Entangled Matters

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?

Fotografia, partecipazione, protesta

Fotografia, partecipazione, protesta

Residencies, talks, works in progress

Fotografia, partecipazione, protesta. Conferenza di Giovanni Ambrosio

Coordinano: Roberto Pinto e Emanuele Meschini.

I MERCOLEDÌ DI S. CRISTINA – INCONTRI CON L’ARTE 2023

A cura di Fabio Massaccesi e Francesco Spampinato

Giovanni Ambrosio (Napoli 1978) è un artista che usa la fotografia come strumento d’indagine tanto per i fenomeni sociali quanto per la ricerca in ambito performativo e teatrale. Il suo lavoro Ultras Youth (2015-), realizzato insieme allo storico degli ultras e ricercatore Sebastien Louis, si è incentrato sul movimento ultras nordafricano e arabo nel periodo successivo alle proteste delle primavere arabe. Il suo lavoro d’indagine fotografica ha portato alla luce il forte senso politico e di appartenenza dei diversi movimenti ultras tra Algeria, Marocco, Tunisia e Palestina. In particolare, in questo incontro ci soffermeremo sulla necessità del lavoro sul campo e su cosa significhi documentare le culture alternative giovanili senza cooptarle né applicare ad esse uno sguardo coloniale o moralista. Il lavoro di Ambrosio è molto diretto e la sua estetica si incentra sull’immediatezza del fatto e sul vissuto della storia personale. Oltre alla tematica della protesta verrà discusso il ruolo della fotografia nella documentazione di performance e come essa possa essere un ulteriore mezzo per comprenderne e ampliare i significati.

Emanuele Meschini

Prophecies and pronouncements in Sibyl Sessions

Prophecies and pronouncements in Sibyl Sessions

Exhibitions, Residencies, talks, works in progress

Prophecies and pronouncements in Sibyl Sessions by  Kulturscio’k live art collective at Museo della Moda di Napoli.

Open dress rehearsals Thu Jun 30th, Fri July 1st, Sun July 3rd 2022

Prophecies and pronouncements is a three chapters series of texts screened and played by performers inside Sibyl Sessions, third step of a trilogy on myths directed by Alessia Siniscalchi:
The distant memory of a red/green past imprinted with super 8 film and acridly sweet images from 1960’s Hollywood. A digital, Whatsapp present where human contact is still possible, where live stories proliferate over social networks. A completely virtual, dystopian future where we are prisoners of a technological helmet, self-obsession and individualism, disrupting everything we try to remember about ourselves.  
 
In first chapter, Out of date prophecies, I re-use and slightly re-write letters from CEOS and general marketing texts stating how important is, after George Floyd death, to promote human rights and to prevent injustice.
 
In the second chapter, following the flow of guru’s, handcrafted experts, theorists with any scientific culture which are now populating our connectivity based society, I offer mundane and non sibylline pronouncements: Killing kills.
 

The third chapter is a series of anxiolytic prophecies coming form my work Submit!, 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. 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 artists, 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.

Réaliser le portrait d’un sportif de haut niveau

Réaliser le portrait d’un sportif de haut niveau

Residencies, talks, works in progress

Réaliser le portrait d’un sportif de haut niveau : Dora Tchakounté.

An educational project for the Centre photographique de l’Ile-de-France/ Collège A. CAMUS du Pléssis Trévise, France. March-May 2022.

De février à mai 2022, les élèves de la 4ème 6 du collège Albert Camus, au Plessis-Trévise, ont créé avec l’artiste-photographe Giovanni Ambrosio. Ces ateliers – en lien avec les cours d’éducation physique, d’arts plastiques et d’espagnol – avaient pour but d’initier les élèves à la pratique du portrait, plus particulièrement du portrait en mouvement. Comment cadrer ? Comment éclairer ? Comment saisir ce qui bouge ? Quel point de vue adopter ? Doit-on mettre en scène ou au contraire saisir ce qui vient ? Dans un premier temps, les élèves ont expérimenté à partir d’exercices proposés par l’artiste. Puis ils ont photographié l’haltérophile française de haut niveau Dora Tchakounté. Mais iels ne l’ont pas photographiée de but en blanc : au préalable, iels l’avaient interrogée pour dresser son portrait chinois et apprendre ainsi à la connaître. Un portrait, c’est un ensemble de données, techniques, esthétiques, psychologiques, mais aussi – et peut être surtout – une rencontre, un rapport à quelqu’un. Les élèves ont également visité l’exposition La vie invisible au Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France de Pontault-Combault. Cette exposition collective rassemble les œuvres de 12 artistes portugaises qui travaillent pour la plupart avec leurs corps. La visite a permis aux élèves d’étoffer leur savoir au sujet du portrait photographique, mais aussi d’expérimenter en laboratoire des pratiques anténumériques. Une exposition des travaux réalisés a eu lieu dans le collège au mois de juin; Dora Tchakounté est venue la visiter. (Cpif)

Le portrait en mouvement avec Giovanni Ambrosio, en 2022. « Le portrait en mouvement » est un projet conçu et mis en œuvre par le CPIF et l’artiste Giovanni Ambrosio dans le cadre des classes à PAC, avec le soutien de la DAAC de Créteil. L’action est coordonnée par le service des publics du CPIF.

