shadows of creation. In the other hand the project intends to observe how the principles of art are present in people and in the events of their lives, through site-specific works created by artists during their period of residence at the Foundation.

The making of Avalanche (and what followed)
Resistance & Romance in NYC

Liza Bear, founder of the historical American magazine “Avalanche”, at the Zimei Foundation 

A new and not-to-be-missed event for art lovers at the Zimei Foundation. On Saturday 9 June, at 7 p.m., at the head office in Via Aspromonte, Montesilvano Colle, Liza Béar, the American writer, photographer and filmmaker, will be participating.

Founder, together with Willoughby Sharp, of the historic New York art magazine “Avalanche“, and currently editor of the magazine Bomb, Liza Béar has organized her speech at the Zimei Foundation into two parts, in which she will talk about “The making of Avalanche (and what followed) and “Resistance & Romance in NYC”.

The well-known Avalanche magazine explored conceptual art and other forms of art such as performance art and land art from the artist’s perspective. It was conceived as a publication for artists who could talk about their work without the intervention of critics, curators or art historians. The magazine was published between 1970 and 1976.

Her experimental and video films such as Oued Nefifik: A Foreign Movie (1982), Earthglow (1983) and Force of Circumstance (1989) were screened at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Festival of the Other Avant-Garde, the Såo Paulo Biennial and inter alia at The Kitchen and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Saturday’s appointment is part of the exhibition entitled “Unfake Connections – Carol Goodden, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark“, inaugurated in the exhibition space of the Zimei Foundation on May 26th. The exhibition, curated by Harold Berg, member of the photography committee of the Whitney of New York, and Massimiliano Scuderi, artistic director of the Zimei Foundation, aims to deepen the climate of artistic experimentation and linguistic contamination of New York in the seventies, focusing on the relationships and research of three great talents of Western art: Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Goodden, Trisha Brown.

The inauguration of May 26th, realized in collaboration with ACS Abruzzo Circuit Spettacolo and the e-Motion group, saw the participation of Carol Goodden, one of the interpreters of the artistic scene of those years, dancer of the Trisha Brown Dance Company, among the founders of the famous Food in New York restaurant, laboratory of experimentation and artistic relations. The exhibition will be open by appointment until July 2.

The event is the upshot of an agreement signed between the two institutions, ACS Abruzzo Circuito Spettacolo and Fondazione Zimei, as part of the residency project “ZONE LIBRE_ actions in support of contemporary creation”, of Mibact and the Abruzzi Region. The project will enable the Zimei Foundation, thanks to collaboration with the ACS circuit, to expand its range of artistic research and thus be able to move, as on this occasion, between the various contemporary artistic languages such as dance, music and other live arts, allowing great national and international talents to reside in a place in which to produce new and multidisciplinary works.

Impossible Community

Curated by Massimiliano Scuderi

After the major anthological exhibition dedicated to him by the city of Milan, at the PAC, at the Novecento Museum and at the Chiostri di Sant’Eustorgio, Luca Vitone is back in Pescara, with the solo exhibition, The impossible Community, curated by Massimiliano Scuderi, at the Fondazione Zimei.

Genoese by birth and based in Berlin, he is considered one of the most interesting artists of recent decades on the Italian and international scene, with exhibitions in major European museums and participation in various editions of the Venice Biennial.
His quest, which started in the mid-eighties, focuses on major themes such as the experience of places in relation to memory, cultural identities and nomadism.

For the occasion, he has attempted to delve deeper into what is one of his recurrent topics – nomadic culture, in the broadest sense of the term, combining some works with documents which testify to a similar experience enjoyed by one of the most important figures of the 20th-century historical avant-garde, the artist Pinot Gallizio. Founder of the international Situationist, Gallizio addressed the issue of gypsies on an ethical as well as a cultural level, and his involvement was such that the other Situationist artists and the nomadic community of Alba, his hometown, hailed him as “the prince of gypsies”.

Out of respect for the right of nomads to halting sites, he took the struggle from a cultural to a political and civic level and right into the city council of Alba, offering a piece of land which he owned on the banks of the Tanaro river to the Roma community. The village project which followed the donation was recognized by international critics as the theoretical matrix of the urban utopia New Babylon by the artist Constant.

The Impossible Community is therefore organized like a parallel path which links Vitone’s personal vision to that of Gallizio through projects, paintings, photographs, as well as an important series of documents made up of papers belonging to the historical archive of Pinot Gallizio in Turin.

Among Vitone’s site-specific works on display is also a large installation, a blue and green coloured globe, with a wheel at its centre, an iconic symbol of nomadic culture and mobility, which Vitone himself chose as the banner of his artistic quest.
In full accordance with situationist tradition, in the days before and immediately after the opening, posters will also be affixed throughout the city of Pescara showing the portrait of Pinot Gallizio dressed as “prince of gypsies”.

The exhibition will remain open until 20 May, 2018 by appointment