ECO SHIFTERS
Curated by Debora Hirsch
Opening: May 25, 2019, 5PM
Until: June 29, 2019
Fondazione La Fabbrica del Cioccolato
Strada Vecchia 100, 6717 Torre, Switzerland
Eco Shifter refers to the ability to interact, adapt, transform and create new relationships with the environment.
With the vanishing of referential backgrounds, we are inevitably bound to unprecedented panoramas. Our daily navigation has become far-out exchange of motionless protocols.
In these settings, once secluded artists turn into eco shifters or denizens of a peripheral ecosystem through permanent adjustments as the only strategy of adaptation and uncertain balance, in order to act as modifying agents. Suffice to say that any contribution to these omnipresent systems implies a shift in nature
and relocation, going back to a temporary but conceptual solitude.
VIDEOS
Galata Field Trip, 2014, 5’01’’ (Jenny Brockmann)
“Chronicle of a Place”, 2013-ongoing is a performance and installations project in public spaces in New York, Istanbul and Tel Aviv. In the framework of this research based, time and site-specific project Jenny Brockmann embarked on paths which are related to the history of German emigrants in these cities.
Cold Rush, 2018, 11’ (Elaine Byrne)
Cold Rush examines the principles concerned with the acquisition of sovereign rights over the Arctic. Partly shot at the RCMP post at Dundas Harbour and at Grise Fiord, Ellesmere Island in the high Arctic, it explores how national claims to this territory have been founded upon symbolic gestures, seemingly trivial acts and the physical movement of people.
To Recall the Absent, 2016, 3’27’’ (Bel Falleiros)
This video is a walk through a sacred landscape in New Mexico: it starts from the North, facing a mountain sacred to the Tewa people, to a site-specific installation made by the artist at Pecos National Park. The symbolic circular site honors each cardinal direction and is an instrument to relate to nature and the culture surrounding it.
Instructions for Installing Vomitorium Label, 2015, 32’13’’ (Ludovica Gioscia)
The instructions video was shot in 2015 as an aid to install a site-specific installation for OFF Biennale Cairo. The curator asked me to realise a work that she could carry on the plane and unfold into a large intervention. I provided a small tube containing wallpaper cut outs and this video.
Firmamento, 2018, 5’45” (Debora Hirsch)
Through the merging of organic beings with erratic digital disturbance and sterile environments, elements are denaturalized, interacting with each other. By combining colonialist imagery, architectures and algorithm visualizations, this video makes references to the links between the colonization of the Americas and the digital colonialism.
Parades, 2019, 16 min (Sophie Kitching)
Parades stages birds perched on wires among airplane trails, palm trees, train rides. Pelicans, pigeons, herons, ducklings, and a caterpillar. that take center stage in the passing of untouched flora.
Déjeuner sur Kurosawa, 2014, 2’59” (Raphaela Melsohn)
In Déjeuner sur Kurosawa, by reinforcing the framing of the camera, it’s a remind that, beyond what is shown, are numerous things happening off-screen. Which sometimes blends figure and background, still and moving image, flatting to the same level and provoking a dialogue between different times, contexts, and situations.
The survivor, 2016, 8’ (Regina Parra)
The survivor addresses the ambiguity of independent nations showing the permanence of colonialist vestiges. Brazil is one of the countries that remain immersed in the prejudice and discursive hypocrisy of its rulers.
The House on Four Waters, 2015, 5’ (Nataša Prljević)
The video is done in an immersive built architectural environment that explores the politics of real and imagined sites of memory of two sisters. Activated through direct visual, auditory, and physical encounter, the house is an intimate meeting point and departure for negotiation of belonging, territorialism, and transformative power of sisterhood.
At Least A Snake, 2012, 6’19” (Beatrice Scaccia)
The themes are the ones of existential introspection, plasticity of identity, memory, nostalgia, escapism, solitude; The character-performer Eve, quarantined in a nebulous interior, softly sings a song about Noah’s Ark, while wandering around with their thoughts. The movements are to be intended as a kind of vital sign.
Sculpt the Motion, 2017, 6’8” (Devis Venturelli)
Motion shows continuous transformations of metallic bodies through different urban plans. Contemporary architecture is a scenario for performance, an experience as a sculptural promenade in continuous flux.
