Marta Dell’Angelo’s Exhibition “Fragile” opens the Mapping-The-City Project in San Francisco

An artistic, multi-faced project, able to build and improve exchanges among Italian contemporary visual artists and their Bay Area counterparts, curated by Marina Pugliese, has kicked off in February at the Italian Cultural Institute of San Francisco. Part of the so-called “Mapping the city” Project, Fragile is a joint exhibition created by two artists, Italian Marta Dell’Angelo and Chino-American Summer Lee.

The exhibition unites different kind of experiences from performance to installation, focusing on the topic of the body and the accumulation.

The exhibition also represents a way to adopt the image of Michelangelo’s Pietà and take it to another, different, modern level. As explained by artist and writer Laura Boles in her exhibition presentation, while Michelangelo’s sculpture displays Virgin Mary cradling Jesus’ dead body, Marta Dell’Angelo and Summer Lee have been able “to translate this form into other mediums where their bodies enact a similar composition”.

In particular for the Italian artist, our human being-ness is represented by the body’s pulsing and positioning within the space around: indeed, her installation isolates the body from the normal settings thanks to the choice of the materials and previous artworks she has used. We talked to Marta during the opening reception on February 18 at the Italian Cultural Institute, where the two artists were also part of a performance “Pietas” at the adjacent Opera Plaza Cinema.

The project has been led by curator Marina Pugliese, who contacted me in order to discuss a possible collaboration. Mapping The City is an across-the-board project which involves the Italian Cultural Institute and the Chinese Cultural Center. I was really interested in this kind of Chinese-American-Italian collaboration and accepted Marina’s invitation.

I did not know her from before, however I had the opportunity to choose her as “partner” and I did: her work is very close to mine, especially in its visual aspects. We had to build a sort of virtual relationship before I came to the United States: we started talking on Skype almost every day in order to make this artistic relation work. Summer has Chinese origins and their influence is very important in this project, because it involves two communities that have been close in many cities around the United States.

I have used standardized A4 sized papers, it’s a cultural format because it’s the size that collects bills, letters, receipts, photocopies, copies, etc. So in one hand it is a kind of foothold, in the other hand it is responsible for crushing the image. Therefore, these papers are nailed to the wall but at the same time they can flutter and act: the gravity let them wave, creating a sort of movement in order to remind the main topic of the whole project and shows the fragility of our lives.

The figures that build the final image come from my painting or drawings or photographs. They are different in quality of visual language and dpi resolution. I put them together trying to give a whole meaning however, according to the position of the viewer, the perspective changes. When the viewer decides where to stand, his/her point of view towards the artwork changes too.

I wanted to build a sort of wallpaper which could be kind of “movable” in order to contrast the idea behind the wallpaper itself, which usually represents something stable and not easy to move.

The colours though are just black and white…

I did not want to use any other colours than black and white. You can see very few colourful parts. I had some red, blue and yellow that are the primary colours. This is because I wanted to recall the idea of a photocopy machine that, when stops working, starts giving colours that we do not expect. And these are usually the three colours we see here.

In one of the small rooms of the adjacent Opera Plaza theatre, we had this ongoing performance during which you see a piece of white cloth suspended in the middle of a darkened room. The Pietas is something Summer proposed as she had worked on it before: together we realized the performance and the video we played for that night which turned to be a unique experience for all the visitors of the exhibition.