primo gusto
orange and lemon verbena
Opening, 18.10.2024, 6pm
19.10.2024 – 26.01.2025
LAVINIA. A Walk
by Salvatore Lacagnina
LAVINIA is not an exhibition; nor a project, or a program.
It starts as a way to investigate certain ideas and question certain habits. It harbours thoughts and images developed over many years, reweaving the threads of much research, from Exercises in Imagination with Peter Friedl for Studio Roma at the Swiss Institute in Rome to the effort made by Studio 14 at Documenta 14 in Athens – but especially in Kassel, Deep in the Sea there is a Puffer Fish. Fables, traditions and other impostors. Study continued developing at Studio Eine Phantastik at the Shedhalle in Zurich. Paolo Do was both instigator and fellow traveller on this journey, together with many others.
LAVINIA is an “exercise in imagination” that begins with the chant kids use when they begin playing: “Let's make it a _____!” as a statement of cold fact, no wishing, no doubt.
Beginnings, however, are not neutral and are not beyond history, space or situations. Beginnings are the chance to tell new stories in a place and time. Beginning is an attitude that tends to spot differences, minimal, germinal discontinuities, not similarities: “Only distant images can be compared, not similar ones.” You have to avoid “recognizing,” which all too often is just a false projection of the recognizer (a plural subject, by the way) that prompts one to assert, “I recognize this,” meaning: “I already know it.” This is the widespread attitude that usually masks the “I know it all” typical of ignorance, as would be said in some non-Western cultures.
The Loggia dei Vini hosted opulent receptions. At the center of the building stood a marble table for dinner parties where fine wines from Scipione Borghese’s collection were served. Two of Rome's rare icehouses could be found on Villa Borghese grounds: deep wells in which ice was stored in layers of straw to chill the first sorbets served at the day’s banquets.
Ice cream is now just one of the most popular desserts on earth, no longer a speciality that shows off a family's wealth.
LAVINIA is also an ice cream: seven flavors linked to the seasons. The first is «orange and lemon verbena».
Let's make LAVINIA a Walk!
Ross Birrell & David Harding
The desire line
The walk begins at the gate on Via dell’Uccelliera and an improvised path the British call the Path of Desire, one of the many marked in parks as short cuts through the nearly always right-angle paths laid out by the architects.
Thanks to the work of Ross Birrell & David Harding that brings us directly in front of the Loggia dei Vini, this is where the beginning of LAVINIA will materialize in a few weeks.
The creative collaboration of Ross Birrell (born 1969 in Paisley, Scotland) and David Harding (born 1937 in Edinburgh, Scotland) began in 2005 with the film Port Bou: 18 Fragments for Walter Benjamin which premiered at Kunsthalle Basel in 2006. Birrell, Professor and Senior Researcher at The Glasgow School of Art, employs a range of media including film, sculpture, installation, music and text to produce works which interweave contexts of poetry, philosophy, politics, and place. David Harding founded the
influential Department of Environmental Art at The Glasgow School of Art in 1985. His engagement with art in public space made him reconsider a concept of the work which focusses on the medium and regards context as an equivalent, if not more important aspect of the artwork.
Birrell’s and Harding’s joint works were shown at documenta 14, Kunsthalle Basel, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, Glasgow International, Galeri Rotor Gothenburg, Swiss Institute in Rome, Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City, Portikus, Frankfurt am Main, and Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, USA. Their Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, a concert for the opening of documenta 14, involved the Athens State Orchestra (ASO) and Syrian Expat Philharmonic Orchestra (SEPO) and was performed in the Megaron Concert Hall in Athens. The concert formed the basis of the film installation, Tryptych, Trinity Apse commissioned for Edinburgh Art Festival (2018) and a related recital with the Damascus Quintet of SEPO at The Scottish Parliament (2018).
Next Stop...
