Pirate-Camp is supported and promoted by the non-profit organization Kaninchenhaus with the patronage of the City of Turin and GAI (Association for the Circuit of the Young Italian Artists) and with the collaboration of the Department for Youth policies of the City of Venice and of Art Enclosures (Residencies for visiting international artists in Venice – a residency program for international artists created and produced by Fondazione di Venezia).

FROM THE PIRATE ATTACK TO THE PIRATE CAMP…

Following Coniglioviola’s PIRATE ATTACK TO THE BIENNALE IN VENICE, performed by the group in 2007, PIRATE CAMP represents the next step in this story.
After the attack, time has come for the pirates to halt on the mainland: colonize the territory and share the treasures stored during their long trip, before taking the Sea route again.

The pirate camp – filling up the ideal gap between the sea, the pirates dominion,  and the land, the system’s dominion -  is first and foremost a work of art itself. It is the metaphorical representation of the natural and necessary condition of being-an-artist.
The analogy between the artist and the pirate/encamped is the pivot concept, both from a symbolic and a philosophical point of view: a status of extra-territoriality which grants the artist a privileged point of view to critically observe and depict the world.

Pirate Camp wants do be an answer to young artists’ needs since going to the great arts biennals, the most important art fairs and exhibitions can be very expensive. Hence, the creation of a campsite totally free of charge that will allow a specific number of artists – selected through a public competition – to experience these events.

A DIFFERENT ARTIST IN RESIDENCY PROGRAM.

Pirate Camp is an indipendent project designed by artists for artists.

The Residencies we are used to, are generally organized by institutions, museums or private mecenates, and seem to work on the unwitting assumption that, not just the work of art, but its creator as well, can be objectified and included in some sort of a private collection.
On the other hand, the Pirate Camp wants to be a living platform, and each and every participant becomes essential to its life.

The Pirate Camp wants to be a great platform supporting the exchange of new ideas and the mobility of young artists. Such a place wants to give life to a collaborative experiment of artistic creation and encourage the development of a collective and solid conscience, creating an international network able to experiment alternative and independent forms of intervention within the contemporary art system.

THE FIRST PIRATE CAMP EDITION WILL BE HELD DURING THE 54TH BIENNALE D’ARTE DI VENEZIA FROM MAY 31 TO JUNE 6, 2011 BREAKING FOR THE FIRST TIME THE NOTORIOUS “NO CAMPING” LAW IN THE CITY OF VENICE!

1^st edition

THE STATELESS PAV @ 54.Biennale di Venezia

VENICE/ITALY. MAY 31 – JUNE 6_2011

ON LINE SUBMISSION ONLY.
DEADLINE May 10, 2011

www.pirate-camp.org

Le vent nous portera - videostill

The event – sponsored by BBC, Technicolor, Telecom Italia and others –investigates last frontiers of the art-technology meeting.

“Le vent nous portera” video has been produced by CONIGLIOVIOLA in 2007.Lately, in 2009, CONIGLIOVIOLA in collaboration with Juma elaborated a new version of the video by using the auto-stereoscopy technology, which allows the visualization of 3-D contents without using any special glasses.

CONIGLIOVIOLA is definitely the first artist in the world to experiment the use of this innovative technology in video-art.

After all, “Le vent nous portera” video was conceived since its first version in 2007 as part of a broader project (titled “Nous Deux”) where Brice Coniglio and Andrea Raviola presented a collection of eleven art-works made by recovering the ancient technique of stereoscopy. This technique, very popular in the 19th century, allows to create three-dimensional images by using couples of slightly different pictures that our brain melts in a single vision, reproducing this way the mechanisms that determines the binocular vision.
In “Le vent nous portera” (as well as in the eleven artworks of “Nous Deux” project) the two artists work through a complex technique of digital compositing altering their current images to transform their faces and their bodies into those of two children starring in an imaginary auto-biography. In the video, the two enfants are shown behind the bars of a prison from where they dream to escape. The prison is here a metaphor of life and its being determined from which one tries to escape through the art, but it is also a metaphor of the relationship between the artist and its work that makes his “story” eternal but relentlessly still.

Le vent nous portera” tells therefore, in a fairy-tale manner rich in literary and cinematographic hints, an utopian effort to break away from reality and also from art towards the moon, symbol of an impossible freedom.

