Guests You don’t need words to tell a story, sometimes gestures or actions are enough, and often just good ideas can stimulate the intellectual appetite.
Section curated by
Guendalina Sabba
The artists who participate in this new edition of Shingle22j tell us, in an emblematic way, how art and food, which are historically bonded together, may be a constant means of communication of subtle subliminal messages as well as food for thought. Dario Di Franco and Tatiana Ferahian are the spokespeople and interpreters of an authentic personal testimony: the former underlines the material and consumerist aspect of this irreparably massified society, while the latter emphasizes the spiritual and moral aspects of a war that forced an entire generation to suffer starvation. On the one side, therefore, we have the results of today’s opulence and abundance, and on the other side, the memory of poverty and misery at times of war. Although these artists choose dramatically divergent concepts, they both share the same aesthetic language, i.e. installation art. They both use everyday objects, poor or waste materials, to tickle the spectator’s perception, who, together with the artist, becomes the depositary of memory. Conserve d’Artista, in fact, features in vitro personal or collective memory, while 25 grams of Rice: Food for Thought sadly commemorates the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Dario Di Franco, an artist from Naples who was born in 1965, presents Conserve d’Artista, a New Pop installation that certainly belongs to the same artistic concept as Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau and Piero Manzoni’s famous Artist’s Shit. This artwork currently contains over two hundred elements, which are all different, all numbered, chronologically dated and constantly evolving. They contain fragments of everyday life, a rich heritage of memories and emotions that has been deliberately preserved to be handed down through time and space. Tatiana Ferahian, an Armenian-Cypriot artist who was born in 1970, created 25 grams of Rice: Food for Thought for the fifth edition of Shingle22j. This site-specific work is composed of 287 wax paper bags that have been cut and sewn together to form tiny little doves, each containing 25 grams of rice. The doves, joined together by invisible nylon strings, are arranged in an ideal concentric flight formation, a symbol of life and its cycle. This artwork tells a story, which is linked to the memory of the Armenian Genocide during WWI and has its origins in the humanitarian operation called Near East Relief that was launched by the American embassy to support Armenian orphans. The small glass bottle full of rice grains that was used to raise awareness of the issue among the population was a testimony to the starvation that these orphans were forced to suffer. Luckily, the operation was a success and 25 grams of Rice is a tribute to all those children who survived the genocide, giving life to a new nation, Armenia.