... “LAVINIA,” indicates the temporary sign indicating a new ATAC tram stop, Rome’s public transit company. But LAVINIA is not the stop that takes us to work, to shop, to the theatre or to an exhibition. LAVINIA is the tram stop of the imagination.
Monika Sosnowska
The gate
A circular staircase with a gentle downslope invites descent to the Loggia built between 1609 and 1618 to a design by architect Flaminio Ponzio below the level of the gardens. Today it vaunts a railing and is closed by a gate for modern safety reasons. In the 17th century, a low wall stood nearby that offered a view that resembled those that came into vogue at Italian-style theatres a few years later.
You’ll probably find the entrance gate. Considering all the look-alike profiles featured of the fence railing and gate, the Monika Sosnowska knob invites us to shake hands and takes us to a time near the loggia's enclosure in the 20th century, the 1960s or the 1980s. Who knows?
In a different place, however: Warsaw. In those years, doorknobs were all the same, says the artist whose work is an investigation and critical reflection of modernist architecture and beyond.
Perhaps Sosnowska will make a new gate for the Loggia at the next LAVINIA stop. But the future does not exist. Or so the physicists tell us.
Sosnowska’s sculptural language emerges from a process of experimentation with, and the appropriation of, construction materials such as steel beams, concrete, reinforcing rods, and pipes. These elements—the solid and rigid foundations of buildings—are manipulated and warped, taking on an independence in which their former functionality is implied yet defunct.
In her recent works, Sosnowska has incorporated elements of modernist architecture and recognisable details including staircases, handrails, gates, and window structures to create unexpected, even uncanny, encounters. She treats buildings as a site of memory and is adept at conveying both political and psychological significance through her work. She quotes architectural irregularities, collaging different elements together to form a whole that appears at once confused, yet intentionally and attractively designed. Space is encountered as a psychosomatic quality, as political as its experience is personal, forever veering in the mind of the viewer between the uncanny and the sublime.
Born in Ryki, Poland, Sosnowska's work has been exhibited in international exhibitions and museums, such as: 13th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah, Lebanon; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN; The Contemporary Austin, Austin TX; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Galleria Civica, Modena; Shanghai Biennale; Venice Biennale; Kwangiu Biennale; Manifesta 4, Frankfurt; Den Haag Sculptuur, Den Haag; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Schaulager, Basel; Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Gianni Politi
Please, take a seat
In the adjacent garden, Gianni Politi invites us to have a seat, lie down, rest, take a break. Three aluminium benches are casts of wooden boards the artist had left behind. They are yellow: knowing why isn’t very important.
Using classic materials that are in keeping with Italy’s pictorial tradition, Politi developed an approach straddling processes that are personal and that take place in the studio, even as he engages in producing images that would appear spontaneous. The studio thus morphs into both container and object of his work; the diverse output of his painting can even cross over in the use of sculpture to enable him to better narrate the struggle of being a contemporary painter. As he sets about redefining contemporary abstract painting, the artist does not shy away from relying on personal experience and happenings in his life; as he channels paramount themes such as love, friendship and sexuality he keeps up a constant effort to idolise whatever materials he works with.
Gianni Politi was born in Rome where he lives and works. His work has been exhibited in various institutions in Italy and abroad including The National Gallery, Barberini Corsini National Galleries, Nomas Foundation, Maxxi, Macro in Rome; Triennale di Milano; Fonderia Battaglia, in Milan; Palazzo Zino, Palermo; Institute of Italian Culture, Prague; Celeste Prize, New York.
Enzo Cucchi
The water lily pond
If you walk through the garden without getting immediately distracted by the building, you’ll find an “abandoned” niche beneath the entry stairway. This was once the nymphaeum. You see a sculpture of a reclining male torso now. We asked Enzo Cucchi to bring water back to the Loggia and think of a new fountain. He decided to work with the empty space instead, and created a sculpture in bronze that closes the niche and enhances the space behind it.
