La Fabbrica del Cioccolato Foundation
Saturday January 27th, 2018 | 4 p.m. | Blenio Valley| Canton Ticino – Switzerland
Vernissage of the Engagé festival with presentation of the video “Fresh garbage, sospesi tra il mangiare e il sognare” (“Fresh garbage, suspended between eating and dreaming”), a contemporary fairy tale by Fosco Valentini & Paola Wu Min Yi.
Short dialogues with the authors of the project and the video, with the involvement of Marko Miladinovic who will talk about the topics covered in “Fresh Garbage” through a literary performance.
Saturday 27th January 2018, 4 p.m.
From 27th January to 11th February 2018
As first stage of its annual programme, during the inauguration of the Engagé festival on 27th January, La Fabbrica del Cioccolato Foundation will present “Fresh Garbage”, a video by Fosco Valentini and Paola Wu Min Yi.
Fresh Garbage was made with an obsolete technology also to show the contemporary technological waste, with disused and recycled materials and techniques, old analogue video cameras, mobile phones and laptops now put aside and fallen into disuse, cassettes, tapes and editing software recovered from oblivion, Croma kei and shooting and editing techniques buried in digital memory, super 8 and 35mm clips, slides, abandoned, vintage-coloured analogue films reshot and digitalised, old incandescent shooting lights, photos of magazines already thrown away, dolls and puppets found in the garbage and in charity shops, abandoned and reused tools, old sound recordings, trash, postcards, decals and old stickers for children found in old drawers, collages found on the street and in rubbish bins, leftovers, animals, actors, dancers, artists, migrants and refugees found in reception centres, authentic abandoned and marginalised human beings.
In the mid-1960s the Californian band Spirit composed the first jazz pop rock ode to the emerging ecological issue of waste and superfluous consumption. Their criticism of excessive consumerism started in the very title of the song “Fresh garbage” and was already clear in the first riff:
“Look beneath your lid some morning – See those things you didn’t quite consume – The world’s a can for your fresh garbage”.
Knowing the message of Spirit already in the early 1970s, with the video Fresh Garbage Fosco Valentini and Paola Wu Min Yi express the universal call to escape in a whirl of imagination, human rights, right to dream, to daydreaming, in which the son of a man doesn’t have a place where to lay his head and there is no place he feels like home. Looking for an aphorism that is exaggeration, extravagant, ironic and grotesque language. A way to excess with a shape broken…by dream and by animated drawings, like something unexpected and uneven. A fragmented speech to let silence, i.e. symbolism, come in. A movement inside a cosmic space, like a labyrinth where we are all part of the same body, animals, women, children, men of any ethnical group, culture and ideology, migrants, refugees, going towards moons, planets, galaxies, travelling inside a cosmic cave containing the sense of space, that is made of paths, spirals, labyrinths and mazes that are also a dance, the dance of life. The idea is to move our feet away from earth to dissolve gravity, the darkness of the matter with the cosmic body flying away towards the sky, towards the moon. Knowing that everything is just a metaphor, we tried to give words and images back their full meaning, like in dreams; turn them into nonsense, going beyond the antinomy between sense and nonsense like dreams do, and tell in this contemporary fairy tale about the “verbum infans”, the infant or ineffable word.
In this video words and phrases are the translation of a verse of Spirit’s Fresh Garbage and the translation of two Haikus. A verse translated with a Haiku by Jorge Luis Borges.
Fosco Valentini (Rome, 1954) studied in Rome in the years of the huge debate around painting, Arte Povera and conceptual art. His friendship and deep collaboration with Alighiero Boetti and Aldo Braibanti promoted a concept of art with a 360-degree view on all the aspects of knowledge, on the sign masters of language, both in terms of communication and of an archetypical/magical substratum of signs and images. Recent exhibitions and installations are “Sopra l’orizzonte terra” (“Over the earth horizon”), installations by Fosco Valentini and Luigi Puxeddu curated by Giovanna Dalla Chiesa: Palazzo Sforza Cesarini Genzano 2015, Wopart Lugano 2017, Art 51 gallery “Insieme in Silenzio” (=Together in silence”) curated by Zerynthia galleria Pieroni, Rome 2017.
Paola Wu Min Yi was born in Rome in 1956 by famous Chinese opera singers. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts. Performer, director and co-author, with the artist Fosco valentini, of video-art short films characterised by the blending of different artistic genres. As a performer she uses sound riffs with voice, body percussion and Western concert flute, along with movement dance and taiji quan. The Chinese analogical and systemic approach is the core of her works, with an eye on social and environmental issues and a dreamlike twist.
