Exhibition series Quickie of Fame from the Kasko, "Loving Secrets"
Step by step, a dark pink lily roams the rooms of Madero 10 accompanied by the trilling sounds of a flute. Its rhythmic clapping on the patterned tiles and earth-colored steps recalls the sounds of a slowly advancing funeral march that recapitulates the stories of past lives as it says goodbye. The lily is part of a ritual of purification with which Rosanna Monteleone (*1977) approaches her vacant family home in Mexico in a performative way. A sensual exploration of the relationship to an existing but distant space and its redefinition - recorded through the documentary lens of a video camera, which registers the architectural structures as well as the objects left behind in them. Stripped of their original function, these found objects (like the disused water pipes on the roof terrace) gradually begin to develop an autonomy that is about a peculiar poetry of the abandoned, the left behind. Henceforth, they enter into new links with their surroundings based solely on their shapes, colors and materials, allowing their transformed content to flow again.
Like the windows and doors of the house, the staircase enables encounters. It functions as a threshold and place of transition, of change, of coming and going, and thus brings into focus the actual focus of Rosanna Monteleone's video work. Together with the medium Maria Gabriela Moreno Rodriguez and other actors, she traces the "presences" of previous generations that occupy the individual living spaces up to the present, enabling them to find their way to new forms of existence and beyond. The cross-media spatial installation thus addresses the conditions, limits and possibilities of temporal and material transformations (lat. trans-formare: to change, to over-form). A process of change that encompasses both life-worldly, social and artistic aspects and takes a look at becoming itself.
A lump of clay becomes the protagonist of this transformation process, not only in the installation space, but especially towards the end of the video work. Scanning the environment, traces, memories and structures are imprinted on it or remain attached to it, only to be subjected to attentive study as it is turned and twisted. In this way, the earth functions as the basic material of artistic products and as the carrier of a language of form and color that, on the one hand, always seems to be already embedded in the material - waiting for the right moment to show itself - and, on the other hand, is emptied of it in order to expose itself to a new interpretation. In this sense, the found and created objects of the room installation Loving Secrets - wrapped in colored light and spicy fragrance - reflect individual sequences of the video work and, in the presence of the exhibition visitors, continue to pursue the thoughts echoed therein.
Video: "Madero 10", 2 channel video/audio work, duration: 45:07 min
Space assemblage with several sculptural works, variable space dimension.
Materials:
Ceramics (glazed and unglazed), steel and metal, cloth, papier-mache, book and paper, Light foil and transparent color foil,
plexiglass, earth, cedar, rose petals, spices and oil essences, paravan made of painted mdf wood, thread, Amethyst stalactite disc,
sofa
Ceramics (glazed and unglazed), steel and metal, cloth, papier-mache, book and paper, Light foil and transparent color foil,
plexiglass, earth, cedar, rose petals, spices and oil essences, paravan made of painted mdf wood, thread, Amethyst stalactite disc,
sofa
Text from Larissa Dätwyler, art historian and Photography from Linus Weber, 2022