curated by: a cura di Stefano Collicelli Cagol e Elena Magini
artists in the exhibition:
Francesca Banchelli, Chiara Bettazzi, Chiara Camoni, Giulia Cenci, Isabella Costabile, Daniela De Lorenzo, Helena Hladilová, Christiane Löhr, Lucia Marcucci, Margherita Moscardini, Moira Ricci, Sandra Tomboloni
The Centro Pecci presents the exhibition Colorescenze. Artists, Tuscany, Future, curated by Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Elena Magini, from 28 June to 13 October 2024.
The exhibition brings together twelve women artists, Tuscan by origin or adoption, belonging to different generations and engaged in the production of new forms and new imagery with materials often collected on the territory, always capable of suggesting unexpected tools and words to build the future. The title is illustrative: a word inspired by a collage by Lucia Marcucci that seems to unite – through reference to colour and knowledge – different universes, but never so close as today: art, science and wisdom. In the contemporary art system, this group of extraordinary artists tells of the uniqueness of the Tuscan context, characterised by a capillary presence of creativity that differentiates it from the concentration of other Italian regions.
The choice to live in isolated places or far from the main artistic circuits is reflected in the desire to deal with a situated knowledge, a knowledge that takes its cue from one’s everyday life. The works draw sap from the communities of reference, from found materials – natural or artificial -, from the possibility of collaborating with craftsmen and from a dialogic relationship with the landscape. Sharing knowledge to overcome the fragility of the individual, sounding out and reconstructing apocalypses without fear but with precision and peaks of irreverence, constructing forms that are both minimalist and baroque, creating alliances between species, of monstrous beings and fantastic stories – all these actions invite to a unique experience of time, space and speech.
In the rooms of the Gamberini Wing of the Pecci Centre, an unprecedented immersion takes shape in the capacity of a shared territory to evoke different experiences, responding to personal aptitudes that cannot be assimilated to a single matrix, testifying to an alternative way of making art to established male models. In a historical phase characterised by hydrogeological disasters, global warming, and the pollution of territories, the care taken in the recovery and reassembly of materials and knowledge becomes an important antidote to a future of decline and despair that appears already written. The Italian procedural tradition meets the reflections on language developed by feminist groups in the 1970s, giving rise to an alternative canon, in apparent contrast to a system of values and knowledge that in Italy appeared incontrovertibly given. Colorescenze. Artiste, Toscana, Futuro collects the legacy of this joyful, lucid and angry culture of otherness, writing an unforgettable page in the history of the Centro Pecci, a testimony to how contemporary art can help us think up new models of the world useful for facing the future.
The decision to present the works of a group of women artists belonging to the regional context responds to the particular role of the Centro Pecci and the Fondazione per le arti contemporanee in Toscana as the coordinating body of artistic production in the region: in this perspective, the need arose to investigate possible forms of planning specific to the territory, thanks to the voices of the women artists who inhabit it. Their artistic re-elaboration allows a proactive reflection on how to imagine a new system of thought and action, through practices of resistance and regenerative imagery, capable of projecting us into the near future.
CAPTION FOR ALL THE IMAGES:
1XUNKNOWN 1942-2018 to Fortress Europe, with Love (2024)
21 video, miniDV and 4k transferred on hard drive, sound, different durations; 21 projectors, cables, cement. Ambient size.
Views and details of the group exhibition COLORESCENZE at Centro Pecci, Prato, Italy, curated by E. Magini and S. Collicelli.
Photo Ela Bialkowska OKNOstudio.
Courtesy the artist and Centro Pecci
The work 1×UNKNOWN, to Fortress Europe with Love (2012-2018) is a series of 21 short films recorded between 2012 and 2018 traveling along the European Atlantic coast from Pyrenees to Norway with the purpose to fix the Atlantic Wall defensive line before its complete disappearance.
The Atlantic Wall (1942-1944 never completed) is a series of about 15,000 fortifications built by the Third Reicht along the European Atlantic coast for the purpose of defending “Fortress Europe.”