To see the eleven artworks of the “Nous Deux” project, please visit the web page
http://www.coniglioviola.com/en/nous-deux/

Galerie Anton Weller (Isabelle Suret)
9, rue Christine
75006 Paris

www.anton-weller.com

Vernissage le 6 mai 2010 à partir de 18h
Exposition de 7 mai au 12 juin 2010.

ConiglioViola. Sono un pirata / Sono un signore

Bilingual catalogue of ConiglioViola’s solo exhibit at  PAC Pavillion of Contemporary Art of  Milan, curated by Brice Coniglio with the texts by  Antonio Arevalo, Alessandro Bergonzoni, Achille Bonito Oliva, Martina Corgnati, Maurizio Ferraris, Tommaso Labranca, Milva, Domenico Quaranta, Laura Serani and by the Councillor Massimiliano Finazzer Flory.

You can buy it on line on the publisher’s website.

Concerto senza titolo (Untitled concert) – the new theatrical show by ConiglioViola and Antonella Ruggiero – is a poetical investigation on the greatest taboo of contemporary culture: the Death. This reticence is particularly evident in a field of our culture that has always been one of the main centers of interest in ConiglioViola’s artistic research: pop culture.

In High Fidelity Nick Hornby wrote “In pop music there are no many songs about death, at least not many good songs”.

This statement of  fact  immediately became a challenge for ConiglioViola. Not only we have looked for some good songs about death, but – to make the challenge even more exciting – we have chosen only Italian songs.

Video-trailer :

The electronic orchestration gives to these classical songs of Italian tradition a new contemporary fit. We find interesting to put in relation the electronic scene with the Italian melodic repertory.

On the stage the songs are executed by Antonella Ruggiero suspended inside a skirt installation that makes her 3 meters tall, an electric string quartet, a moving touch piano and the electronic live set.

The choice of using classical instruments (like the string quartet) in their electric version is related to the concert theme, to the idea of dematerialization.

Each musical execution is accompanied by the projection of videos created by ConiglioViola and screened through the utilization of new technologies, such as holographic projections.

The use of these very new systems of projection is related to the concept of the project because consents us to materialize, on the stage, ghosts and spirits.

The center of the scene is occupied also by a moving-touch piano, whose keys move without the human intervention. The code of the piano, when opened, will assume the semblance of an open coffin.

Pics of the show:

Musicians and performers are  black dressed and move on completely black backgrounds, exclusively enlighten by VOOD lamps. This way, the reprise of another theatrical tradition, the Black Light Theatre,  gives to the audience the illusion that the instruments are played by ghosts…

The not-title of the project is also referred to this dimension of absence. When a new document is opened in any informatics application, this is automatically named “Untitled document”. This blank space, still to be filled, will be the aesthetic dimension of this new production.

For the 5th edition of Contemporary Art Day – organized by AMACI, the Italian Association of Contemporary Art Museums – PAC Pavillion of Contemporary Art of Milan open for the first time its doors to a very young artist with a big show that tells all ConiglioViola’s world.

An artistic name which is active in all fields of the contemporary art scene – from video art to photography, from electronic music to experimental theatre, from net.art to performance – ConiglioViola rapidly garnered public and critical attention for projects that cross the thresholds of contemporary art, in a transversal approach that invades all areas of creative expression. The group’s many projects are united by an ironic and tentacular investigation of the increasingly uncertain borders between the various compartments of contemporary culture and in particular between mass and élite culture.

Sono un pirata / Sono un signore (I am a pirate / I am a gentleman) draws on the Pirate Attack on the Venice Biennale carried out by ConiglioViola in 2007, in which it fired 52 cannon shots against the venue of the prestigious contemporary art event, from on board a giant pirate winged rabbit. This spectacular and symbolic action has been chosen as a manifesto to define the role that ConiglioViola plays on the art scene.

The exhibition at the PAC, designed to be a meta-work in itself, unwinds in a series of rooms, each dedicated to a different project. The visitor is led through the show as if undergoing a transformation in relation to the works and the space, in a sort of alchemical initiation rite. ConiglioViola, the electronic heir of the White Rabbit, thus leads the visitor, a novice Alice, through its fantasy universe, inhabited by both classic creatures and contemporary monsters, deceptively reassuring and subtly cruel.

