28/06/2024
"Pensieri con la mano per disegnare l'invisibile" / La Repubblica, 19.05.2024
" Stephan Zimmerli's "studiolo of exile" is a mental architecture. It is made of poplar wood, has a rectangular floor plan and a barrel roof reminiscent of the Renaissance lines of Francesco l°'s studiolo in Palazzo Vecchio, but if we enter it, we enter inside a head with its memories and thoughts, indeed, inside several heads. The project by the French artist, architect, set designer and musician, on display until July 20 (free admission) at the Mad-Murate art district where his artistic residency was held, is a work on collective memory that connects art, architecture and theater, and speaks of human stories of exile, migration and travel. On the walls of this small ephemeral set installed in the Laura Orvieto hall of the former Florentine convent and prison, there are the images that Stephan Zimmerli drew from the personal stories of ten people, men and women of various ages and backgrounds, who today live far from their home, family, and country of origin: they told, and he drew. A three-day long performance whose outcome is the interior decorations of the studiolo, a place of the mind and memory. There is the living room of a Buenos Aires apartment where a father and daughter embraced for the last time, there is the Cairo square once a gathering place for families now swept away by urban transformations, and there are the sunflower fields traversed on childhood walks. Life stories condensed into an image, places revisited and reproduced here in charcoal, crystallized memories that for a while come alive again thanks to the artist's manual skills. "Thinking with the hand" is how Zimmerli describes his work made up of listening and graphic ex*****on, or again, "drawing the invisible." Zimmerli is one of two hundred artists who come from all over the world each year to the MAD contemporary art hub thanks to the call supported by the Region of Tuscany and Fondazione Cr Firenze for new artistic residencies dedicated to visual artists, performers, musicians and dancers with unpublished site-specific projects. MAD, which to date has hosted two thousand curators and young artists and is visited by 30'000 people each year, will celebrate ten years of activity in 2024. Its most in-depth themes are global identity, gender and ecology, and among its greatest successes, says MAD artistic director Valentina Gensini, is Riva, a project dedicated to the collective imagination on the Arno River that was presented at the last edition of the Venice Biennale. "What we have done in recent years is a scouting of emerging artists who have then grown a lot on the international scene, such as Alessandra Ferrini or Ana Vujovic," she explains, "our specificity is that we don't work for the market, but for the community: our mission is to create a culture of contemporary language and stimulate attention to the great issues of the present, and the benefit of the whole society."
article by Elisabetta Berti, 19.05.2024
"Stephan Zimemrli - Studiolo dell'Esilio" exhibition open @ MAD Murate Art District Firenze until 20.07.2024
