Ius Soli at Indian Photo festival 2023

Exhibitions

A selection of  Ius Soli Chapter One will be on show at Indian Photo Festival 2023. The 9th edition of the Indian Photo Festival will be presented from November 23 to January 7 2024 at the State Gallery of Art, Madhapur, and other venues across Hyderabad. 

Ultras Youth in Ultra Fotboll och politik vid Medelhavet Göteborg

Exhibitions

A selection of Ultras Youth with @sebastienlouiswriter is now on show at Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities of Goteborg @medelhavsmuseet in a brilliantly curated exhibition on football and politics, among brilliant installations by researchers and image makers.

Starting from the collection We need no education (North Africa and Asia), the installation tells about strategies and ploys of ultras groupes to stay afloat in their societies: I can’t breathe, I do want to breathe, I try to breathe, how do I breathe? Ultras groups as a destituent power?

It is clear enough that ultras are not a classic political subject, no category seems to be appropriate to define their way to stay afloat in their societies. They are not feminist, not right wing, not left wing, not extra parliament, they are not anarchist, they are not libertarian, they are not progressive, but certainly one cannot say they are reactionary. They are just ultras. And no one can deny their ability to get into the public scene.

The installation is based on light boxes and framed pictures, with videos and original objects.

From official press release:

The successful Ultra – Football and Politics in the Mediterranean goes to the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg in July. The exhibition was shown in 2022 at the Mediterranean Museum in Stockholm, where it attracted a large audience. 
The exhibition is based on the Arab Spring of 2010-2012, when football supporters were often at the centre of many of the popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. Ultra describes how chants moved from football stadiums to the streets to overthrow governments. Flags with the colours of different football clubs could be seen in protest marches and chants could be heard in town squares. The power otherwise used to support their own team was mobilised to protest against those in power.

 

It’s sometimes said that football and politics don’t mix. But the truth is often rather different, not least on the terraces.During the Arab Spring of 2010 — 2012, fan groups played a central role in a number of the popular uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. Flags bearing the colours of various clubs were on display in protest marches, and the chants of the terraces made their way to public squares. Energies that were normally devoted to supporting a particular team were used to depose governments. And the thing all of these groups had in common was that they referred to themselves as Ultras. Who were these groups? What is the link between politics and fanatical devotion to a club? In this exhibition, film-makers, researchers, photographers and journalists offer their own perspective on these questions. Using a variety of documentation from different countries around the Mediterranean, we examine fandom as a cultural phenomenon.

Entangled Matters

Exhibitions, Residencies, talks, works in progress

Altereurope Futuremanufactory: Entangled Matters

Vonderau Museum Fulda (Germany) – 11-15 July 2023

This is a recent output of my collaboration with the research group Science of Singularities.

Science of Singularities created a collaborative work-in-progress installation in the Vonderau Museum as well as an intervention into the collection of the museum. The installation and intervention reflected on Europe seen through the lens of an ecosystem and interrogated the Entanglement of Matters. The installation of sizable dimensions involved about 150 participants, pupils, students and citizens in the creation of an imaginary map of Europe as an Ecosystem. In a multilayered process that applied the Table of Matters as well as visual practices, the participants developed the installation step by step in a series of intensive workshops that took place each day of a full week as well as through exercises for individual visitors. The output of the collective process, the Foundland Map, will be shown in an exhibition for three months in 2024. 

Entangled Matters – Vonderau Museum Fulda (Germany) – 11-15 July 2023. Giovanni Ambrosio with Science of Singularities.

Entangled Matters expands the theoretical shift of perspective that drives the research of Altereurope to the field of ecosystems and reflects on Europe as an ecosystem. It does so by referring to an interconnectedness between nature, animals, humans, and also technology – Entangled Matters. 

Conceiving Europe as such an interconnected ecosystem, redefines not only Europe through the introduction of the ecosystem, but also the ecosystem itself: The latter becomes a political and historical matter that evolves through human intervention.

We therefore raise social questions in the context of an ecosystemic approach to Europe, for instance whether a sustainable ecosystem requires a different way of living together? Or, how the creation of a respectful relationship between all participants of the ecosystem, humans, animals, plants and vital matter can help us develop eco-sensitive forms of society?

Submit! in #StreetCartCasamale

Exhibitions

Vascio Room Gallery, in close collaboration with Vesuvio Adventures, for the second consecutive year renews the open air group show #StreetCartCasamale , paper based works pasted in the old town of Vesuvian city Somma Vesuviana, 20 km away from Napoli city center.

I installed some prints from the work Submit!, the preparatory sheets for the screen prints made at Frans Masereel Centrum.

Submit! Submit! is a work analysing the marketing literature aiming to intercept a huge reservoir of potential buyers: artists. They all want to emerge and they are ready to pay for any possibility to be seen by millions. Cities are now places shared by Uber eats riders, emerging artists and a ridicu-lous amount of art places – museums, galleries, foundations, artist run spaces, informal spaces, street art walls. And we are all obsessed by this fine arts world. As well as migrants’ bodies are targets of depiction by documentary photo-graphers aiming to reveal the truth of the violence of their condition by adding – de facto – the violence of representation, artists are constantly targeted by invi-tations – calls for entry – to show their works, to emerge from the densely popu-lated art world. Like oil on water after a disaster. A massive copywrited literature, sent by newsletters, constantly counts the time left before calls for proposal expire. A pressure on time shaped by countdowns and reductions for early birds. That is translated by a compulsive behavior for ar-tists, filling forms, answering to calls, writing cover letters. Artists turns in chain workers as well as they are part of a market in which they can buy their possible marketing tools.

