SOLUZIONI Festival arrives in January, featuring art and live performance

SOLUZIONI Festival arrives in January, featuring art and live performance

Giulia Guido · 1 year ago · Art

What might the world be like in 2050 and the people who inhabit it? Can we only imagine negative futures or do we think we can also imagine utopias in 2050? What “SOLUTIONS” would we find to live the everyday life they imagine? These are some of the questions that gave rise to the first volume of a new event for artists of all disciplines: the SOLUZIONI Festival

Born from an idea of Grage 80 and with the collaboration of Stasis and Toco Coworking, SOLUZIONI Festival involved some artists from the national scene who were asked to give their own vision of the future through the creation of a poster and a survival kit. 

Once they have given vent to their fantasy and imagination, all the works produced by the artists will be exhibited at Toco Coworking in Via Montanaro, 44 in Turin from 19 to 22 January 2022.  

Intrigued by this new initiative, we asked Roberto Gentili and Edoardo, representing Garage 80 and Stasis respectively, a couple of questions. Read on to find out what they told us about SOLUZIONI Festival. 

How was SOLUZIONI born? What is the aim of this festival?

SOLUZIONI was born out of a need, like all good things. The need to create an independent artistic container capable of bringing together different artists from the world of contemporary art. An experimental place where artists can express themselves freely, combining different skills of the visual arts. SOLUZIONI was born through a strong synergy created over time between Garage 80 and Stasis, an artistic hub in the Turin area known for audiovisual and cultural events in Barriera di Milano, based in the Toco Coworking space.

SOLUZIONI’s aim is to create an independent festival, aimed at reincarnating liminal spaces. An “open studio” capable of creating empathy and sincerity with the public that aims to spread the underground culture of visual arts, very often relegated to more commercial uses. 

SOLUZIONI wants to ask real questions, related to issues that, in these last years of global crisis, prevent us from projecting ourselves into the future.  Questions such as: Are we able to imagine utopias or only dystopian futures? What will be the new artistic frontiers and the role they will play in the creation of a post-pandemic culture?

soluzioni festival
Beppe Conti

Tell us about the artists involved. Who will be participating in this edition of SOLUTIONS? 

The call was answered by artists who have a common background and mentality that is quite in line with the ideas of SOLUTIONS. They are people we respect both on a human and professional level, and for us it is a source of stimulation and growth to work together. They are professionals who come from different worlds, from illustration to graphics, from street art to vj sets, from musicians to DJs, to the poetry slam. For us, this means inclusion!  

The programme we have put together is full of events: starting with the collective exhibition involving 8 artists and illustrators such as Luca Ledda, Michele Guidarini, Abel Bael, Fra design, Marte Giunipero, The Great Paper Massacre, Beppe Conti, Roberto Gentili who have been asked to reinterpret the concept of the future. 

soluzioni festival
Luca Ledda

We will have special guests such as the performance by Mattia SIlano aka Matthew White, accompanied by Matteo Cozzo aka The Great Paper Massacre, in an artistic dualism characterized by raw aesthetics and Lo -Fi. From the live painting of Alice Lotti, who will find herself immersed in a digital environment thanks to the visual samples of Turin designer Virginia Toffetti aka INGRID; to the geometries of Abel Bael, also digitized by the Highfiles collective, respectively Tommaso Rinaldi and Riccardo Loira Aja Akasha, two Turin-based visual designers with Stasis roots, who share a digital abstractionism influenced by post-internet aesthetics. Finally, there will also be the poetic incursions of Alessandro Burbank, accompanied by the experimental sounds of Andrea Cauduro. 

The event will feature the electronic sounds of Sonambient and Corgiat, producers from Turin, from electronic music and techno, and the experimental live performance of the musical project by Claudio Lorusso, a singer-songwriter from Turin, also influenced by electronic music. 

Since that is the theme of this edition, we are also asking you: What might the world be like in 2050 and what might the people in it be like?

Our imagination has already taken us a long way in describing what the future will be like, it is clear when we hear of yet another environmental disaster, focusing on it with a bit of resignation we feel powerless in the face of crises that are ever wider. The point, however, is that this image cannot be overwhelmed only by images of the end of the world, it must be an engine for the reality we want. 

For this reason, the future we imagine is not made up of great utopias either, we do not claim to change the world and its people, we just want to give an extra moment to think about our everyday life, about those small gestures that will also be there in the future and make up an infinite color scale between the end of everything and the impossible. Perhaps, to answer the question we are asking, in 2050 one thing we would like to imagine could be a freer, more convivial, more everyday culture of art.