 

 

 

Documenting the ultras movement

Documenting the ultras movement

Exhibitions, Residencies, talks, works in progress

Football fans, their behaviours, culture and history, have been the subject of analysis for decades. However, specific studies of the ultras movement, the youth culture that over the past fifty years has spread over the world, well beyond its origins in Italy, are relatively few.

Photographer Giovanni Ambrosio and filmmaker Ragnhild Ekner have both been involved in creating the exhibition Ultra at the Mediterranean Museum. They tell about and show examples from their ongoing work to document the ultras movement in different parts of the world. Together with you in the audience, we discuss what it means to photograph, film, and document a subculture such as the ultras movement? What problems arise, what considerations must be taken into account? And why is it important?

The Italian photographer and writer Giovanni Ambrosio has for many years worked with the historian Sèbastien Louis to document ultras groups in Europe, North Africa and Asia.

Director Ragnhild Ekner is currently working on the documentary film ULTRAS, about ultra groups in several countries around the world, which will premiere in the spring of 2024. The film is a co-production between Story, Film i Väst and SVT.

Moderator: Karl-Johan Cottman, Exhibition Producer at the National Museums of World Culture

ATT DOKUMENTERA ULTRASRÖRELSEN 18 MAJ 2022, KL. 18:00 – 19:30

Ossessione napoletana

Ossessione napoletana

Residencies, talks, works in progress

I’m screening a selection of my landscape and space related works in Ossessione Napoletana, a multimedia show connecting the narratives of Napoli and Lisboa, cities of songs, literatures, images and obsessions. And, incidentally, two of my cities. How do you look at a city? How can we represent a city in pictures? It’s almost impossible.
– New living districts
-Spatial disorientation
-Something in the way she moves attracts me like no other lover
-Biographies/thresholds
-Football landscapes
@fondogioia @mdmpelomundo

Written by Mauro Gioia @fondogioia and Maria De Medeiros @mdmpelomundo, directed by Maria De Medeiros. With pianist @burgarellag
Giovanni Ambrosio New Living districts
Giovanni Ambrosio New Living districts Giovanni Ambrosio New Living districts
Mauro Gioia’s Conferenze cantate visual set

Mauro Gioia’s Conferenze cantate visual set

Residencies, talks, works in progress, Videos

Mauro Gioia’s Conferenze cantate visual set includes this young dead bride, the young absent bride, the young murdered bride.

Giovanni Ambrosio conferenze cantate
The dead bride, an archive of invisible violence.

It’s the key image in the visual set for Alpha singers in Neapolitan song, the last Conferenza Cantata at Auditorium Parco della Musica @auditoriumparcodellamusica in Rome and at Teatro Trianon Viviani @teatrotrianon in Naples, written by Giuditta Borelli, Mauro Gioia himself @fondogioia, Antonio Pascale @atpascale66 and Anita Pesce, in which Mauro Gioia tells about a peculiar story inside history of Neapolitan song, related to toxic relationship with love, relationships between men and women, gender violence, gender domination.

It’s a documentary photograph picturing one of the most impressive archives I have ever seen: my mother’s trunk containing her pre wedding dowry. While it is still untouched and possibly never opened before, extracting one piece gave me the image of a long running violence related to cultural tradition, family education, ideologic positions. Of a low-fi lifetime impossible to depict violence, in which blood rains into wine in an invisible transparency, in which acceptance itself of invisible yet powerful violence build up an ineluctable structure of your own life. Also combined with the idea of poorly sexually and emotionally educated males as part of your life horizon.

In Alpha singers in Neapolitan song, Cantanti alpha nella canzone napoletana, i also worked on a series of videos interviews based on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Comizi d’amore, re-writing some Pasolini’s classic questions and adding some I wrote.

Frans Masereel Centrum ResidencyFrans Masereel Centrum Residency

Frans Masereel Centrum Residency

Residencies, talks, works in progress

I’m currently and proudly a resident at Frans Masereel Centrum in Belgium, working on the migration from digital matter to printed matter and from minimal gestural painting to digital files and again to paper. The Frans Masereel Centrum is a center for contemporary art, combining an artist-oriented exhibition and production schedule with an international residency programme for artists and curators, often with a specific focus on printed matter-at-large.

I’m working to a new series,  Sumbit!,  which also includes texts already written for Sibyl Session performance.

The Sibyl Sessions projectThe Sibyl Sessions project

The Sibyl Sessions project

Residencies, talks, works in progress

The Sibyl Sessions project (working title) is an on going work by Alessia Siniscalchi and her collective Kulturscio’k.

The tragedy, the myth, the oracles, the prophets.
A theater where the text is reduced, summarized, destroyed, to take advantage of the creations where image, sound, effects, art, radical technological inventions, exacerbated and extreme, become a pretext to tell the present, the past, the future.
Or to glimpse what we don’t want to know about the human condition.
Sibyl oracle prophet?

Giovanni Ambrosio Sibyl Sessions

In this work, started on the basis of a collective residency in a theatre in Paris during the first week of March 2021, I write prophecies, responses and pronouncement as Instagram Stories.
Beyond the artists working with Kulturscio’k on a regular basis, I invited to join german artist Julia Liedel to interact with my writing.

All pictures : © Roberto Di Mola.