Happening Under Vesuvio

Exhibitions

Happening Under Vesuvio is an event organised by Kuturscio’k live art collective at Kulturfactory to raise awareness about the current implosion and explosion of earth and human beings, metaphorically associated to Vesuvio (Alessia Siniscalchi). The live performance showcases three of my works part of Kuturscio’k latest pieces.

The Oreste will be back performance by Kulturscio’k Live Art Collective features an installation with pieces from Ius Soli and Opus Incertum. The Healing ProcessWhile the performance called Sybil sessions presents the text based installation Prophecies and pronouncements

kulturscio'k Happening Under Vesuvio 2023, Kulturfactory Domicella. © Giovanni Ambrosio

Reasons of which reason knows nothing

Exhibitions, Residencies, talks, works in progress

Installation with Science of Singularities at Clea Brussels

A chapter of my collaboration with the research group Science of Singularities.

In the framework of the research of CLEA and the Artscience Self-organized Symposium on Self-organisation “Systems at play”, Science of Singularities presented a collaborative installation that confronted the theoretical and artistic practises of the participants with the self-organising principles of ecosystems drawn from the collections of the ongoing research process “Entangled Matters” based on the tool Table of Matters. It involved the Scientists, Artists and Researchers participating in the Symposium in a creative writing process that challenged traditional paradigms of creativity through reflections on the ecosystemic conditions of intellectual and artistic production.

Reasons of which reason knows nothing

In the framework of the research of CLEA and the Artscience Self-organized Symposium on Self-organisation “Systems at play”, Science of Singularities presented a collaborative installation that confronted the theoretical and artistic practises of the participants with the self-organising principles of ecosystems drawn from the collections of the ongoing research process “Entangled Matters” based on the tool Table of Matters. It involved the Scientists, Artists and Researchers participating in the Symposium in a creative writing process that challenged traditional paradigms of creativity through reflections on the ecosystemic conditions of intellectual and artistic production. 
 Giovanni Ambrosio with Science of Singularities.
Reasons of which reason knows nothing

In the framework of the research of CLEA and the Artscience Self-organized Symposium on Self-organisation “Systems at play”, Science of Singularities presented a collaborative installation that confronted the theoretical and artistic practises of the participants with the self-organising principles of ecosystems drawn from the collections of the ongoing research process “Entangled Matters” based on the tool Table of Matters. It involved the Scientists, Artists and Researchers participating in the Symposium in a creative writing process that challenged traditional paradigms of creativity through reflections on the ecosystemic conditions of intellectual and artistic production. 
 Giovanni Ambrosio with Science of Singularities.

Cado sempre dalla nuvole

Exhibitions

Cado sempre dalle nuvole – Cantare Pasolini, is a project led by Mauro Gioia starring himself and Italian actress Claudia Gerini, produced by Teatro di Napoli Teatro Nazionale Mercadante. It is a musical theatre piece, a small opera as Francesco Saponaro defined it, based on songs written by Italian writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

On the stage, as part of the dramaturgy conceived by stage director Francesco Saponaro, a set of photographs from my personal works are printed on huge size blu back papers. In what he calls theatrical space, Saponaro designed an advertising billboard on which are pasted posters made out using pictures from my works

Dust of days,

Intra muros/hors les murs

The way she moves attracts me like no other lover. Personal landscapes.

Aperitivi con gli assassini

In a first movement, Francesco Saponaro engaged a re-writing process leading him to compose new images rearranging the pre existing pictures. Inspired by the decollage technique and in particular by Mimmo Rotella works, the act of ripping part of a picture on one layer composes a brand new image using the emerging piece of a an underneath image. On the stage, during the show, actors, in their scenic movements, rip the posters following a path precisely written by Saponaro, making emerge the new picture in a live and spontaneous movement. Saponaro’s aim was to echo themes and aesthetics from Pasolini’s cinematography as well as to build up a space in which stories from the songs on stage as well as from the texts of dramatist Igor Esposito, can find a visual link.

CADO SEMPRE DALLE NUVOLE – CANTARE PASOLINI
un progetto di Mauro Gioia
drammaturgia Igor Esposito
elaborazioni e musiche originali Pasquale Catalano
regia e spazio scenico Francesco Saponaro
con Claudia Gerini, Mauro Gioia
pianoforte e direzione musicale Giuseppe Burgarella
musicisti Francesca De Filippis, Monia Massa, Annamaria Puggioni, Alberto Toccaceli
costumi Anna Verde
disegno luci Cesare Accetta
fotografie Giovanni Ambrosio
aiuto regia Salvatore Scotto d’Apollonia
scenografo collaboratore Carmine De Mizio
assistente ai costumi Daria Bonavita
produzione Teatro di Napoli – Teatro Nazionale

Ultras Girls Ultras Libere in Beyond the game BI-BOX Art Space

Exhibitions

BI-BOX Art Space, a gallery in Biella, Italy, run by Irene Finiguerra, hosts the exhibition curated by Marco Bianchessi Beyond the game, featuring Giulia Iacolutti and Giovanni Ambrosio.

I am invited to present the selection Ultras Girls Ultras Libere, chapter 1: Y., A. and M. + S. Women in the Winners group, Casablanca, Morocco. Cunning and freedom. Six prints, one framed sticker collected on the field with researcher Sébastien Louis and a video (Density) screened on the wall.

Giovanni Ambrosio

Beyond The Game, la mostra che racconta il calcio come non l’avreste immaginato è ufficialmente aperta.
In galleria troverete i lavori di @giuliaiacolutti e @giovanni__ambrosio che vi racconteranno di esperienze ai margini, di storie di comunità e di come il calcio può essere una pratica inclusiva.

BI-Box Art Space

Ultras Girls Ultras Libere in Beyond the game Ph. Alice Krizman Courtesy of BI-BOx Art Space
Ultras Girls Ultras Libere in Beyond the game Ph. Alice Krizman Courtesy of BI-BOx Art Space