Pirate Attack to Biennale: installation view

The exhibition (visited by almost 10.000 people in only ten days) examines all the stages in the creative evolution of this “Renaissance workshop in the digital era”, from the underground period (2001-2004) characterised exclusively by works of net.art, to the major project Recuperate Le Vostre Radici Quadrate (Reclaim Your Square Roots) (2004-2006), the groups’ most “pop culture” work which explores the aesthetic and pop music of the 1980s. As well as the project Nous Deux (2007), a poetic and melancholic escape to the moon, the enigmatic Rebus with Achille Bonito Oliva, and the installation Fine Primo Tempo (End of the First Half) which interprets the track “Ci sarà” by Al Bano and Romina Power in an eschatological key.

The vitruvian rabbit - sculpture m3x3

Sono un pirata / Sono un signore (I am a pirate / I am a gentleman) is the title of this first roundup of previous episodes, an ironic slogan which perfectly encapsulates the role of elegant “outlaw” that ConiglioViola has carved out for itself on the contemporary art scene, on its unique and entirely eccentric path.

The exhibition catalogue – published by SilvanaEditoriale and personally edited by Brice Coniglio – includes essays by Antonio Arevalo, Alessandro Bergonzoni, Achille Bonito Oliva, Martina Corgnati, Maurizio Ferraris, Tommaso Labranca, Milva, Domenico Quaranta and Laura Serani.

Brice Coniglio, founder and captain of the group ConiglioViola, born in 1977, is the youngest artist that the PAC has ever dedicated a solo exhibition to.

I. A L’ECOLE

La maestra è sola, una strada, la indicata via, quasi lattea, per “l’alunnaggio” di due saperi, doppi, bini e bambini, andati e trasandati, perché la classe non è acqua, come disse l’insegnante agli scolari col salvagente…

II. LE LAPIN EST UN ANE

Dura lex sed l’ex asinum est quid non legit? C’è un errore, sempre. E la lavagna è il confine tra il bianco dei bravi ingessati e il nero ignoranza dei somari. E per capire ciò? Allungare le orecchie.

III. LUNA PARK

Dove si lunaparkeggiano i sogni, e dove il bambino che indica le felicità dice “ecco”. Il l’ecco l’ecco delle dolcezze lappabili, il gioco ergo sum, dove i discoli vanno a infiniti giri (di giostra).

IV. SUR LA ROUE

La paura brufola, l’aria che ci si dà (quando si fa, fa la ruota) è incondizionata e pavona, sua altezza Re Altà abdica, e lascia il posto ai sudditi infanti e cavalli che salgono e scendono da “sé stessi” e da altri congiuntivi.

V. ELIXIR DE CERISE

A cosa serve il naso? A sentir l’odor del vetro al posto di quello che c’è dietro! Profumo rosso, succo di nocciolo, bewanda Osiris, desiderio monello, estate in bottiglia.

VI. VOLEURS DE CERISES

Nel mar Achella nuotano i ragazzini a castello, le braccia degli alberi o i rami dei bambini, mentre luna cocomera vede l’unione e la forza, fare due amici.

VII. FORGERONS

Il lavoro nobilita l’uomo ma schiavizza il bambino! Ori e sud’ori, restar bambino tra l’incudine e il marcellino, faticare per comprare pane e vino, livida infanzia, sporca dozzina senza gli altri dieci…

VIII. EN MENOTTES

Legami, per sempre, o per un po’, l’importante è nel suo insieme, quel sesto senso, il senso di colpa che di colpo ti prende, sensazione scatologica, cioè d’averla fatta grossa…

IX. EN PRISON

Ah, se tutte le sbarre fossero come quelle del passaggio a livello, che ogni tanto s’alzano e ti fan passare (la voglia di sbagliare)…! Dentro, si capisce meglio chi si è fuori: prigion sono e prigion’iero!

X. FUITE DE LA BATILLE

Lima: capitale delle fughe. Chi butteresti dalla torre se non te e l’amico di tutto? E a salvarvi, la coniglia mongolfiera di sé e altri dubbi, come la “S” di libertà.

