Chiara Camoni

Opens Saturday, May 9

Con te con tutto (With You With Everything) is a call to gather, an invitation to build a different way of being in the world, starting from encountering and sharing with all living things, leaving space for wonder, sentiment, dialogue, contemplation and the flow of time that transforms everything.

Presented as a unique installation by artist Chiara Camoni (Piacenza, 1974), the exhibition – promoted with the support of the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture – involves the entire Pavilion and reimagines it as a landscape in transformation, in which the body of the sculpture and the bodies of the visitors are invited to partake in mutual exchange.

Chiara Camoni’s work feeds on relationships built on shared feeling, on an affinity that transcends the limits of artistic creation only to extend into life. Sculpture, understood as collaboration with matter, is the result of collective processes involving the community that has grown up around her studio and in informal groups. Con te con tutto brings to the surface the bonds and affections that make creative work possible, presenting the artist’s practice in a new light and adopting her choral perspective as a methodology.

The themes of ecology, femininity, process, care and collaboration help us to rethink the role of art, starting from the relationship between artist and work and between work and audience, but also, through the visual mediation of the works, to imagine a different possible way of living in the present. Not infrequently, artistic practice favours co-creation over the authorial gesture: doing things together both presupposes and leads to thinking together, a dimension that philosopher Chiara Zamboni identifies in the specific political nature of female friendship and which, translated into the exhibition framework, makes us rethink and subvert the limits of authorship by placing the word ‘with’ at the heart of creativity. The space that opens up between two or more people thus transcends the work itself.

Chiara Camoni’s work is part of a constellation of female thinkers and artists, in the words of Silvia Federici, committed to ‘re-enchanting the world’ by proposing research that reinvents gestures and ways of working, celebrating the beauty of everyday life and relationships, opening up to contamination with other disciplines and placing encounter at the centre of her research, starting from her vital relationship with matter. Through the collective dimension of ‘doing together’ and care, which characterises her poetics and also constitutes her working method, the artist invites us to reflect on the relationship between body and space, on how bodies construct spaces, how gestures construct worlds, how worlds tell of relationships, and relationships are a way of reinventing manners of being together, producing and exhibiting.

Con te con tutto brings to the surface the bonds and affections that make creative work possible, presenting the artist’s practice in a new light and adopting her choral perspective as a methodology.

The first section houses a silent forest of ceramic figures. Modelled using the colombino technique or composed of a myriad of small terracotta elements that give shape to bodies in potential metamorphosis, they appear to us in the semi-darkness like minor deities, arriving from a distant past to question our present.

The second section appears as a world under construction: a potential architecture that seems to emerge from the ground and become a floor, a container, a wall, a seat. At the centre of the space is a square surrounded by long seats, whose vanishing point is the garden: living matter, which in its changing colours and light – hour by hour and season after season – restores the connection that all bodies have with time.

The Pavilion is a place of exchange and contact between bodies that make space to welcome others and which, like matter, change each other reciprocally: starting with the works on display, the Dialoghi, curated by Fiammetta Griccioli and Lucia Aspesi, give rise to multiple readings of the works on display through the commissioning of two new interventions by Alice Rohrwacher and Annamaria Ajmone and a constellation of works and documents inserted into the body of the installation itself, while the Public Programme curated by Lungomare develops a narrative framework of encounters, listenings and collective actions through engagement with the space and materials.

Starting from the works on display, the Dialoghi section, conceived by Lucia Aspesi and Fiammetta Griccioli, sets off a timeline that connects Camoni’s works with other figures and narratives. The exchange of perspectives guides the journey, outlining a space for encounter and contact between various works and voices.

The intervention includes two new commissions from director and screenwriter Alice Rohrwacher and choreographer and dancer Annamaria Ajmone, as well as a series of works and documents inserted into the body of the installation itself, which occupies the second floor. Here, domestic architectures evoking ‘homes’ are developed: structures originating from wooden sideboards and wardrobes, which serve as display devices housing works of art, artefacts, texts, videos and performative interventions.

In addition to the interventions commissioned from Alice Rohrwacher and Annamaria Ajmone, the corpus of Dialogues consists of two small ceramic cups by Fausto Melotti, a watercolour by Alberto Martini, a drawing depicting a face by Marisa Merz, footage of a whirling dance inspired by Loïe Fuller, an installation by Kazuko Miyamoto, a photograph by Medardo Rosso, a sculpture by Senga Nengudi, a photograph by Gauri Gill, a woodcut by Felice Casorati, photographic documentation of Martha Graham dancing with props by Isamu Noguchi, and a work by Luciano Fabro in Marinella Pirelli’s garden.

There are also artefacts such as a Greek amphora dating from the end of the seventh century BC, two ritual loaves from the Sardinian tradition, ‘Pipia de Carèsima’, two fish fossils and an extract from a poem by Chandra Candiani. These presences broaden Chiara Camoni’s own research on gesture and the body, contributing to a polyphonic redefinition of the radical nature of her language. Added to this set of works are those previously included by Camoni in her own works, according to a practice established several years ago, testifying to her resonance and intimacy with artists Bettina Buck, Luca Bertolo, Lucia Leuci, Alessandra Spranzi and Franco Corradini – a key figure in the artist’s training.

Commissioner: Angelo Piero Cappello

Curator: Cecilia Canziani