Ha visto i colori divini del Lago di Costanza?
Have you seen the divine colours of Lake Constance?
- Robert Walser from an idea of Franco Pavanello
curated by Caterina Benvegnù in collaboration with Enoch Battagin
with:
Mario Airò, John Armleder, Massimo Bartolini, Emanuele Becheri, Alex Bellan, Monica Bonvicini, Ana Maria
Bresciani, Martin Creed, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Stefania Galegati, Luigi Ghirri, Chris Gilmour, Peter
Liechti, Bruno Lorini, Thorsten Kirchhoff, Kensuke Koike, Dimitris Kozaris, Eva Marisaldi, Liliana Moro, Diego
Perrone, Pietro Roccasalva, Antonio Rovaldi, J.F. Schnyder, Roman Signer, Alessandra Tesi, Guido Van Der
Werve, Cesare Viel, Luca Vitone, Vedovamazzei, Jordan Wolfson
Opening: 26 September 2014, 6:00pm
Round table, 3:00pm
curated by Cristina Menegolli and Caterina Benvegnù
with: Eugenio Baroncelli, Massimo Bartolini, Rocco Lorusso (Libreria Simon Tanner, Roma), Antonio Rovaldi,
Beppe Sebaste
Spazio Thetis, Arsenale Novissimo
Friday 26 September 2014 – Friday 24 October 2014
Mon-Fri > 10:00am-6:00pm
free entrance
info: coloridivini@gmail.com
-“Ha visto i colori divini del Lago di Costanza?” is a group show that takes form and inspiration from the poetic
of the Swiss writer Robert Walser, one of the more important authors of XX century.
A project born from an idea of the collector Franco Pavanello and curated by Caterina Benvegnù, in
collaboration with Enoch Battagin.
Born in 1878 and dead on Christmas day in 1956, Walser is unique figure in the literary European overview.
The characters he delineates in his texts are mainly loafers (the protagonist outlined by Eichendorff in Aus
dem Leben eines Taugenichts, sees in Walser his most authentic heir, in respect to this philosophical and
romantic idea of life). Walserʼs work is based on a disjunctive, rambling, destructured writing. It becomes
poetic of the fragment, of an itinerant observation accompanied by long walks, by the experience of places
and events as a research of a further meaning, near to the contingencies of the daily life but at the same
time very far from them. In his texts digressions, cross-references, pauses are frequent: as Catherine Sauvat
says, “he destroys the footholds he seems to establish, coming back on apparently definitive acquisitions
and then contradicting them again”.
Contemporaneity of this writing becomes stimulus to realize an exhibition where various works by national
and International artists cross-refer to it. The intent of the project is to create a path that – delicately –
unveils, investigates, hints at a poetics made by irony, solitude, slowness, disappearance.
Similar expressive languages – the narrative one by Walser and the one of the works in the exhibition – will
mix up cross-referencing one to the other, with the attempt to contribute to the investigation of an author
who gave life to the literature of the minor, the minuscule, the fragmentary; who, while walking, preferred “to
breathe in the inferior regions”; the writer who, in the last years of his life, affirms to “hear voices” and
pursues in the research of disappearance, given by the will to be far from the rest of the world.
Investigating on (and with) Robert Walser means searching on tiptoe for hidden traces, walking together
with his writing, slowly going through little marked directions. The works in the exhibition will try, with a
similar narrative language, to go between the folds of this path, stumbling with him among images, visions,
sounds.
The works of the involved artists are audio, video, films, installations, photographs and little sculptures, all in
a way touching the walserian literary path.
Furthermore, to let the audience know better the work of the author, during the afternoon of the opening a
little round table is scheduled, proposing a discussion among who, in different fields – from literature to art,
until academic environments – has approached the work of Robert Walser.
In collaboration with Spazio Thetis
Info
Opening: 26 September 2014, 6:00pm
26 September 2014 – 24 October 2014
Mon-Fri > 10am-6pm
free entrance
Spazio Thetis, Arsenale Novissimo
Form the railway station and Piazzale Roma: steamboat 5.2 stop Bacini (on request)
Contacts
coloridivini@gmail.com