Fra Design
SOLUZIONI Festival
SOLUZIONI Festival arrives in January, featuring art and live performance
Art
SOLUZIONI Festival arrives in January, featuring art and live performance
SOLUZIONI Festival arrives in January, featuring art and live performance
1 · 7
2 · 7
3 · 7
4 · 7
5 · 7
6 · 7
7 · 7
Brice Gelot, “For the love of god”

Brice Gelot, “For the love of god”

Tommaso Berra · 2 days ago · Photography

For the love of God is an expression that expresses an image of religion understood as a solution to salvation, often associated with a sense of dissatisfaction or impatience. It is in common use, embedded in language as much as religion itself is pervasive, for multiple and complex reasons, in society.
“For the love of god” is also the title of the photographic series by French artist Brice Gelot, which Collater.al is publishing in full preview. The gaze is toward religion – the Christian Catholic religion in particular – understood as a social-cultural system of behavior, which exceeds rational explanations by tending toward transcendence. It is perhaps in this never running out of meaning in the real world that the success of religious art over the centuries lies, called upon to interpret and depict symbols that are always the same but take on new meanings from time to time.

Photographing faith becomes for Brice Gelot an expression of the reality. Observing how people face the challenges of nature and photographing them means living a life of faith firsthand, which becomes a tool for understanding and analyzing what is sacred and profane.
In Gelot’s shots, it emerges how religion is part of the human experience and how it represents a force that can shape the world around us and its aesthetic representation. Tattoos, statues, icons, niches for the veneration of saints, the artistic imagery in these photographs is not metaphysical but real, living along the streets and on people’s skin.

Brice Gelot | Collater.al
Brice Gelot | Collater.al
Brice Gelot | Collater.al
Brice Gelot | Collater.al
Brice Gelot | Collater.al
Brice Gelot | Collater.al
Brice Gelot | Collater.al
Brice Gelot | Collater.al
Brice Gelot | Collater.al
Brice Gelot | Collater.al
Brice Gelot | Collater.al
Brice Gelot | Collater.al
Brice Gelot | Collater.al
Brice Gelot, “For the love of god”
Photography
Brice Gelot, “For the love of god”
Brice Gelot, “For the love of god”
1 · 14
2 · 14
3 · 14
4 · 14
5 · 14
6 · 14
7 · 14
8 · 14
9 · 14
10 · 14
11 · 14
12 · 14
13 · 14
14 · 14
The inner landscapes of Tetyana Maryshko

The inner landscapes of Tetyana Maryshko

Giorgia Massari · 3 days ago · Photography

The haze of uncertainty, which came with the advent of the pandemic and the subsequent Ukrainian war, swept over photographer Tetyana Maryshko, so much so that it led her to create a long-lasting photographic project in which she relentlessly searches for her own essence. Through a path made of honesty to herself, the Ukrainian photographer explores her inner self by making self-shots in which she blends personal and relational elements. “There is me, the camera and the truth,” says the artist.
Each photograph captures a reflection, a conversation, a still moment in time that dialogues with her soul. The shots, in black and white and color, attempt to go beyond the aesthetics of the subject by applying a veil of blurring that prevents the image from being clearly read, or by inserting textured surfaces in front of the lens, such as wet glass or bubble wrap. At other times, however, the photograph is clear and sharp, such as her shot in the bathtub, which hints at suffering. The gaze is lost in emptiness, the flushed eyes exude weeping and despair while the tight lips communicate helplessness, that feeling that every human being feels in the face of war.

An element that recurs often in Tetyana Maryshko’s is the flower, placed in dialogue with the body: placed along the spine or in front of the eyes, to cover the gaze, symbolizing a desire for rebirth. Tetyana tells how it was a long, difficult and troubled journey: “When we turn the camera toward ourselves, we embark on a journey of self-discovery that requires introspection and vulnerability… In the end, this project was not just a personal journey, but a universal one. A testimony to the human experience.”

