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Luca Vitone: Identificazione del luogo (Location i...

Luca Vitone: Identificazione del luogo (Location identification) at LabOratorio degli Angeli in Bologna

Since 2014, LabOratorio degli Angeli in Bologna, on the occasion of ART CITY, the program of exhibitions and events collateral to Arte Fiera, has invited an artist to reflect on its peculiar identity as a restoration laboratory specialized in large-format contemporary artifacts, located in the evocative deconsecrated church of Santa Maria degli Angeli and the adjacent Oratory. The protagonist of the eleventh edition of this consolidated format is Luca Vitone (Genoa, 1964. Lives in Berlin), a multimedia artist who has always been interested in the creation of an alternative artistic semantics that brings to the surface the implicit signs of the places on which he reflects, exploring their dark side.

Luca Vitone, “Identificazione del luogo”, installation view at LabOratorio degli Angeli, Bologna, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and LabOratorio degli Angeli

Luca Vitone, “Identificazione del luogo”, installation view at LabOratorio degli Angeli, Bologna, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and LabOratorio degli Angeli

An example of this is the 2014 installation in Bologna of five lights with Masonic symbols on a busy street to commemorate the tragedy of the 1980 train station massacre, recalling the persistence of the P2 lodge ramifications in Italy over the last twenty years. Or Per l’eternità, the invisible sculpture presented at the 2013 Biennale where the essence of rhubarb that hovered in the Italian Pavilion evoked the unconscious inhalation of Eternit dust by those who lived or worked in contact with this highly toxic material. Invited by curator Leonardo Regano, Vitone chose here to focus on the valorization of the restorers’ daily work in designing his intervention, imagining an exhibition in progress centered on the restoration of some of his older works. In the context of his more than ten-year production, he has therefore selected some works from the Identificazione del Luogo (Location identification) series, a project developed between 1989 and 1992, in the initial and founding phase of his research, since then already reactivated on other occasions but no longer exhibited for a long time. This cycle summarizes an important passage of his creative story, linked to questioning the meaning of a place through the interpretation of its signs, and consists of site-specific installations created in galleries and public institutions, in which the windows of the exhibition rooms were screened by him with reproductions of cartographic maps.

Luca Vitone, “Identificazione del luogo”, installation view at LabOratorio degli Angeli, Bologna, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and LabOratorio degli Angeli

Luca Vitone, “Identificazione del luogo”, installation view at LabOratorio degli Angeli, Bologna, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and LabOratorio degli Angeli

Each map was an enlarged xerography mounted on plexiglass of the cadastral plan of the specific portion of the panorama visible from each window, considered starting from the lower limit of the line of the building in which the window was located to arrive at the end of our possible horizon in relation to that point of view. By mentally tilting the cartographic image from the vertical to the horizontal position until the roads and buildings indicated gradually coincide with those actually identifiable through the window, the conventionality of the mapping operation becomes clear. While in the map the same extension of the sheet covering the glass always corresponds, in the various locations, to a similar extension of the development of the landscape, in the real vision the depth of the horizon accessible is very different if the window is in a country house (as in Castello di Rivara, 1989, here exhibited) or in a metropolitan street like Crosby Street in New York where the buildings opposite immediately block the view. The idea is to reflect on the relationship between us and the places we inhabit, highlighting their nature mediated by information and reproductions from which we draw the elements to read what we could instead experience. If what remains of a landscape is its convention, the sense of loss resulting from this awareness shifts the artist’s operation from the starting conceptual level to the affective one of a personal geography where individual and collective memory intersect.

Luca Vitone, “Identificazione del luogo”, installation view at LabOratorio degli Angeli, Bologna, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and LabOratorio degli Angeli

Luca Vitone, “Identificazione del luogo”, installation view at LabOratorio degli Angeli, Bologna, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and LabOratorio degli Angeli

To multiply the revelatory and alienating effect at the same time, from these in situ installations the artist obtained a further small-format reworking, namely the black and white photographic reproduction of the same environments in which the cartographic maps, proportionate to the size of the print, are graphics shrunk and glued like diaphragms to the photographed windows. The exhibition in Bologna also develops, therefore, on two levels: the horizontal one, consisting of the restorers’ work tables, where both some original plexiglass installed decades ago and some collage-photographs that during the opening period of the exhibition will be the subject of conservative restoration and aesthetic reorganization interventions, and the vertical one of the walls, where we see both categories of artefacts already “treated” by the LabOratorio degli Angeli staff. For each type of work, a specific protocol was planned: the works exhibited in the previous performance installations show signs of deterioration linked to the exhibition moment and to their subsequent conservation history, such as stains, mold or tears in the xerography glued onto the panel, while in the case of the photographs it was mainly a matter of attenuating some imperfections linked to the executive technique that had already occurred during the production phase, such as some swelling due to the lack of adhesion of the elements added via collage, and of adapting the assembly and the glass of the display cases (now anti-reflective) to facilitate their use.

Luca Vitone, “Identificazione del luogo”, installation view at LabOratorio degli Angeli, Bologna, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and LabOratorio degli Angeli

Luca Vitone, “Identificazione del luogo”, installation view at LabOratorio degli Angeli, Bologna, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and LabOratorio degli Angeli

To the stringent operational limits linked to the constitutive delicacy of the photographic material, the challenge of a very delicate graphic medium is added here, which will probably prevent the yellowing of the support from being corrected. The restoration operation requested by Vitone focuses attention on the transformations of the materials included in the works, both those connected to the natural aging of each artifact, and those linked to the artist’s experiments, who in each replication of the project was encouraged to change some compositional solution to diversify the image series. Within the same theme, therefore, each cycle has its own specific technical peculiarity for the progressive elaboration of different solutions, such as the strips that at a certain point appear to distance the map from the image of the window to illusionistically mimic the idea of ​​the curtain.

Luca Vitone, “Identificazione del luogo”, installation view at LabOratorio degli Angeli, Bologna, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and LabOratorio degli Angeli

Luca Vitone, “Identificazione del luogo”, installation view at LabOratorio degli Angeli, Bologna, photo Francesco Rucci, courtesy the artist and LabOratorio degli Angeli

What remains constant, since it is aesthetically constitutive of the work, is the choice of xerography as a printing method, maintained by the artist even in the most recent re-editions of the project, such as the one at the OK Centrum in Linz in 2007, when more up-to-date systems could have been used. This persistence demonstrates how for Vitone the original technique was an integral part of a process that, despite the apparent stylistic minimalism, draws visual effectiveness precisely from those values ​​of surface and graininess that the apparently aseptic insert of the maps seems at first sight to elude. Among the many proposals of the ART CITY program, this is certainly one of the most interesting exhibitions, with the only note that it would have been very engaging to see, even in derogation of the conceptual rigor of the project, a new site-specific cartographic intervention on the suggestive arched window of LabOratorio degli Angeli.

Info:

Luca Vitone. Identificazione del luogo
curated by Leonardo Regano
3 – 15 febbraio 2025
LabOratorio degli Angeli, via degli Angeli 32 – Bologna
www.laboratoriodegliangeli.it


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