A poet and self-taught painter, Cucchi has been a key figure in Italian art since the 1970s. Known for his highly expressive and lyrical paintings, he continues to explore materiality by experimenting with various media and contexts to expand the boundaries of his work.
Enzo Cucchi (b. 1949, Ancona, Italy) currently lives and works in Rome. Since the 1970s, Cucchi has presented numerous solo exhibitions in institutions worldwide. Among these stand out the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1983), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1986), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1986), Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, München (1987), Wiener Secession, Vienna (1988), Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (1992), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (1993), Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo (1996), Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Hamburg (1999), Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv (1999 and 2001), Villa Medici, Rome (2006) and MAXXI, Rome (2023).
Piero Golia
Fountain
Moving on, you’ll discover that Piero Golia was the one who brought water back to the Loggia with a nearly magical portable fountain. Unmasking the trick at a magic show isn’t the point. Finding the wonder is.
Italian-born, Los Angeles–based artist Piero Golia is a sculptor of situations. His works—which at times take physical form, often at an architectural scale, and at others are immaterial—are statements aimed at expanding the possibilities of art. His practice is heterogeneous and unpredictable, employing diverse mediums and methods to spark chain reactions that, even when they leave no objects or images behind, have the capacity to alter our perception.
His works have been exhibited at major international institutions: Castel Sant’Elmo, Naples; Istituto Svizzero (Roma, Venezia); Biennale di Venezia (Art and Cinema); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Villa Medici, Rome; La Fondazione, Rome; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas; Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Site Santa Fe, 7a Biennal Santa Fe; Le Carré d’art, Nîmes; Sculpture Center, New York; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla Y León, León. Golia's paintings and sculptures have entered public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Witte de With, Rotterdam; and MoMA PS1, New York.
Virginia Overton
The Loggia
IThe Loggia
Now it’s time to walk between the columns of the Loggia. Virginia Overton has created an instrument that makes music with the wind or anyone else who wants to, with all due caution. The two arms that uphold the elements of this chime have the same oval shape as the Loggia and invite us into the building’s center. The sculpture/instrument is made of parts of a Ducati motorcycle someone in Tuscany gave her. Here as well, the work is an invitation to look elsewhere. Gazing upward, you see Archita Ricci’s newly-restored fresco Banquet of the Gods (1619) with the highest Olympian gods seated around a long marble table: Jupiter and Juno (whose figures have unfortunately disappeared almost entirely) are on the left at the head of the table. With Ganymede serving wine, they are followed clockwise, by Pluto, Apollo, Diana, Mercury (whose figure has disappeared completely), Mars and Venus with Cupid, and three winged Putti pouring wine and throwing flowers on the table.
Infused with an ethos of economy, Overton employs everyday, elemental materials to engage with a site, its geographical location and history. Wooden planks, beams, metal, mud, sheetrock and bricks – things commonly associated with construction work or farming – are cut, bent, stacked and hammered into shape, often pushing the material to its physical limit. The objects used can be salvaged and recycled from one project to the next, found in situ or in the environs of the exhibition space. Evincing the power and sensory quality of their own textural materials, her sculptures and installations, through their new functionality, expose the energy and associations encapsulated within their parts. ‘I like for the work to act as a marker of its own history – letting accrued defects show in the pieces – that talks about the ways in which the materials have been used’, she explains.
Virginia Overton was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1971 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Solo exhibitions include Landcraft Garden Foundation, Mattituck, New York (2023); Hypermaremma, Orbetello, Italy (2023); Frist Art Museum, Nashville (2022); Goldsmiths CCA, London (2022); White Cube Hong Kong (2020); Socrates Sculpture Park, New York (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson, Arizona (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2014); Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany (2013); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland (2013); The Power Station, Dallas, Texas (2013); and The Power House, Memphis, Tennessee (2007). Group exhibitions include 59th Venice Biennale (2022); The Ranch, Montauk, New York (2021); Hayward Gallery, London (2020); Front Triennial, Cleveland (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit, Michigan (2017); and Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (2016).