Ludovica Carbotta

Information

Exploring an urban space takes time. It requires a willingness to interpret as well as a disposition to listen and to absorb the social and cultural conventions that underlie it. Acting as an individual who constantly relates to a collective body, Ludovica Carbotta’s artistic research is based precisely on this premise. We all form part of a collectivity, and yet it is at times distant and abstract.The artist thus takes her observation of the community, on a physical level and in its very essence, as a place for living and as a constantly evolving generative space, and she uses it to reflect on the social structures that have given shape to today’s urban areas.To bring into question the space that is all around us, Ludovica Carbotta uses her body as a unit of measure and as a filter. Her existence and her subjective experience and physical presence are used as devices for her interaction with the subject of her research, bringing about situations that give form and proportion to the final work. Drawing, photography and sculpture, which are the artist’s preferred media and means of transition, create forms that attempt to distance themselves from direct experience, becoming a fantastical, complex documentation that is the outcome of a sometimes unpredictable process.

The relationship between imaginary and real places has recently become key to Ludovica Carbotta’s art. Starting from the literary tradition of ekphrasis – the verbal description of a visual work – the artist reflects on the significance of reproduction in the history of art. A motorway is a very strong wind (2014), a complex and multifaceted project, reverses these considerations in order to reveal the conception

of an ideal place for the community, starting out from collective reasoning. The project first involved summoning a number of personalities with whom the artist has spent time.They were asked to provide notes on what they perceived as the ideal place for a community, based on imagined, utopian or real experiences. The result is a large installation consisting of physical renditions of the ideas put forward by each of these people. Spaces, buildings, instruments, materials and aesthetic codes, rules to be used for finding and developing a society, whether invented, borrowed or quoted, all form guidelines for a pluralistic, choral and imaginary community. These stories are blended together and intersected, creating agreement between individual visions that are brought together and mediated by the artist. Ludovica Carbotta takes up the traces she collects and creates an ideal environmental form. Here it is verbal descriptions and written words that become three- dimensional, creating a landscape and the apparition of a space made of shared individual desires as potency. Thus transformed and interpreted, the collectivity becomes the hypothesis of a new world.

Ilaria Gianni



ArtWork in Exhibition


Digo a la Tierra: fluyo. Al agua: soy

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