Città Invisibili
La Box, National School of Arts, Bourges
2016
Artists: Olga Kisseleva, Davide Balula, Virginie Yassef, Caecilia Tripp
Curated by Julia Cistiakova & Ekaterina Shcherbakova
Città Invisibili is a curatorial project originally developed during a nine-month residency at the La Box Gallery in Bourges, France, in 2015-2016. It includes four contextual ephemeral performances in the city space and attempts to unveil the hidden faces of Bourges, still present in the air as fiction and legend. Addressed to the inhabitants and inviting them to react and participate, Città Invisibili endeavors to bring art into the streets; this discards materiality and the need for protection by the walls of an art institution.
One of the main aims of the Città Invisibili program today is to question to which extent the urban space could become a subject for an artist’s work. Being a stage, as well as an experiment, research, and interiorisation material, the city space is thus considered to be a destination for mental voyage. How to translate the contextual particularities into moments of imaginative, multilayered structures, which reverse and deconstruct the quotidian perception of a public space? How do you re-discover already discovered historical artifacts and shape a new approach to the city that relies upon a centuries-old history? How do the inhabitants perceive and organize spatial information and create their own mental map of the city after observing artistic interventions?
This project was inspired by Italo Calvino’s cognominal novel, where the reader is confronted by numerous descriptions of Marco Polo’s trips to faraway lands and exotic cities. While delving deeper into the adventurer and trader’s memoirs, we perceive that he confabulates phantasmal travels: The cities called after women’s names, containing traces of different époques, from antiquity to possible futures, scarcely have any prototypes in reality. Each artist in Città Invisibili is considered to be a storyteller, as Marco Polo was, who developed a way to narrate a story about imaginary place by the objects, gestures and corporal movements, successively acquiring his own language.
The program invites visitors to a many-sided discourse between historical locations and modern living. The site-specific projects explore the multifaceted history of the city of Bourges from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the historical monuments and a hidden underground to the current life dynamics and perception of the public space concepts. The program comprises individual interventions by artists Olga Kisseleva, Virginie Yassef, Davide Balula, and Caecilia Tripp. However, each project coalesces related disciplines, professionals, contributors, collaborators, and co-creators.
Involving various disciplines, from physics and ecology to music and dance, Città Invisibili attempts to investigate what shape contextual artistic research could obtain. Olga Kisseleva proposed to verify the hypothesis of Bourges’ magnetic anomaly and the legend of a hidden philosopher’s stone via a collaborative project, Landstream. Virginie Yassef created a theatrical piece exploring the phenomenon of caves, doubling the area of historical center of Bourges. Davide Balula suggested a protocol for staging a dance made of stretching exercises, appropriating the space of the main city garden. Bourges’ history of trade and the idea of a migrant as a traveller were explored in the music and dance interpretation set by Caecilia Tripp. All artistic interventions of this project are perceived as visual components that are organized into one pattern or whole.
Julia Cistiakova & Ekaterina Shcherbakova
La Box, National School of Arts, Bourges
2016
Artists: Olga Kisseleva, Davide Balula, Virginie Yassef, Caecilia Tripp
Curated by Julia Cistiakova & Ekaterina Shcherbakova
Città Invisibili is a curatorial project originally developed during a nine-month residency at the La Box Gallery in Bourges, France, in 2015-2016. It includes four contextual ephemeral performances in the city space and attempts to unveil the hidden faces of Bourges, still present in the air as fiction and legend. Addressed to the inhabitants and inviting them to react and participate, Città Invisibili endeavors to bring art into the streets; this discards materiality and the need for protection by the walls of an art institution.
One of the main aims of the Città Invisibili program today is to question to which extent the urban space could become a subject for an artist’s work. Being a stage, as well as an experiment, research, and interiorisation material, the city space is thus considered to be a destination for mental voyage. How to translate the contextual particularities into moments of imaginative, multilayered structures, which reverse and deconstruct the quotidian perception of a public space? How do you re-discover already discovered historical artifacts and shape a new approach to the city that relies upon a centuries-old history? How do the inhabitants perceive and organize spatial information and create their own mental map of the city after observing artistic interventions?
This project was inspired by Italo Calvino’s cognominal novel, where the reader is confronted by numerous descriptions of Marco Polo’s trips to faraway lands and exotic cities. While delving deeper into the adventurer and trader’s memoirs, we perceive that he confabulates phantasmal travels: The cities called after women’s names, containing traces of different époques, from antiquity to possible futures, scarcely have any prototypes in reality. Each artist in Città Invisibili is considered to be a storyteller, as Marco Polo was, who developed a way to narrate a story about imaginary place by the objects, gestures and corporal movements, successively acquiring his own language.
The program invites visitors to a many-sided discourse between historical locations and modern living. The site-specific projects explore the multifaceted history of the city of Bourges from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the historical monuments and a hidden underground to the current life dynamics and perception of the public space concepts. The program comprises individual interventions by artists Olga Kisseleva, Virginie Yassef, Davide Balula, and Caecilia Tripp. However, each project coalesces related disciplines, professionals, contributors, collaborators, and co-creators.
Involving various disciplines, from physics and ecology to music and dance, Città Invisibili attempts to investigate what shape contextual artistic research could obtain. Olga Kisseleva proposed to verify the hypothesis of Bourges’ magnetic anomaly and the legend of a hidden philosopher’s stone via a collaborative project, Landstream. Virginie Yassef created a theatrical piece exploring the phenomenon of caves, doubling the area of historical center of Bourges. Davide Balula suggested a protocol for staging a dance made of stretching exercises, appropriating the space of the main city garden. Bourges’ history of trade and the idea of a migrant as a traveller were explored in the music and dance interpretation set by Caecilia Tripp. All artistic interventions of this project are perceived as visual components that are organized into one pattern or whole.
Julia Cistiakova & Ekaterina Shcherbakova
