Download Catalogue - Paola Anziché

experiencing the works on exhibit. All of these
methods, however, pertain to a vision of contemporary
art seen as a source, an intermediary, a
tool for learning, inspiration, and care of both collective
and community life, lived by strangers or
acquaintances, outsiders or relatives. Therefore,
the exhibition halls, the learning room, but also
the informal spaces of the Fondazione, are all
conceived as useful spaces for creating temporary,
but real and practicable, “forums”, agoras,
or speaker’s corners. The two workshops for
Greater are meant to open up such spaces and
test new ones.
Paolo Piscitelli: Trans-formare
The process-oriented phase that leads to
the work, the definition of an installation’s or a
sculpture’s form, their very transitoriness, potential
and changeability, constitute some of the
central elements of Paolo Piscitelli’s research.
The construction of a work as the moment when
different activities merge (gestures, energies, intentions,
decisions), and a reflection on work as
labor, are the two components that lie at the root
of the planning and production of the workshop.
In the run-up to the opening of Greater Torino,
the artist will gather a workgroup formed by cultural
mediators and students, and invite the participants
to move outside the exhibition context,
and walk the area that surrounds the Fondazione
– the San Paolo district, which used to be one
of the productive areas of the city until recent
times – in search of signs. Traces, noises, images
of (even æsthetic) transformation of a city in a
time of crisis. These signs will be recorded in different
ways (photography, film, audio, narration,
logs) and will provide the material for a shared
reflection, which will be offered to all workshop
participants.
The choice of the title itself, Trans-formare,
trans-forming, gives us the first clue: the suffix
placed before the verb immediately suggests
that form is the effect of an action inscribed in
a condition of mobility. It is the result of a transit,
translation and de-placement operation. Two
of the works on exhibit – More Work / More
Space, and 107 Days / 100 Drawings – distinguish
themselves, from their very titles, for the capacity
of their relationship. One part generates the
second. A consequence. More space equals,
Greater Torino :
therefore, more time, and the artist himself says
that this statement can be reversed and still be
equally valid. 107 days, or 100 drawings: in this
case the imperfect mirroring of the calculation
leaves a margin for variants, choices and unpredictability.
In both cases, however, Paolo Piscitelli
defines a field, and describes a working method,
openly stating the theme upon which his artistic
creation focuses. The two works act as indexes
for the two work ‘families’ proposed for the workshop
stages – the work that happens outside, in
the city, and the interior work, which takes place
on the desks of the learning room.
More Work / More Space is a sculpture that
was first conceived in 2009. Its structure and
form change with every new installation. The
work necessary for construction and during the
mounting phase remains invisible to the public.
For some of his works, such as Noccioli, 2000,
and Platonic 5, 2008, Piscitelli uses the definition
‘performative sculpture’, in that the process
of making, its duration, seen as a prolonged resistance
exercise and a testing of limits, are recorded
on video or audio, and are an integral part
of the work. More Work / More Space is, instead,
a sculpture whose performative quality requires
that the observer do an imaginative effort, follow
a backward path, a reversal of the final result,
breaking down the set of gestures made to assemble
the 800 wooden modules that form the
sculpture. The latter is indeed offered as the accumulation
of such pieces-gestures, a sequence
of intentions and decisions taken by the artist
one after the other, while searching for balance
and development within a global growth process.
“What is this?” asked Piscitelli standing in
front of Mu, the progenitor of the work at hand.
“By structuring the whole space, and arbitrarily
building empty spaces – he explains – I draw
the plastic rhythms and the intervals according
the logic of the fugue, or of the assembler, or
the termite. The sequence that is activated during
this process transforms space into time, and
subsequently reconverts it, at the end of my operation,
back to space”. 3 Starting from this idea
of artwork as a transforming act fueled by intentions
and energies, 107 Days / 100 Drawings and
Sign of the Times develop a new reflection on
current events, on the collective perception of
an emergency. With two experiments based on
3.
Paolo Piscitelli, Mu, in Emanuela
Termine, Paolo Piscitelli. Some Prefer
Nettles, Gangemi Editore, Rome 2007,
p. 48.
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