How do I imagine being there?

8 May – 16 October 2016*
*Extended until 6 November 

“All living beings perceive of the world only in terms of what is necessary to their action” (C. Losi)

What language should be used to describe a place? This is the starting point and the core question of Claudia Losi's project.
The way we perceive places also shows how we develop our thinking: the pondering hinted at and evoked by the works on exhibit springs from individual and collective imagination; we feel, we store experiences and later we “bring them back into the world” in different and subjective constellations.
Claudia Losi's is a peculiar travel chronicle turning into consciousness of the journey itself. It springs out of a real “crossing” of St. Kilda islands in 2012 to later shift into the realm of the mind, to move onto the construction of new maps.
Experiences of physically relating with a territory, of emotions, and feelings, become mnemonic traces generating new visions, artefacts that the artist creates after a period of sedimentation.

A project dedicated to memory, its functioning mechanisms transforming a real experience where the journey and the surrounding landscape – becoming both the incipit, the starting point, and the final destination – are capable of triggering synaesthetic explorations, visual associations, pathways at time leading to unforeseeable and unexpected destination even for the artist. At the same time, however, the project focusses on a possible future, on the idea of bravely moving beyond towards new destinations which from being real places turn into places of the mind.

From that also emerges the inescapable need to reflect on the possible models of interpretation of the same landscape, the “possible observational systems of the world surrounding us” (in the artist's own words) which in their turn do not offer definite answers, but create new landing places for the “archipelago-world”.

The exhibition consists in an itinerary across a topography of real, material artefacts which lead us inside an “archipelago of thoughts”– as a sort of cabinet opening its doors to our gazes.
The token-stones brought back from visited places mix with portolan charts and books of islands drawn by the artist in pencil and watercolours on the walls of the exhibition rooms. The photographs documenting the journey to St. Kilda islands blend in with objects, glasses, collages and bronze castings of micro fossil landscapes. A large embroidery of the North Pole, drawn from the imaginary representation by Athanasius Kircher, strikes a conversation with a notebook housing paper cut-outs of hands/birds made by the artist. Partially crushed and misshapen everyday objects, taken over by plant forms – recalling domestic life, of which however they have lost all memory – seem to gaze at the fossil findings from the archaeological and ethnographic collection of the town's Spallanzani Museum.

Writings and images move in parallel in Claudia Losi's project. The book with the same title, accompanying the exhibition, and published by Humboldt in collaboration with Collezione Maramotti, brings together views and contributions of the artist, together with Matteo Meschiari, Christopher Collins, Fabio Pupin, Giorgio Vallortigara, Carlo Maiolini, Michele Guerra, Paolo Ossola, Isabella Pezzini, Marco Ciriello, Hamish Fulton.


Press-clippings selection

E. Bordignon, Claudia Losi, How do I imagine being there?, in "Atpdiary.com", 3 May 2016

A. Di Genova, La viandante dello stupore, in "Il Manifesto", 10 May 2016

A. Fornaciari, Viaggio nell’alterità. Losi & Simonazzi a Reggio Emilia, in "Artribune.com", 12 May 2016

M. Piumatti, Mettere al mondo il teatro interiore, in "Exibart.com", 13 May 2016

S. Bottani, Claudia Losi alla Collezione Maramotti, in "Doppiozero.com", 20 May 2016

F. Galán, Apasionada, interactiva, expansionista, enriquecedora hibridación, in "Art.es" n. 68, Summer 2016

P. Bonino, Claudia Losi. How do I imagine being there?, in "Juliet Art Magazine" n. 178, Jun. 2016

G. Scardi, Claudia Losi in viaggio a St.a Kilda, in "Il Sole 24 Ore - Domenica", 11 Sep. 2016