XI. VERS LA LUNE

Occhio senza pupilla, rosa perché femmina, la luna, li vede e li fa passare volantieri, per tutti i passati presenti futuri e gerundi possibili e impossibili; li fa passare per bambini che diventan bambini, usando solo il cielo per celare, nascondendo un bel niente, salvi e salivi, come dopo undici corse a loro immagine e dissolvenza…

Alessandro Bergonzoni

Trash: I can’t stand the word. And I know it makes ConiglioViola lose their rag too. It’s something we have in common. I rarely go on television. I hardly ever watch it either. Will ConiglioViola go on? That could be one reason for watching, but art suffers from a chronic lack of coverage. I hope they do get some coverage, especially for those faceless Magritte-style mermaids, and that wonderful female monster that hops around digital purple fields. And while we’re on the subject, I have never believed in superstitious rubbish – I rarely wear the colour myself, but only because of my hair.

I mean, how could La Rossa wear purple?

Milva

M= Martina Corgnati
B= Brice Coniglio

1 Violet

MARTINA: It can be difficult to see how such diverse projects – as ConiglioViola has produced so far – could actually hook up with a unified vision of the world. This could be one of the aims of our conversation. And while we’re on the subject: should artists necessarily have certainties and visions? BRICE: I have no certainties or general theories about that. M.: But I’m not interested in general theories. I want to talk about you. What does ConiglioViola mean to you? B.: It’s not that easy to talk about… I mean: I think that ConiglioViola was a kind of project… a message of love or in any case a message, a stand-in for me… though at the beginning ConiglioViola was not just about me, it was a kind of child. M.: Your name is Coniglio, isn’t it? B.: Yes, yes, my name is Coniglio… and I often dressed in purple – although I think I prefer indigo – when I acted in first person I had a kind of security blanket – it was a purple top hat, because that’s a strange colour… M.: That you can never mention in the theatre; worse than the number 13, black cats or anything else… B.: So they say… I’ve thought about it a lot … but it is a colour on the margin, and that’s what counts. M.: It evokes many different things. B.: It is connected to something which I feel belongs to me: being never completely in yet never completely out; a role that corresponds a great deal to how I feel or have felt in my life, as a slightly borderline figure. This has caused me a lot of suffering but has also given me a certain perspective, it is something that grants me a particular vision – I don’t like the word “particular” – yet many people think they are special without ever having experienced the burden of being different. M.: It is a great strength B.: It’s something that makes you suffer but gives you a different vision… I think that to some extent this is my duty. What I mean – I’ll try to explain – is that I want to be what you call an artist, I know it’s a job, but I think that above all my duty is to try: what I have to do – and I mean this in a humble way – is to try and look at things from another point of view. This is something that not everyone can do, luckily for them. M: Don’t you think that all artists are in this position? B: They should be; but I don’t see it in the artist just in it for the money, and in view of that too much inside things. Being an outsider is hard, and taxing. It’s a kind of priestly duty that belongs to the artist, the wizard, the philosopher, the prisoner, figures that lie midway between solitude and other people. This is what purple is about.

