VISITING is a project curated by Davide Quadrio and organized by the Italian Embassy in Amman at Darat al Funun in collaboration with Arthub, Shanghai/Hong Kong.
The project is part of the 15th “Italian Contemporary Art Day” (Giornata del Contemporaneo), the worldwide event promoted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and AMACI – Italian Contemporary Art Museums Associations. The project is centred on the identification of objects belonging to everyday life in Jordan and other places. The dialogue between the work by Andrea Anastasio and Stefano Arienti, together with the special performance by Alessandro Sciarroni, brings into Darat al Funun, a vernacular complex turned into a home for the arts, new life through juxtaposed objects inside this architectonic complex, both outside in dialogue with the complex architecture and garden’s structure, and in a white box space inside the Print Studios.
Through aesthetic or functional interventions, micro-alterations obtained by subtraction of parts or material/chromatic manipulation of identified objects, the aim is to generate narrations centred on the routine of individuals, their social fabric, the relationship with the becoming of existence, the forces behind it, and the awareness of its duration.
The project is based on an open-ended process that will bring together these elements and ideas into a site-specific installation that will seep into Darat al Funun’s archaeological site, its architecture and garden, bringing back feelings and echoes of the once familiar, inhabited houses. The exhibition calls for specific interventions by Andrea Anastasio and Stefano Arienti, with a performance by Alessandro Sciarroni in the Archaeological Site, spreading the energy of this project from the past to the present time.
Andrea Anastasio will display a series of artworks transforming “ready-made” objects, either found on-site or “transferred” from Italy and other places where the artist worked and lived, with the aim to generate narrations directly linked or originated from the meeting with objects, spaces, domestic environments or public architecture in Jordan.
After extensively visiting Jordan, Stefano Arienti intends to elaborate on the poetic of the mutant mutable, of memory and simple gesture reconnecting to locations and personal experiences of the past. His personal feeling will generate site-specific objects and interventions, in an open dialogue with Andrea Anastasio’s artworks. By extension, they become voices of the same choir.
Alessandro Sciarroni’s performance in the Archaeological Site among the Roman and Byzantine ruins, ideally turns the wheel of time showing our humanity as a continuous struggle to be, to leave traces and inevitably coming back over and over to the same place between beginnings and ends.
The project VISITING is a gesture, a reaching out, a platform to encounter Amman and Jordan in a delicate, almost reserved way.
On the occasion of the opening, curator Simone Frangi is invited to take the topic of this project and bring it to a philosophical level; his intervention an open dialogue on the theme of watery thinking, an analogy of a non-binary understanding of the world in its human and non-human subjects. His introduction will open the fragility of artistic interventions by the invited artists to a transversal need of openness, mutual understanding, and tolerance.
The exhibition runs to 14 November 2019.
Image Caption: Stefano Arienti, wooden castle, 2015.