La Fabbrica del Cioccolato Foundation is in charge of the cultural activities of the former industrial complex of Cima Norma. In 2016, first year of activity, the programme foreignness was launched, a curatorial project designed by artistic director Franco Marinotti, that expresses itself as a theme-project analysing the interaction between art, in its various expressions, and territory, meant as a developing cultural, social and political heritage.
“Engagé”
From the French dictionary: Engagé est aussi qui est engagé dans un endroit et ne peut en être retiré facilement. Qui prend position, en vertu de ses convictions profondes, sur les problèmes sociaux, politiques ou religieux de son temps. (“Engaged” is also who is engaged in a place and cannot be removed easily. Who takes a position, by virtue of his deep convictions, on the social, political or religious problems of his time).
The project Engagé comes from a dialogue between Fosco Valentini and Franco Marinotti about the absence or rarity, in contemporary socially-engaged art (political art, social art. etc.) of those ironic, imagination, subconscious, symbolical, poetic, dream, transcendent, iridescent, spiritual freedoms essential to shed light on and discuss the emergencies of our world, that we live as nightmares bothering us in the chaos of the eternal ground of creation. Nothing distressing us then, to start daydreaming again, re-sexualising ideas and words, finding the mark of Eros again. We need to go beyond pre-set meanings that became stones and find the temporary meaning lying in game, or reciprocal action of light. The space Engagé proposes to develop a synergetic path collateral to the programme of the Fabbrica del cioccolato Foundation, going against those “artistisations” borrowed from the media and aimed to dramatize ecological, social and political emergencies, exacerbating communication masochism. Engagé wants to give space to Contemporary Art’s expressive methodologies, to those worlds of Art, Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics investigating with a “Dionysiac” approach, meaning by that the artistic-aesthetic choices freeing metaphorical excess, ironic exuberance, poetic exhilaration, the aphorism of grotesque and exaggeration, knowing that both in art and in the human nature there is no such a thing as satisfaction, there is no sense of enough, but rather an innate need for excess, twinkle, exaggeration. That’s the reason why we can’t live without imagination, without adorning and exaggerating our own life.
The institutional sponsors of La Fabbrica del Cioccolato Foundation are: Republic and Canton of Ticino, DECS-Fondo Swisslos; Municipality of Blenio; Municipality of Serravalle; Municipality of Acquarossa; Regional Development Agency of Bellinzona and surrounding Valleys; Regional Tourism Organisation of Bellinzona and Upper Ticino. General and technical sponsors are: Banca dello Stato del Canton Ticino; Winteler & Co SA; Dazzi SA, printing press; Cham Paper Group; Assimedia, insurance service; Giardini Toschini; Laube SA; Fausto Bizzini Giardini; Degiorgi &Vitali, container transport service. Media partners are: Plug-in, contemporary art and culture; Ticino Finanza and Metalocus revista-magazine.
The ongoing events at La Fabbrica del Cioccolato Foundation are: Paper Building by Daniel González, visible on the external façade of the factory’s main building, and CacaoCollective by Ivo Rovira and Ana Ponce, that can be visited in the factory basement from Wednesday to Saturday from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. However, we recommend visitors to always inform us in advance writing to: requests@chocfact.ch
The Fabbrica del Cioccolato events programme within the curatorial project “foreignness” will continue with: “Wasteland”, a journey across mining landscapes (10th February 2018) ; Walkabout #01/foreignness enchantment (7th April 2018).
Any updates to the programme are available at www.chocfact.ch
General information:
La Fabbrica del Cioccolato Foundation
what: Inauguration Engagé festival, presentation video Fresh Garbage
when: Saturday January 27th 2018, 4 p.m.
artists: Fosco Valentini & Paola Wu Min Yi
critical text: Fosco Valentini & Franco Marinotti
artistic direction: Fosco Valentini & Franco Marinotti
short dialogues: Fosco Valentini, Paola Wu Min Yi, Franco Marinotti, Marko Miladinovic
duration: from January 27th to February 11th 2018
entrance: free from Wednesday to Saturday from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. or by appointment (requests@chocfact.ch)
information: requests@chocfact.ch www.chocfact.ch +41 79 737 44 99
address: Stabili Cima Norma | Strada Vecchia 100 | CH-6717 Torre-Blenio
