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Exhibition
"Works and days" - Marco Maria Zanin @ Pivô Recebe
30/09 - 21/10/17
Free
TUE - SAT: 1pm - 7pm

Pivô Welcomes is a programme which presents previously formatted projects by artists, curators or cultural producers. Participating projects are selected based on conceptual affinity, viability and the gallery schedule. Throughout the year, three to six projects are typically carried out within the programme.

The first edition of the year of Pivô Welcomes, a program dedicated to hosting projects previously formatted by artists, curators or cultural producers that shares conceptual affinities with the institution’s program, presents the exhibition “Works and Days” by Italian artist Marco Maria Zanin and curated by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti.

The exhibition questions how distinct peoples relate to memory and time passage through  ruins. Zanin,  specifically chose Italy and Brazil as the departing point for his research, the first place, carries biographical aspects: the rural landscape of the Veneto, region of Northern Italy, is where the artist’s family comes from and where his earliest memories are rooted- many linked to ancient rituals and traditions, in which the beliefs, the knowledge and the needs of land workers are inextricably intertwined. The second place is São Paulo, where Marco has lived for extended periods. The city’s  distinct temporality –or maybe a pathological pursuit for the future-   is probably what makes the megalopoli’s population unaware , or careless, about it’s own past. What the artist witnesses and reveals, by placing himself both conceptually and physically on the threshold between these two universes, is the clash between radically distinct and ,apparently, irreconcilable worldviews.

Zanin takes the different debris of these worlds, and reproduces the rubble of the demolition of the buildings in the center of São Paulo in porcelain, as if they were treasures to be preserved. The objects belonging to the ancient rural civilization of the Veneto, in their turn, are cutted, revealing forms that resemble objects of cult of Afro-Brazilian religions. In these gestures of memory transformation, Zanin investigates the possibility of the ruin to reveal the existence of other temporalities and narratives under the official History, and proposes the exercise to create hypothetical historical layers in any debris.

Most of the works on show were produced by the artist in the context of the Pivô Research residency program. Last year, Zanin spent a long period in the center of São Paulo, where he came into contact with the dynamics and socio-political context of the region surrounding the Copan building, which, despite housing an extremely diverse population, is still itself a kind of ruin of modern thought, in which layers of time and history overlap and resignify themselves.

 

About Marco Maria Zanin

 

Marco Maria Zanin (Padova, Italia, 1983). He first took a degree in Literature and Philosophy, and then in International Relations, obtaining a Master’s degree in Psychology.

He received Italian awards and prizes such as Level 0 at ArtVerona (2016) and Agarttha Arte (2014), an honorable mention at Fabbri Prize (2016) and in 2016 was shortlisted for the Talent Prize. Recent group exhibitions include Attualità di Morandi, MAMBO, Bologna; Giovane Fotografia Italiana, Fotografia Europea, Musei Civici, Reggio Emilia; From Object to Exposure, TRA, Treviso; Uno Sguardo Italiano, Rencontres d’Arles, Arles; Duas Naturezas, Central Galeria, San Paolo; Lo Spazio del Demiurgo, Palazzo Madama, Torino; Wenn wir dich nicht sehen, siehst du uns auch nicht, Huize Frankendael, Amsterdam; Show Off, Salsali Private Museum, Dubai.

Recent solo exhibitions include Dio è nei frammenti, curated by Daniele De Luigi, Galleria Civica di Modena, Modena; Demonumento, curated by Alessandra Mauro, Ambasciata del Brasile, Galleria Candido Portinari, Roma; O lado direito do avesso, curated by Paulo Miyada and Julia Lima, Oficina Cultural Oswald de Andrade, São Paulo.

In 2015 he founded in Padova, Italy, Humus Interdisciplinary Residence, an artist-in-residence program aimed at fusing the contemporary art world and the suburban areas which are still tied to the ground.

Lives and works between Padova and São Paulo.

 

About Jacopo Crivelli Visconti

 Naples, Italy, 1973   Jacopo Crivelli Visconti is a critic and independent curator. PhD in Architecture from the University of São Paulo (USP), is author of Novas Derivas (WMF Martins Fontes, São Paulo, 2014; Ediciones Metales Pesados, Santiago, Chile, 2016). As curator of the São Paulo Biennial Foundation (2007-2009), he was responsible for the official Brazilian participation in the 52nd Biennale di Venezia (2007).   Among his most recent recent works as curator of contemporary art are: Memories of Underdevelopment (2017), Museum of Contemporary Art (San Diego, USA), Museo de Arte de Lima (Peru) and Museo Jumex (Mexico); Héctor Zamora – Nonlinear Dynamics (2016), at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo; Sean Scully (2015), at the Pinacoteca of the State of São Paulo (Brazil); 12th Biennial of Cuenca (2014), in Cuenca (Ecuador). He is a regular contributor to contemporary art, architecture and design magazines, as well as writing for exhibition catalogs and monographs by artists.

Curatorial Text

In recent years, Marco Maria Zanin has been developing his work within two diametrically opposing contexts, which carry a profound symbiotic relation between each other.