2 Coniglio before Viola

M: How did you become an artist? B: I never set out to be an artist, even though I was viewed as having that typical kind of character, the cliché of the clown figure… but in actual fact the start of my life as an artist coincided with my withdrawal from life in the first person M: What did you do when you were living in the first person? You were at university weren’t you? Studying philosophy… B; Literature. But no, I wasn’t doing anything special, it was just a magical time in my life… I was very Dadaist. M: In the sense of breaking away, not accepting things… B: Yes, I was very amusing. I did some pretty surreal things, like with people I met in the street… because that was my way of communicating – crazy, naïf. M: In so far as it wasn’t an act. B: No, it wasn’t, but it could have turned into one because theatrical mechanisms came into play. These were useful at the start but then they became all too easy. But I think there is a substantial difference between the mask and the character. The mask is a cover-up, it hides the face, you can put it on and take it off at will. But you can’t get rid of the character, it clothes the soul skintight, it’s not a hiding place, but a suit of armour that allows you to show your authentic self. M: But you enjoyed stirring things, was it about attracting attention to yourself? B: Yes, of course, but for me the most important thing was doing something inappropriate in a given setting to observe the reactions I elicited, and to really enter into contact with people in an unconventional way. M: But why? B: Because I feel unsure around conventional behaviour, that is, I am not sure of people’s sincerity, shaking someone’s hand, being introduced… I’m not, and I wasn’t, sure that when someone greets you they really want to, that it has any meaning. M: You’re right. B: I am, and I was, terrified that there was no sincerity in all these gestures that are in some way expected. And I needed to feel totally sure of the sincerity of everything I did. I don’t feel that need so strongly now, which, when you think about it, is pretty serious! M: But what did you want to do you when you grew up? B: Anything but be an artist, a visual artist: what I do now. M: But why? B: I can’t draw, I have no manual skills… I just make a mess of the paper, I’m no use at it. Actually, do you know what? I don’t think I have a particular talent for anything… M: But you’re a computer genius, aren’t you? B: I don’t know, it was purely a chance thing. I’d never had a computer, it came into my life as something that I had always kept at a distance. M: What about music? B: …possibly the most powerful art form M: Your favourite, in any case. B: Yes, even though I don’t actually listen to it much, because I can’t manage it – if I listen to music I don’t get anything else done. M: What kind of music do you like? Italian music from the 80s, for example? That even became one of your projects, Recuperate Le Vostre Radici Quadrate. B: Yes, it’s a project… Anyway, I don’t like the question so I will answer as a formality. I love any kind of music that has some kind of intrinsic theatrical quality… This concept connects even forms of expression that are very different. Enough said.

3 The same outsider dimension

M: Do you like travelling? B: Yes, travelling is part of my way of experiencing the world: only while travelling was I able to fully and justifiably experience the feeling of being a foreigner that I felt at home too. At home that attitude could end up being problematic, but while travelling it was entirely legitimate. M: You travelled in your own way. B: Always alone. I would leave without any money, never knowing when I would be coming back… I would be looking for something, but nothing specific… nothing really. M: Nothing fundamental in any case, it wasn’t that important for you as an artist… B: No! because I wasn’t an artist, I never wanted to be an artist, and it was only after I’d been an artist for three years that I discovered that what I was doing could become a job. I have to make that distinction. M: Sorry, but when did you become an artist? B: When I changed my point of view. Quite simply: at a certain point I found myself in a different position, in a city that was not mine, small, very conventional, in a setting that could be described as hostile, and at the same time, as a way out of that, I found these “substitute” forms of sociality, like the net. Not just that, but for the first time in my life they enabled me to create something concrete and almost tangible, enabling me to be more than just someone who talked or thought a lot. Now I was someone who could lend shape to various ideas very easily and for free. It was then that I started being an artist, or rather producing works. M: When was it? B: That was 2000, 2001. I had been given a computer and a relative asked me to find someone who could make a website… in the end I learned to do it by myself. It was a website for spare parts for articulated lorries: strange, beautiful objects! Really beautiful. Back then doing websites was something new, it was like creating theatre sets, with the unknown quantity of who would appear on that private stage, and when and how. So, at that point I started doing my projects on the web, and what did I think about… what’s in it for me? I thought: maybe I’ll become a web designer and these projects will give me publicity… because media attention was one thing that I got that right away. M: How did that come about? B: By churning out a series of bizarre experiments, including a foot-fetish site, a pseudo porn site called Pornella, the site for the pop group Modho and a sort of virtual house. And then La meditazione di Yolanda, the first ever site for meditating online. That was an important intuition. M: What year was it? B: 2001, I was living in Barcelona. You enter the site guided by the robot from Metropolis, rechristened Yolanda. I wanted to introduce the idea that the internet could become a prosthesis not only of the memory but also in some way of the deepest layers of our consciousness. I think time proved me right.

