Claudia Losi | Being There. Oltre il giardino

For the publication of Claudia Losi’s new book Being There: Oltre il giardino, Collezione Maramotti is presenting a conversation between the artist and the neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara, a professor from the University of Trento and Rovereto, on Saturday 12 November 2022 at 6.00pm.

The book, published by VIAINDUSTRIAE, is part of a project with the same name that Claudia Losi has developed over the last two years, sponsored by the Marche Regional Directorate of Museums and supported by the Italian Council (9th edition, 2020), a programme through which the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Directorate-General of Contemporary Creativity promotes contemporary Italian art around the world.

Being There. Oltre il giardino, curated by Leonardo Regano, ties together worlds and contexts that are very different in their culture, language, and landscape. It asks what can be seen as “natural” and what can be considered a “place”, observing how every point of view helps build macro-narratives of limitless complexity. For some time now, Losi has been focusing on the ambiguity in the concept of landscape, on our perception of the environment around us, and on the shifting boundary between the natural and manmade worlds. Her investigation began during a series of trips to northern Scotland, particularly the archipelago of Saint Kilda in the Outer Hebrides. She then developed it further in 2016 for the solo show How do I imagine being there at Collezione Maramotti.

For the occasion, three of Losi’s works connected to the project will be on view within the permanent collection: an embroidered fabric artist’s book made in 2022 in collaboration with Lottozero, and two embroidery works (completed in 2016 and 2020) belonging to Collezione Maramotti, based on Athanasius Kircher’s seventeenthcentury imagining of the North and South Poles.

The event at Collezione Maramotti is the latest in the various phases of development of Being There: Oltre il giardino. The project began in February 2021 with a workshop on the concept of the “natural place”, organized by NTU-Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore. It continued with research and experimentation conducted in collaboration with the Hansen House cultural center in Jerusalem, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, the Accademia di Belle Arti in Urbino, CIMeC–Centro Interdipartimentale Mente/Cervello at the University of Trento and Rovereto, and concluding with a solo show at Rocca Roveresca in Senigallia, from June to September 2022. In October 2022, in for the eighteenth Giornata del Contemporaneo, Losi presented a performance piece and a workshop connected to the project at GAM in Turin.