CONTEMPORARY LOCUS 11

Contemporary Locus 11

Eva Frapiccini
Monastero del Carmine
September 9th - 18th 2016
Via Bartolomeo Colleoni 19, Bergamo

Contemporary Locus participates in the TTB project “Arcate d’arte: consonanze di teatro, cultura e arte’’ on the occasion of its 11th edition, by returning to the old and silent spaces of the monastery with an intervention of artist Eva Frapiccini.
The exhibition opens secret spaces of the ancient monastery - the first floor of the cloister and the chapter house - and in this operation of rediscovery and rereading through artistic languages, it consolidates the relationships with the TTB - Teatro tascabile Bergamo.
Eva Frapiccini is an artist well-known for her precise work practices. First of all the research for signification that interprets the complexities of the contemporary and communication dynamics opposing true and false. Also the careful and sensitive observation of current events, of an individual and collective memory that the artist regularly pushes away and leaves to sediment, holding onto iconic or poetic traces.
Hers are an attitude for planning and a practice of collaboration with research teams and an experimentation that is often translated in the use of fixed and moving image, photography and video.
Her practice contemplates a conceptual elaboration of a research filtered by the rational lens of a poetics, that is never didactic or unnaturally empathic. It is a form of elaboration that does not exclude participation or judgement but offers the most unconditional interpretation of her work, freed from any ‘special effect’.

Contemporary Locus 11
Eva Frapiccini, Dreams’ Time Capsule, 2011
nilon fabric, 2 fans 250 volts each, 1 Tamram recorder
Monastero del Carmine, Bergamo 2016
ph Mario Albergati

These are the premises for the site-specific intervention for Contemporary Locus 11.
Eva Frapiccini brings to Bergamo Dream Time Capsule, a participative project born to create an audio archive of dreams, gathered through the direct collaboration of the visitors.
Today, the archive of Dream Time Capsule counts around 1200 testimonies of dreams recorded in several countries, from Europe to Latin America, to Middle East and Africa. This phase of the project consists in the gathering of the dreams: the visitors are invited to ‘donate’ their oneiric material, recording it inside an inflatable structure, some sort of luminous spaceship imagined for light travelling in a suitcase, that lands in the middle of the cloister of the monastery.
Inside the chapter house of the monastery Eva Frapiccini instals seven ‘photographic sculptures’, part of the series Golden Jail. Discovering Subjection. The series was born from thinking about her residences in Cairo and Bahrein between 2012 and 2014, two countries that have lived through the ‘Arab Spring’ and are currently experiencing the removal of its memory and overturning of its assumptions. The works, prints on cotton paper that are presented through a system of rolling and physical superimposition - therefore hiding - of the images, activate a process of referencing to censorship and strategies of political transforms operated by the power for its own preservation.

Contemporary Locus 11
Eva Frapiccini, Untitled dalla serie Golden Jail | Discovering Subjection, 2014-16
pigment printing on cotton papar Hanhemuhle
Chapter house, Monastero del Carmine, Bergamo 2016
ph Mario Albergati

Contemporary Locus 11
Eva Frapiccini, Dreams’ Time Capsule, 2011
nilon fabric, 2 fans 250 volts each, 1 Tamram recorder
Monastero del Carmine, Bergamo 2016
ph Mario Albergati

Eva Frapiccini 
Born in 1978 in Recanati. Lives and works in Leeds, UK.
Visual artist Eva Frapiccini lives and works between the United Kingdom and Italy. Her research experiments with language and its invisible ways of expression using a variety of media and methodologies: slide projections, video & sound installations, film, photography, staged narratives and performance.
Her works are included in a number of institutional collections such as Castello di Rivoli, Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation; MAMbo, Museum of Modern Art of Bologna, Fondazione Fotografia di Modena, the Monza Civic Collections.
Between 2011 to 2015 she is Associate Lecturer at the Fine Art Academy of Bologna, IED - European Institute of Design in Turin, and tutor at the Master of Fine Arts Imaging in Modena. In October 2015 she enrolled in the practice-based Ph.D. in Fine Art at the University of Leeds, UK.

Monastero del Carmine
The Carmine Monastery is clear evidence of the historic layers and their superimposition in the urban texture of the Upper Town. The building went through several construction stages, from the early XIVth century when the Humiliati friars had a church built over remains of the ancient Roman walls. The church passed on to the Carmelites in 1357, to be renovated and enlarged one century later. It was then that the Monastery took on its layout.
The structure underwent ongoing renovations since the early XVIth century. The church of Saint Agatha of the Carmel, originally XVth-century, was given Baroque decorations by Giovan Battista Canina. The wings that hosted the friars’ cells also underwent modifications and renovations, and were lastly turned into the two current wide rooms at the eastern and the southern ends of the piano nobile.
The Carmelites abandoned the Monastery in the IXXth century and decay set in throughout the XXth century. It was only from the 1970s that structural works were carried out. The building was included in a detailed plan of recovery of the Upper Town, complying with environmental, cultural, and historical-artistic protection standards. A restoration plan to give the Monastery new functions, is still on hold. The cloister and some rooms on the ground floor, however, have been reopened and put to good use since 1996, thanks to the TTB – Teatro tascabile di Bergamo. The TTB headquarters are located here, and act as a research and education center to promote contemporary theatrical culture.

Monastero del Carmine, Cloister, Bergamo 2016
ph Mario Albergati

Monastero del Carmine, Chapter house, Bergamo 2016
ph Mario Albergati

Institutional Partners of Dreams’ Time Capsule
Alberto Peola Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy | Al Riwaq Contemporary Art Space, Manama, Bahrain | Arkitekturmuseet, Swedish Museum of Architecture, Stockholm, Sweden | Botkyrka Konsthall, Fittja, Sweden | Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Rivoli, Italy | Fare Milano, Mlan, Italy | Goethe Institut, Turin, Italy | kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga, Latvia | Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, the United Kingdom | Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, the United Arab Emirates | Resò Network, supported by the Piedmont and CRT Foundation Sikka Art Fair, Dubai, the United Arab Emirates | Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, Egypt | University Library of Jorge Taleo University, Bogotà, Colombia | University of Leeds, School of Fine Art & Cultural Studies, Leeds, the United Kingdom | Contemporary Locus association, Bergamo, Italy

The structure Dream Time Capsule was created in collaboration with Michele Tavano and its production was supported by Arkitekturmuseet in Stockholm, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea (Turin, 2014), Al Riwaq Contemporary Art Space (Adliya, Bahrain, 2014), Kim? contemporary Art Centre, Riga, Latvia, 2013.

Contemporary Locus 11
Eva Frapiccini, Dreams’ Time Capsule, 2011
nilon fabric, 2 fans 250 volts each, 1 Tamram recorder
Monastero del Carmine, Bergamo 2016
ph Mario Albergati

Contemporary Locus 11
Eva Frapiccini, Dreams’ Time Capsule, 2011
nilon fabric, 2 fans 250 volts each, 1 Tamram recorder
Monastero del Carmine, Bergamo 2016
ph Mario Albergati

Workshop with Eva Frapiccini, Dreams’ Time Capsule
Monastero del Carmine, Bergamo 2016
ph Mario Albergati