FOROF presents Alex Cecchetti SORTILEGIO curated by Maria Alicata, with Sortilegio Alex Cecchetti makes us immerse in a natural and fantastic world, a spiritual experience giving up our memories, our individual and collective memories, to return to a primordial dimension, to the origin of life.
November 16, 2022 – April 15, 2023
Roccagiovine Palace
Trajan’s Forum, 1 – Rome
“We will return forests, perhaps we will return waves. Our identity will be dissolved, our ego forgotten. We will return to coral, we will return to jellyfish. Life is a magical pastime.”
Alex Cecchetti
For its second season, from November 16, 2022 to April 15, 2023, FOROF presents Sortilegio, a site specific personal exhibition by Alex Cecchetti – artist, poet, gardener and choreographer – who has created a shamanic environment whose elements guide the spectators to abandon themselves themselves and go to the meeting of Nature.
In an exhibition itinerary made up of sounds, narrations and smells, Sortilegio is a hymn to nature and an invitation to identify with it that reminds us that we owe our life to other species, such as the air we breathe to the oceans and forests. In this cohabitation and interdependence, however, we have forgotten love. While loving this planet, habits have clouded us for too long, and with this spell the artist wants to get the heart out of the chest of anyone who will take part in it.
“In the ecological urgency we are experiencing today, it is all too clear to everyone how counterproductive it is to control and exploit Nature as a resource to which nothing is owed, not even respect. – Says Alex Cecchetti – It is counterproductive because Nature always wins, the seed always wins, it is we who lose. We are nature, we are part of it, we do not stop being nature even when we are dead. But it is our being a species, our being life that is in danger. “
For the exhibition, alongside works produced in recent years, Cecchetti creates three series of unpublished works: the Revolutionary Vases, the Meduse and Passatempo.
The first part of the exhibition is, in the artist’s words, “a spell of perfumes, shapes and liqueurs that will enchant you, drawing into you a spiritual eroticism generous with orgasms. Because loving something, being attracted to it is the highest form of knowledge. All knowledge is nothing more than the result of the seductive power of the universe. “
The Botanical Paintings (2021 – 2022) that the artist defines as “collaborations with other forms of intelligence such as plants, flowers and seasons” open the path. These are paintings made with the ancient techniques of impression and natural dyeing; works installed in such a way as to bring out the colors, shapes and impressions, which become devices to activate narratives and stories. Next to these, for the first time, the Revolutionary Vases are exhibited, large enamelled garden vases bearing poems composed by the artist; installed on carpets of lavender, hops and hibiscus, these objects are placed halfway between a decorative element, a narrative device and an elixir with intoxicating scents. Together with these also Essence (2020), a relief in scented wood of cypress, cedar and pine, born from a reflection on time and its measurement through the life of the trees.
Some of the walls of the space are instead covered as if they were theatrical backdrops by an installation of plants and ferns collected in the gardens and parks of Rome, which composes an anticipation of Love Bar, an environmental installation conceived by Cecchetti in 2012 and in continuous evolution, which will be protagonist of one of the Episodes part of the program conceived by the artist who will accompany the exhibition for its entire duration.
Going down to the underground floor will give the sensation of slowly plunging into a marine dimension, a dreamlike context in which some Medusa – hammocks inspired by the planktonic marine animal, illuminated and covered with silk organza as if they were lanterns – welcome visitors and their dreams.
For the archaeological area Cecchetti has created Onda a swing sculpture on which visitors are invited to sit and swing, inspired by underwater shapes and made with wood, ceramic and fabric. “The swing is like a wave that comes and goes like the day, the night, the wind and the seasons. – Says Alex Cecchetti – And if everything comes and goes why shouldn’t we also come and go like love? Return to forests, return to waves “.
To amplify this underwater dimension, large videos shot by the artist during his dives in the different oceans of the world are projected in this area, a sort of underwater travelogue.
The program of Episodes created and conceived by the artist with the aim of activating the exhibition path, deepening the themes explored by the works and the poetics of the protagonist, includes events that, from December, will light up Sortilegio through some spells.
