Special project curated by Stefano Pezzato
Lounge/Project Room, Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art
Prato, 28 October 2007 - 23 March 2008
For over ten years Botto&Bruno have been concentrating their artistic research on the urban scene. Their works are environments on an oversize scale which launch the spectator directly into the scene, along with photomontages which bring into view whole sections of the disintegrating city.
The Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art now presents the exhibition Kids' Riot (In the House of Lost Sound) - open until 23 March - in which, with a new video and an installation designed especially for the Lounge, the two artists "redefine" reality. In conjunction with the exhibition there will be a display of the results of the workshop which Botto&Bruno held in Prato last September. This will take place at the "Officina Giovani - Cantieri Culturali Ex Macelli".
Kids' Riot (2006), the brand-new video which gives its name to the exhibition, shows us a fight between street urchins wielding cardboard boxes, the unwitting protagonists who challenge and clash with each other without ever attacking one another; indeed, with the elder one helping the younger in case of need. The whole scene is taken from a distance in black and white and in slow motion, accompanied by hardcore music that ends with a shout of liberation and a metaphorical kick up the arse to the consumer society and the waste and debris produced by the adult world.
In the House of Lost Sound (2007), the site-specific installation produced at the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art, is on the other hand a paradoxical construction made up of fragments of pre-existing buildings, photographed and reproduced life size on the surface of a parallelepiped (once more, a box) situated diagonally so as to occupy part of inner outer spacesof the ground floor of the museum. Interior and exterior - since in this area these are already in communication by means of a glass wall - are mutually cancelled out on account of this vast presence. They are then repeated, as in Chinese boxes, in the inner space of the construction, where we discover an imaginary world of drawings and collages attached to the walls.
These redefinitions of actuality, thrown to the ground or embedded in the walls as a reminder of their passing, are of course the two artists who, like two anonymous actors in photographs or settings, give a first-person interpretation of the archetype of silent, vigilant and rebellious humanity. Theirs is the attitude of flaneurs roaming the city with no fixed destination, steering clear of the places frequented by the masses while in search of unknown treasures and hidden places in which to dwell.
The 'destructured' images of Botto&Bruno
For this occasion the Pecci Centre is publishing a bilingual Italian/English catalogue containing over one hundred reproductions of previously unpublished works by Botto&Bruno from 2002 on, as well as text by the curator Stefano Pezzato, the sociologist Massimo Ilardi and the journalist and musician Silvio Bernelli. As Stefano Pezzato has written: "The art of Botto and Bruno is not one of the memory, referring to what once was, but is on the contrary an art that forces openings in the walls, that rips open the closed spaces of galleries and museums to give us a chance of looking at what is happening around us. It brings with it all the tension of an unstable and fragmentary present, of a suspension of time that - after the manner of Beckett - heralds the advent of something that is not yet there.
"Botto and Bruno use photography simply as a means for mounting a carefully thought-out operation of selection, cutting, collage and re-touching of images, not as a process of documentation or as a linguistic tool or form of aesthetic adherence to the suburban setting in which they live and work.
"The way they de-structure and fragmentize the photographs they take as they scour the city outskirts leads to each subsequent re-assembly resembling a puzzle with the power of holding together and containing its single constituent pieces, in spite of errors of perspective, disproportion between the parts, incongruity between adjacent elements or superimposed planes. It is these very distortions, these twists revealed by the manual montage of the images, which emphasize the fragmentary nature of an approach to reality that aims to reconstruct it a posteriori rather than reproduce it directly in the way that photography does, while also avoiding the camouflaged falsifications and illusions of digital manipulation.
"The buildings are unroofed, split asunder, broken to pieces, before being recomposed in new forms, and once mounted act as the opaque, impenetrable wings to decrepit scenes, stretches of mud and weed-covered cement, puddles, refuse and ruins, forgotten crannies on the fringes of the city. They will all end up in ruins or demolished, just as happens in fact to the on-site subjects of the two Turinese artists, which survive only due to their photographic documentation.
"This process of imminent destruction makes possible also a transitory existence, the momentary occupation of such places (interaction, in the case of temporary installations), and maybe even a destiny other than what might have been expected. It is this potential which generates the energy which pervades these townscapes, keeping up the tension evoked also by the leaden atmosphere, laden with rain and forebodings."
Botto&Bruno
Gianfranco Botto and Roberta Bruno (Botto&Bruno)) were both born in Turin, in 1963 and 1966 respectively, and have lived and worked as a couple since the early 1990s.
They have had numerous personal shows both in Italy and abroad, for example at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (2000), the Chelsea Kunstraum in Cologne (2002), the Mamco in Geneva (2003), the Mamac in Nice and the Fundacio La Caixa in Barcellona (2004), and the École Nationale des Beaux Arts in Lyons (2005).
They have taken part in various collective shows and exhibitions, including The Memory of a Meeting Place at the New Museum of New York (1998), Passaggi Invisibili at the Palazzo delle Papesse in Siena (1999), Futurama: arte in Italia at the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato (2000), Paysages urbains at Le Quartier Centre d'Art Contemporain in Quimper (France, 2000), Platea dell'Umanitŕ at the Biennale di Venezia (2001), Busan Biennale (Sud Corea, 2002), Apocalittici e Integrati. Utopia nell'arte italiana di oggi at the MAXXI - Museo nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo in Rome (2007).
Their work has obtained much recognition, including the Premio Torino incontra… l'arte of the Associazione Arte Giovane di Torino (1998), the Premio artista dell'anno at Cortina d'Ampezzo (2002), and Artists in Residence at the Couvent des Récollets in Paris (2004).
Kids' Riot (In The House of Lost Sound)
Lounge /Project Room, Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art
Open daily 10-19, closed on Tuesdays
Admission free
