“Agency” is the power to change reality by having a specific effect. This is a clear definition for philosophers, sociologists and art historians. What’s less clear, though, is who or what this “causal power” refers to. That a human being has the ability to cause a certain event or to act is not debatable, but our certainty falls into a radical crisis when the subject to whom agency is attributed is not human but banal, flat, passive matter.
“Vibrant matter”: Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Giulia Cenci, June Crespo, Jesse Darling, Bronwyn Katz, Sandra Mujinga, Isabel Nuño de Buen, Luca Trevisani, installation view, courtesy Fondazione Sandra e Giancarlo Bonollo. Photo credit: Giovanni Canova
The exhibition Vibrant Matter at the Bonollo Foundation in Thiene (VI) reignites criticism of the three adjectives “banal, flat, passive”, which appear clear and unquestionable. Based on the book of the same name by philosopher Jane Bennett, curator Chiara Nuzzi organises the works of eight artists in a dialogue that revolves around their material agency and the ecological issues they raise. Far from banal is Clessidra (C) by Giorgio Andreotta Calò, halfway between an objet trouvé – a bricola eroded by Venetian waters – and a complex and intelligent sculpture, the two mirrored parts of the work merge in bronze. Here, the material has an effect on us because it forces our minds to be influenced by the lagoon tradition of which it is a trace, a voice and an active reminder. That trunk, which hybridises its wooden nature with the artist’s bronze artifice, makes us feel the wound that the tide has caused on its surface, makes us see the gondola that was once tied to it, makes us imagine the fragility to which every entity in this world is subject.
“Vibrant matter”: Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Giulia Cenci, June Crespo, Jesse Darling, Bronwyn Katz, Sandra Mujinga, Isabel Nuño de Buen, Luca Trevisani, installation view, courtesy Fondazione Sandra e Giancarlo Bonollo. Photo credit: Giovanni Canova
Far from flat is Markers of Buried Gold by Bronwyn Katz, in which a discarded material such as a disused bed net is activated to generate a new horizon of meaning. That woven metal annoyingly tickles our aesthetic sense and at the same time redirects it towards a new meaning, combining the artist’s mastery in working with something so unusual and devalued with the unexpected geometric harmony inspired by the map of Johannesburg, Katz’s hometown. That useless rusty iron, while not distorted in its appearance, reveals itself to be complex and meaningful. Finally, works such as Giulia Cenci‘s Excersise for a proper gait enrich the questioning of the agency of non-human matter, in which mechanical parts, urban elements and raw materials such as clay and dust merge into an uncategorizable being. This rigid and distorted figure disturbs us with its apparent ability to move and attack us at any moment. We are unsettled by its almost human yet not perfectly realistic nature, a condition that robotics engineer Masahiro Mori would describe as the threshold of the “uncanny valley”.
“Vibrant matter”: Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Giulia Cenci, June Crespo, Jesse Darling, Bronwyn Katz, Sandra Mujinga, Isabel Nuño de Buen, Luca Trevisani, installation view, courtesy Fondazione Sandra e Giancarlo Bonollo. Photo credit: Giovanni Canova
«Matter is not neutral, but an actor in the system of meanings and influences», wrote art anthropologist Alfred Gell as early as 1998. As an actor in our network of relationships, we humans interact with that matter mainly in two ways: either by suffering its effect, as in the case of Vibrant matter, or by wanting to govern it. A perfect example of the latter trend is the second exhibition presented by the Bonollo Foundation, a solo show by Paloma Proudfoot curated by Elisa Carollo. The artist weaves a dialogue – paraphrasing the title of the exhibition Speech weavers – with ceramics, treating it as a reactive organism that the sculptor masterfully tames. The young artist works clay in the round and in bas-reliefs, transforming the questions that feminist thought and psychoanalysis have addressed to the body and identity into elegant images. Proudfoot’s fragmented bodies, made up of hands that protrude from the walls and eyes that remain attached almost two-dimensionally to them, speak of a fluid and decomposable identity.
Paloma Proudfoot, “Speech weavers”, installation view, courtesy Fondazione Sandra e Giancarlo Bonollo. Photo credit: Giovanni Canova
Vulnerability and fragmentation, in this perspective, are the irreducible elements of subjectivity – the content of the works on display – but they are also the elements that define, par excellence, the material quality ceramics. There is therefore an undeniable continuity between the body-subject as the meaning of the works and the ceramic body as their constituent material. In this continuity it is given the refinement of the sculptures of Speech weavers, whose characteristics of fluidity and materiality – the effect that the material gives us – communicate perfectly with the installations of Vibrant matter.
Info:
Vibrant matter curated by Chiara Nuzzi
Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Giulia Cenci, June Crespo, Jesse Darling, Bronwyn Katz, Sandra Mujinga, Isabel Nuño de Buen, Luca Trevisani
7/06/2025 – 7/11/2025
Paloma Proudfoot. Speech weavers curated by Elisa Carollo
7/06/2025 – 30/08/2025
Fondazione Sandra e Giancarlo Bonollo per l’arte contemporanea
Via dell’Eva 1, Thiene, Vicenza
www.fondazionebonollo.com
Graduate in Philosophy from the University of Milan, where she currently lives, she specialized in aesthetics and contemporary criticism. Passionate of the art world and devoted to research, she believes in the potential of the interdisciplinary gaze, which intertwines critical thinking, typical of philosophical backgroud, and the communicative power of art to shape the evolving identity of its time.
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