“The Episodes program is as fundamental as the installation project – explains Giovanna Caruso Fendi, founder of FOROF. – The choice of creating a cultural space managed by a benefit company, in fact, sees in its continuous activation, not only a different way to offer the use of art and to involve the public, but also to generate interest, to contribute to its positioning national and international cultural, with repercussions not only cultural but that guarantee its sustainability. A new, more contemporary concept of patronage, which I like to define as ‘collective patronage!’. “
CONTACTS FOR THE PRESS
Lara Facco P&C
ALEX CECCHETTI
Alex Cecchetti (born in 1977, died in 2014, resurrected in 2021) is an artist, poet, gardener and choreographer. Difficult to classify, his work can be considered as the art of the unrepresentable: tactile and poetic, aesthetic and materialistic, he creates mental and physical environments in which the spectators are part of the work of art. Alex Cecchetti pays attention to the small but significant shifts of meanings, sensations and perceptions that open the public to imaginative experiences of inner transformation. His works, which he defines as spells, transform play, poetry and collaborations with “more than human” beings into catalysts of almost mystical everyday experiences.
Invited to walk backwards in a garden or wear skirts to dance like dervishes to the music of the frequencies of the planets of the solar system, spectators are no longer confined to just the role of observers.
Asleep to a chorus of human voices singing like whales or kidnapped by cocktails and potions made with local plants and love stories, the spectators are transported in a spell lived both mentally and physically.
For Sortilegio, Alex Cecchetti wanted to produce the new works in the territory of Rome, collaborating with wood craftsmen, potters, dancers and gardeners, with the desire to give life to a community that dialogues around aesthetic and ecological issues.
Recent exhibitions and charms include: PATH for Biennale Gherdeina (recipient of the Italian Council award of the Italian Ministry of Culture 2022), MAXXI, Rome (2021), SEMA Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, KOR) and Netwerk Aalst with Laure Prouvost ( 2020), Serpentine Galleries London and Castello di Rivoli (2019), Spike Island, Bristol (2018). Palais de Tokyo, Paris; CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin, (all in 2017). Playground Festival and M Leuven & STUK, Leuven, (all in 2016). Serralves, Porto (2014); South London Gallery (2013); MAXXI, Rome and Contemporary Art Center (CAC), Vilnius (2012).
PATH, Alex Cecchetti’s most recent walking project, accompanies the public on a one-to-one experience along a mountain path that combines spirituality, ecological sensitivity and more than human poetry. Moving between poetry, love story, spell and myth, SENTIERO accompanies the public and its guides through the encounter with non-human people (plants, animals, minerals), their stories, their different forms of creation of the world and the experience of sensations. Partly an intervention on site, partly a community project, PATH creates new paths in the mountains as an archetype for a journey into the unknown, guided by human and non-human forms of knowledge and accompanied by collaborators including plants, seasons and stars. For SENTIERO, a host of guides from different disciplines and carriers of different passions – from dance to music, from talking to birds to studying dreams – have been trained to accompany spectators along their path to a place of refuge at the end of the trail, a purpose-built architecture that echoes that of a yurt, created through eco-printing techniques, where the sensory experiences of food, smell, sound and color are all derived from the artist’s deep engagement with communities and local ecologies.
MARIA ALICATA
Biography Art historian and curator, her research interests focus on artist cinema, performative practices, the neo-avant-gardes in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, artist writings and the archive as an artistic practice. Previously, she headed the Art, Architecture and Urban Planning department of the Adriano Olivetti Foundation, curating public art projects, seminars, conferences and the acquisition of the archives of Olivetti architects and designers. From 2011 to 2014 she curated the Young Artists and Residences program of the MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. You have worked and lectured for institutions, such as the Venice Biennale and the CNEAI Center National Édition Art Image, Paris. You are one of the founders of Magic Lantern Film Festival (together with Adrienne Drake and Ilaria Gianni), a six-monthly review that investigates the relationship between cinema and visual arts. For the MAXXI, National Museum of XXI Century Arts, he recently curated an exhibition and a series of meetings dedicated to the archive of the Ferranti Gallery, developing a project aimed at investigating the artistic and political scene in Rome from 1974 to 1985. as part of the 66th Biennale Musica he curated the site-specific installation Respiro by Irma Blank.
November 16, 2022 – April 15, 2023
Trajan’s Forum, 1 – Rome
source: Lara Facco P&C