Glass-Scapes, 2018, 14’10” (Virginia Inés Vergara)
Vergara employs a complex process to photograph museum dioramas at natural history museums which she then digitally manipulates. She explores artificiality offered behind glass, for intellectual delectation. She employs photography as a tool of manifest destiny, ideologically implicated in domination and control of nature.
ARTISTS
Jenny Brockmann researches natural forms and processes and the function of human and social behaviours in a variety of different media. She has exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions including Museo de Arte de El Salvador, San Salvador, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan and Viborg Kunsthal, Denmark.
Elaine Byrne main exhibitions: Hugh Lane (Dublin); the Slought (Philadelphia); Elizabeth Foundation (New York); Montoro12 (Rome); Limerick City Gallery; UAM, (Mexico City). Awards include 8th Arte Laguna sculpture prize. She was a Fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program 2015.
Bel Falleiros is a brazilian artist with an Architecture degree from the University of São Paulo. Her works and walks were showed at CAIXA Cultural, São Paulo and at MAXXI Museum, Rome. She developed site-specific works for Pecos National Park, Burnside Farm Detroit, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Underwater/WOW, New York.
Ludovica Gioscia lives and works in London. She has been exhibiting at galleries and institutions including: Palazzo da Mosto, Reggio; The Warhol Foundation, Pittsburgh; Baert Gallery, Los Angeles; Salon 94, The Flag Art Foundation, NY; The Miro’ Foundation, Barcelona; Jerwood Space, South London Gallery and VITRINE, London.
Debora Hirsch, artist in residency at AnnexB, NY, RU Residency Unlimited, NY. Nominated for the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation’s (CIFO) Grants and Commissions Program 2019-2020. Exhibitions include those at MOCAK Krakow, MuBE São Paulo, Anthology Film Archive NY, Scivias, Galerie Lisi Hämmerle, Bregenz, Firmamento, Dix9, Paris.
Sophie Kitching has recently exhibited at Palais de Tokyo, Maison de Chateaubriand, Villa Emerige, Paris; 67, New York; Grande Surface, Brussels; fffriedrich, Frankfurt. She has been granted a Studio Residency by PS122, NYC, 2018-2019. Born 1990, Isle of Wight, UK, she lives and works in New York and Paris.
Raphaela Melsohn is an interdisciplinary artist. She holds a BFA in Visual Arts from FAAP, where she was granted with a scholarship. Recently was a resident artist at AnnexB (2018, USA) and also at Red Gate Residency (2016, CHN). Among her solo shows is “investigations in VIDEO: register, displacement of view and WAYS OF THINKING” (2016, MIS, BR).
Regina Parra’s main exhibitions: Jewish Museum (NY), PAC (Milan), 601 Artspace (NY), Galeria Millan, Pivô, Paço das Artes, Videobrasil, MASC and Fundação Joaquim Nabuco (Brazil). Awards include: SP_Art Prize, FUNDAJ Film Award and Videobrasil Prize. In 2013, she was nominated to the Emergent Artists Award at Fundación Cisneros.
Nataša Prljević is an artist, curator and co-founder of HEKLER. Honors include: KulturKontakt Austria Grant; Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Residency; Rackham Fellowship/ Chia-Lun Lo Fellowship; Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture Nomination. Currently the Executive and Curatorial Assistant at RU.
Beatrice Scaccia studied at the Fine Art Academy (Rome) and at the Holden School (Turin). She was selected for residencies at: LESP, Residency-Unlimited, Artists-Alliance, Woodstock-Byrdcliffe Guild. Her work is part of many important collections included the William Louis-Dreyfus Foundation and the Portland Museum of Art.
Devis Venturelli has shown in international institutions including Lincoln Center, New York; Anthology Film Archive, New York; PAC, Milan; Xinjiang Biennale; MACRO, Roma; Kulturhuset Museum, Stockholm; Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle, Wien; Centre d’Art Santa Monica, Barcelona; Fondazione Merz, Turin
Virginia Inés Vergara is a photo-based Chilean American artist with a studio practice in Harlem, NY. Her work embodies meditations on light, perception and proximity, and investigations into relationships between art and nature. Her work is included in numerous private European and American collections.