The inner landscapes of Tetyana Maryshko
Photography
The inner landscapes of Tetyana Maryshko
The inner landscapes of Tetyana Maryshko
1 · 9
2 · 9
3 · 9
4 · 9
5 · 9
6 · 9
7 · 9
8 · 9
9 · 9
The male body taxonomy by Francesco Paolo Gassi

The male body taxonomy by Francesco Paolo Gassi

Laura Tota · 4 days ago · Photography

Inhabiting a body means perceiving it, recognizing oneself in it and being recognized. It means feeling familiar to oneself and to others, relating to the World through nerve endings, fat and senses.
The body is the core center of our own identity and will, and the nude has long been a favorite subject for photographers since the birth of the photographic medium. However, speaking of male nude, its diffusion is lower, except for some particular cases, since it has been considered less interesting (if not disturbing) by the dominant “Male Gaze” (or the representation of the female universe, in the visual arts and literature, from a male and heterosexual point of view, which represents women as mere sexual objects aimed at the satisfaction of the male audience). Only since the late ’70s, thanks to the birth of the homosexual liberation movement and the advertising market, we have witnessed a new life of nude male, able to transform the male body into an erotic subject open to hedonistic contemplation.

 
 
 
 
 
Visualizza questo post su Instagram
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Un post condiviso da GASSI (@iam_gassi)

An example is the iconic body of works by Robert Mapplethorpe, attracted by the male nude since childhood, which recalls classical nudity and gives dignity and beauty to a considered degrading category of people, or the most recent portraits by the photographer Florian Hetz who, through tight close ups, immortalizes the true essence and innate sensuality of the male body.

And it is precisely on the border between art and eroticism that the narration of “Bodies” is played out, the latest project by Francesco Paolo Gassi, a young author from Puglia who investigates the physicality of the body in his practice. Francesco is literally obsessed with imperfections and the naturalness of smudging, far from the glossy aesthetic clichés: hair, skin and body fluids are his playing field, details are his favorite points of view. He moves carefully around the male body, that is at the same time, something familiar to him, but also a source of shame for a community he has had to hide his sexuality for years.

Art, pornography and taxonomy dialogue in the photographic space. The poses, meticulously studied, just as the illumination and the relationship of the body with space, suggest and allude to an eroticization of the body that is never explicit, they orient the human anatomy to emphasize the insignificant and the banal, elevating it to the object of desire. It’s an almost scientific approach that, through the photographic image, aims to make eternal the organic matter of which man is made and to reach the essence of every portrayed subject.
Thus, the male bodies become the ideal playing field on which to renegotiate identity, free from social superstructures and free from conditioning, presented to the eye of the observer in its total, disturbing and ambivalent authenticity. The project combines digital photographs with snapshots:  the unrepeatable body is perpetuated in the uniqueness of a Polaroid, as well as the quality of the digital image reflects every single detail of the epidermal specificity of each photographed body.

The male body taxonomy by Francesco Paolo Gassi
Photography
The male body taxonomy by Francesco Paolo Gassi
The male body taxonomy by Francesco Paolo Gassi
1 · 7
2 · 7
3 · 7
4 · 7
5 · 7
6 · 7
7 · 7
Lise Johansson and the non-appartenence to places

Lise Johansson and the non-appartenence to places

Giorgia Massari · 5 days ago · Photography

Why do we feel we belong to some places and not others? Danish photographer Lise Johansson (1985) questions herself. This reflection is the starting point of her research, based on an analysis of the relationship between humans and the environment they inhabit. Very often our homes represent who we are, they are a reflection of our soul and character. Minimal or baroque, total white or colorful, full of objects or aseptic; in any case, we build environments tailored to us, in which we feel comfortable and which shape our person. But when we go outside the home and find ourselves relating to other environments, such as the workplace, a doctor’s office or our friend’s house, external factors come into play that we cannot control and with which we are forced to interface. Lise Johansson reasons about these unconscious dynamics that govern unconscious psychology.

In the series I’m not here, the photographer makes a series of selfies inside an abandoned hospital. The environment is aseptic and a disturbing desolation in which the white dominates relentlessly. The daylight enters through the windows, sometimes in contrast with the artificial one, accentuating the chromatic power of white, highlighted even more by the milky complexion of the photographer and her long candid dress, typical of hospital patients.
The relationship between the subject and the environment is not relaxed. One perceives a melancholy tension, typical of subjects locked inside a place. The figure almost seems to wander like a spectrum, its face is never visible because of the photographic framing and, in other cases, it is hidden inside or behind an object – like a sink or a mirror. This detail allows the woman to be present in space but at the same time not to inhabit it, as if her mind tried to escape in other directions, looking for a way out. Like the subject, the environment is vulnerable, stationary in limbo and undergoing transformation. The place exists, like the woman, but they are forgotten entities, without status and completely emptied of a soul.

Lise Johansson and the non-appartenence to places
Photography
Lise Johansson and the non-appartenence to places
Lise Johansson and the non-appartenence to places
1 · 9
2 · 9
3 · 9
4 · 9
5 · 9
6 · 9
7 · 9
8 · 9
9 · 9