Naima Morelli

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Lee Wen
I first met Lee Wen in Rome, in the courtyard of my very first house in the Eternal City. The place was in the local Chinatown, called Piazza Vittorio. This is not a nice Chinatown. It doesn’t have the fancy portal to mark its main street, nor particularly good restaurants or shops. Indeed, Piazza Vittorio become the go-to establishment for Chinese immigrants only in the late ‘80s, where they set up bare shops selling cheap clothes, where no one ever goes buy anything.

The building where I used to live in had a large courtyard that led into different buildings, and in the middle of the courtyard there was a small gallery, called La Nube di Oort. One day I got an email from the gallery saying that in a few days there would have been a performance called “Un evento piccolo ma significativo” (A Small but Significant Event), featuring artists Lee Wen, Myriam Laplante, and Mike Cooper. The press release explained that Mike Cooper would have recreated a sound performance – which he didn’t attend. His performance was a personal sonic response to a short video clip of part of English musician David Toop’s performance posted on Facebook. Lee Wen would have responded to Mike Cooper’s response and Myriam Laplante would have responded to Lee Wen’s response to Mike Cooper’s response. I thought this process of osmosis, lost in translation and enrichment in translation was quite jarring. In my mind, the artistic device was similar to the American version of Singapore which was Madripoor and my Italian perception of Madripoor. And neither myself or Claremont had ever visited Singapore at that point. The press release went on to say a bit about the artist’s bio. I knew two of the three artists. Mike Cooper was a white-bearded English singer-guitarist forever wearing Hawaiian shirts and a straw hat even in winter. He rose to prominence by innovating the international scene with the explorations of avant-garde sound. Myriam Laplante was a Canadian artist who moved to Italy a while ago. Her work, consisting of performances, installations, sculptures, photographs, and drawings never lacked in dark humour and was heavily parodist, absurd, cynical, sad and disturbing. Being a vernissage-hopper I happened to have seen Cooper and LaPlante in action a few times already. But I had never met Lee Wen. I knew him for being a pioneer of performance art in Singapore since the ‘90s. The press release informed me that his multidisciplinary work, spanning from writing to song, was a constant reflection on society, motivated by strong idealism and a revolutionary impetus.

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“Quello che noto nelle mie opere è che tu le vedi e dici Uh che carine… ma poi le guardi con più attenzione è AAARRGH! Sono micidiali! Per me questa apparenza innocua è come una specie di presa in giro… e anche io in fondo sono così, più aggressiva di quello che sembro a prima vista!” mi dice Anita Calà in un impeto di passione di cui solo le rosse sono capaci.

Quattro del pomeriggio, siamo sedute, io, lei e  mio cappello (un Borsalino vintage grigio molto ghetto-chic, devo dire) al bar Ombre Rosse in Piazza Sant’Egidio, proprio di fronte al Museo di Roma in Trastevere.
Avevo incontrato l’artista qualche settimana fa alla Galleria Nube di Oort dove è esposta la sua videoistallazione “Anita C” nell’ambito di una collettiva, insomma, un buon pretesto per approfondire il suo lavoro.

La storia di Anita Calà come artista visiva sembrerebbe partire da quando, dalla mattina alla sera, decise di mollare il suo lavoro di costumista ad altissimi livelli per cinema, teatro e televisione, per buttarsi nell’unico ambito dove l’unica certezza è l’incertezza: l’arte contemporanea.
In realtà è cominciata molto prima: “Mi ricordo questa scena delle pagine gialle: ero piccolissima, le scarabocchiavo e nella mia mente ogni pagina era una persona con un suo vestito particolare”

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