May 13th – June 30th 2010
The journey has gone wonderfully well is the title of Ludovica Carbotta’s exhibition at CHAN. The work of the artist focuses in this case on what she defines as “an exercise in immobility”. Using a street lamp as a supporting element, Ludovica Carbotta remains still for a long time in the urban landscape, contrasting her own individuality, almost neutralized by the mimetic gesture, with the continuous and homogenizing movement of people. The video – exercise one – presents the experience in a very long 120-minute plan-sequence, reducing any kind of interpretation to a minimum: the viewer becomes part of the moving landscape that is the visual and sound background of the action. The fixed frame provides an image played on the balance between vertical (the pole) and horizontal (the movement of the machines). The concern for urban planning and the architectural attitude that distinguish many of Ludovica Carbotta’s works find in this operation a further deepening trying to achieve a personal fusion with space. The artist places himself vertically in the environment almost like a primitive menhir, the structure that represents the first physical transformation of the landscape, an object at the same time abstract and endowed with life inside.
The journey, understood as physical displacement, is the seemingly contradictory result of an operation of “discreet insistence” in a given space, which reveals new meanings and new paths. It thus becomes possible to get lost by remaining motionless, changing the relationship with the environment to be dominated, as La Cecla claims, by the place itself: the result is moments “in which we learn to learn from the space around us”.
Alongside the video is a series of 120 small drawings on paper – exercise two – made by the artist in a minute time each. Overturning the perspective of the video, the drawings offer an instant look at the same urban space in which Ludovica Carbotta spent 120 minutes still. The whole becomes a sort of contemporary travel album that
involuntarily contrasts today’s frantic movement with the thoughtful notebooks of travellers of the past.
My interest for nature and urban spaces as well as for their continuous changing and retreating into themselves – together with the interest for the cultural dynamics producing this environment itself – is at the core of a series of works aiming at creating modules representing specific social attitudes.
Ludovica Carbotta
