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14/6/2013

Leone Contini

Logu i Shkendijes, Tirana

Microgallery is a project by studio203 - art and architecture collective.
Microgallery is a portable gallery in miniature that has no great pretensions, but expects great ideas.
The space is built and designed as a white cube (50x50x50cm), a space which by its own definition does not have an identity, but in this case the identity is symbolized by its size.

Microgallery is a cube, a window, a space for thought offered to artists to enable them to compete with a space with which have never been involved before. The challenge is to create an artwork that is fully part of the artistic research of the artist invited and at the same time surprised him.

We are happy to invite you to the opening of Foreign Body – Antena, Lecture Performance and microexhibition of Leone Contini, the first artist in residency for 2013 at Tirana Art Lab. Between April – June 2013 he was conducting an artistic research in different cities of Albania. The project idea flourished when the artist found an old map of Albania under the Italian occupation. The map belonged to his grandfather who was stationed in the Balkans during WWII. The map marked cities and places with lines and dots, evidencing an invasion, an attempt of control and domination. Today each dot is a void, echoing both a personal and collective amnesia: the map is a “foreign body” for both, the artist’s personal family past as well as for contemporary Italy that has removed its imperialist past from the collective awareness.

Foreign Body – Antena, Lecture Performance and microexhibition can be considered as an attempt to retrace those warpaths from a different perspective: Contini turns the map from a tool of control into a platform to sew relations; his intention was in fact not to decode the dots-voids - this would be the duty of a historian -, but to re-fill them through interaction with people. Out of this meticulous net of journeys – being as much as possible loyal to the original map - he created an audio-visual-textual and very subjective archive and shared it in the form of a blog titled Harta e Thesarit - La mappa del tesoro, http://hartaethesarit.wordpress.com/

The contents of this blog often relate to migration experiences of Albanians in Italy, but also with strategies of survival in the current chronic-crisis of the so-called transition process in Albania. A mixture between interviews, short essays stories, self-reflexive thoughts and images, build up a written and visual archive, making visible the artistic research process and at the same time documenting a part of the country’s everyday reality.

This work process culminates with the Lecture Performance, a format that the artist has chosen to present his practice at the end of the residency and of his research. We can say that the real outcome of Contini’s practice is the research itself and the documentation through the blog, shifting the focus from creation of objects to creation of social relation- ships. Lecture Performance, a brightly used artistic expression in the last few years, offers the appropriate format for the artist’s self-reflection, discussion, performance and interaction with the public. Comparing it with essay-writing, Jenny Dirksen argues that lecture performance is a critical and reflective method of presentation in which both pragmatic and aesthetic criteria are deployed with equal validity, not in order to make a final point, but to open up the possibilities inherent in any perspective.

In this sense, Contini’s Foreign Body, Lecture Performance is conceived as an inclusive device, able to incorporate the complexity of such a multilayered research, held under the project umbrella of Harta e Thesarit, developed during his residency stay.

Another big subject in Contini’s fieldwork research in Albania relates to homemade aerials built during the communist time, mainly used to reach the Italian TV signal. During his residency, Leone asked people to draw for him their most familiar handmade aerial and collected a wide range of models, this variety answering very different needs: in relation to the materials available and to the geographic specificity of each region - the electro magnetic flow being affected by morphology, weather etc.

Through the aerials, Albanians learned a foreign language and got familiar with Italian Pop culture. At the same time the imagery transmitted through these devices was nothing but the idealized simulacra of the consumer society. Watching Italian TV and the subsequent mass emigration was a yearning towards a false promise. When the first refugees arrived in Bari in 91, the Albanians were for the Italians a blank page, ready to write on. Before 91, the immigration in Italy was not “thematized”, nor exploited for political agendas. But the super-iconic image of the crowded refuge ship overlapped with a void of political power and was therefore turned into the archetype of a new collective fear: the fear to be in- vaded by foreign bodies.

Driven by his interest in self-made aerials, Contini developed the work Foreign Body – Antena: an intervention that will be hosted by microgallery, a hybrid Italian-Albanian art project based in Tirana. The project Foreign Body – Antena, micro- exhibition is answering and at the same time challenging the microgallery “statute”, by connecting this small and intimate space to the vast realm of the real. But Antena will subvert the aerial device too, by turning this tool, conceived to pas- sively receive signals from some invisible elsewhere up there on the air, into a hearty, field-feeler and relational medium. This project was made possibel by scholarship NCTM E L’ARTE Artists-in-residence

More information about the artist www.leonecontini.wordpress.com

microgallery
portable contemporary art gallery
a project created by studio203 - art and architecture collective www.studio203.info

Opening: 15 June 2013 hrs 19.00

Logu i Shkëndijës
Rr. Frosina Plaku, nr. 31
(between Faculty of Construction Engineering and Hotel Mondial) Tirana

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