By Jacopo Crivelli Visconti

The first context – also from a biographical point of view – is the rural landscape of Veneto, the region in Northern Italy where the artist’s family originates from and where his oldest childhood memories lay, many of them linked to ancient rituals and traditions, in which the beliefs, knowledge and needs of agriculture are indissolubly intertwined. The second is the city of São Paulo, where Zanin has spent long periods of time, fascinated by the megalopolis’ totally distinct temporality, with its pathological vocation towards the future, which makes it a hostage to a chronic lack of knowledge about its own past. By placing himself – both conceptually and physically – on the edge of these two worlds, the artist witnesses and reveals the clash of two world visions that are radically distinct and apparently irreconcilable, but that coexist despite all and, mainly, despite the common places on contemporaneity. In his classic Hybrid Cultures (1990), Argentinian anthropologist Nestor García Canclini proposes “strategies for entering and leaving modernity”. Zanin’s artworks highlight the need to “leave” a superficial vision of contemporaneity so it can be understood in a deeper and more comprehensive way. 

 

A fundamental reference in the conception of several of the artworks in this exhibition is Georges Didi-Huberman, who considers debris and ruins almost as symptoms, that is, signs of something distinct, in this case, a different time from what we perceived at first sight. The reference is fundamental to understanding the series of small porcelain sculptures that constitute Restituição, in which rubble from construction and refurbishment sites, which the artist collected from skips in the city centre, are patiently ‘portrayed’ in an almost infinite cluster of sculptures. In the artist’s own words: “In both literal and metaphorical ways, the modus operandi requires me to kneel down in order to observe and collect leftovers from the hurricane of modernity. In other words, an overflowing of our own humanity beyond the tracks of capitalism, searching for the construction of a meaning, of a path. Of a horizon at the end of the world”. Once collected, the original rubble is not used as moulds, but reproduced freehand, in an attempt to condense them and return their power. In a world in which it is possible to conceive that all existing images and information are stored somewhere, the decision to oppose this immense memory with modest and precarious sculptures – apparently bound to the same process of dissolution and oblivion to which the remains of construction sites produced by the city are endlessly destined – becomes symbolic and meaningful. 

In general terms, if we consider, for example, that the planes in Ferite feritoie are also ruins or ‘leftovers’ of a time, of a type of knowledge and practice that fades in front of our eyes, Didi-Huberman’s analysis is central to the exhibition as a whole and not only as far as Restituição is concerned. In Ferite feritoie, the artist collected several planes similar to the ones his grandfather used for carpentry, which directly refer to the history and tradition of a kind of artisanal knowledge that was once almost universal but that has today become restricted to a professional context. Subsequently, the planes were cut and sectioned, and the resulting forms are reminiscent of African or Pre-Colombian masks and idols. The encounter with this archetypal form, previous to the civilisation that we call Western, is not accidental but emerges from the understanding of the need to invoke all these references, pillars or debris that underpin our ruins, paraphrasing the T.S. Eliot’s classic verse in The Waste Land (1922): “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”. As well as conjuring – almost per forza di levare as Michelangelo would say – the imprisoned form in the artisanal tool, the cut plays the symbolic role of highlighting the clash between two times: the time of long years, decades or even centuries of use that gradually wears the instrument down, and the time of the quick and precise cut, the mark of a contemporaneity that, almost paradoxically, retrieves innate and original memories. In this sense, the photos of Ferite feritoie, can be considered ‘fragments’ of a reflection on time or rather ‘times’: the time of seasons and climate changes that have guided and regulated life and agriculture since Hesiod (whose poem, from the 8th century BC, lends the title to the exhibition), and the time of uninterrupted coexistence, through overlapping and simultaneous layers, that seems to mark our daily existence, where the gap between novelty and obsolescence is increasingly narrower. 

The artist’s position within this friction is not explicit. The ambiguity is revealed, for example, by the images of the series Lacuna e equilíbrio, in which the debris that results from the frenetic pace of construction and destruction in São Paulo is transposed into an atemporal context, inspired by the paintings of Giorgio Morandi. Despite the suspended and metaphysical atmosphere of the Bolognese painter’s images, light is almost tangible, sculpting the contour of the few objects carefully displayed on a small table. The importance of light and the attention to its transformations throughout the day and the year reveal a proximity between both artists that go beyond the iconographic reference, as it becomes evident, amongst other examples, in the diptych Maggese, a record of the movement of sun light in the artist’s studio. Maggese was an agricultural practice that consisted of letting a field rest for a month (the month of May, maggio, in Italian) so it could recover after harvest before being cultivated again. Here, by crossing through the ajar window, the light draws a shape on the floor, which the artist fills in with soil, creating a small ephemeral sculpture, whose transience is immediately revealed by the moving light itself. Perhaps, it is precisely in the impossibility of defining the moment of rest that resides the key to understanding this piece and, in general terms, Marco Maria Zanin’s poetics: there is no single moment that is more important than the other, in the same way as there is no decisive moment. Everything is in flux but each instant of this interminable flux defines us forever. 


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