4 Net genius

B: That was the start. After that there were other net.art projects, a great one called Secret.room, then Un’estate al mare… each one explored something different. M: How did you go about working? B: I used technology in an unusual way. At the start all new technologies get used automatically. Think of the TV shows in the 80s, they used special effects simply because they were something new. While ConiglioViola, for example, used Flash without Flash graphics. This led to the first experiments with video, the “Dis.soluzioni” trilogy set to the Modho song, created simply by animating photos with Flash. These works, done using very simple tools that no-one has ever seen again, still retain their poetry. One thing that is a priority for me, however, is maintaining a competitive relationship with the software, because when you work with digital technology the software is always a silent coauthor, you have to use it without getting used yourself. M: In this context too, you have a borderline, transversal approach. B: Yes, acting in that way often means you can be ahead of things. In fact three years later that approach to graphics became the main style on the web. Recuperate Le Vostre Radici Quadrate came about two, perhaps three years before Italy got obsessed with the 80s. The same thing happened with Nous Deux and stereoscopic imaging. And using digital body art to turn yourself into a child. M: At this point we can say you are an ingenious IT experimenter… B: I’m interested in magic you see… And I believe there is a deep-seated affinity between digital and spiritual… firstly because they are both to do with immateriality. My relationship with art springs from the digital world, in the sense of a metalanguage, a sort of metaphysical code for ordering reality. M: What do you mean? B: Painting works with colours; sculpture with stone, whatever technique you take works with some kind of medium, while digital art works with a language made up of zeros and ones, it’s immaterial, numerical, a metalanguage… I am interested in that and the opportunity it gives me, that is to roll out the same idea in every form. The same “word” becomes music, video, photography and then even acquires totally different forms: theatre, installation… opera! Multimedia art par excellence. The digital dimension is a tool that lets you get back to that kind of thing, I would call it renaissance-like… and it was the tool that solved my dilemma of “what to do when I grow up”, the nightmare of having to specialise in something or be defined by my job.

5 Making worlds that can be shared

B: In my view art is connected to operative dimensions of this kind. Doing art means being a sorcerer: the figure of the wizard interests me, the way he is “on the outside”, taking on the suffering of others. M: The wizard as analyst? B: No, not an analyst, analysts have ways to keep things at arm’s length… M: Analysts are rational. B: The creative wizard, who takes risks. Yolanda is a project that refers to a mystical dimension, and the video Rebus is a kind of magical operation, an initiation rite you have to undertake to get access to the work. Then there is the idea of immersion, taking people and putting them into other worlds. “Making Worlds”, as Birnbaum says. M: Once again, this is a general issue in art. B: For me it was this wizard-like position – and ConiglioViola resembles me in this: ConiglioViola is to art as I am to the world – very central and very eccentric. M: The impression I get is that you are shy. No, seriously! That you are obviously a consummate charmer but someone who puts out something authentic, not an act. There’s a game being played here – but this position of eccentricity might also be connected to your shyness – people who are shy are a bit eccentric too, aren’t they? Someone who has to stay on the margin, out of fear and lack of confidence, a bit childish but also very grown-up, someone who is able to take on responsibilities. And in your work you have taken on a great many responsibilities. B: Yes, my way of being so “out of things” was in response to my shyness. At the beginning I was constantly challenging my limits, my difficulties, then slowly things started to come between me and the world, and when I found myself surrounded by this wall, art became my replacement for direct relations. I say it with great regret, but I chose this, it’s what I wanted. M: So we come to ConiglioViola B: but then I started to miss that suffering, that positive destructiveness, because it was actually working against the barrier, the limit. I have a need for complicity, to bring someone else into my world, alas! In both life and art, those who come and see my works have to enter another world. I used to try and draw people in, to involve them totally, I wanted total osmosis, to give totally – but now maybe I have less faith in this. Have I changed so much? M: I don’t know how much faith you have. But in my view, what is arguably your most lyrical and atmospheric project touches on this very subject, being built around sharing as a narrative as well as being an autobiographical strategy… I’m talking about Nous Deux. B: Just a second though, to talk about this I have to go back to ConiglioViola, which sprang from an idea of mine, a need, and in the beginning it was almost like an anonymous creature crawling around the web, with no-one knowing who had given birth to it. At a certain point, however, I felt the desire to share this project with the person I was closest to. There was this obsession for the number two, which for me is a perfect and impossible number, as my astrologist told me. Well I wanted to go beyond the dream of “forever”. All artists tend to project themselves into the future, because their works inevitably outlive them. That wasn’t enough for me, I wanted to project my relationship, artistic or personal, it’s the same thing for me! Into the past too, so I could really say “forever”. Nous Deux is an imaginary autobiography. Mine and that of my then partner in crime. There are 11 images (because 1+1=2) telling the story of two naughty children, us two. They were created by manipulating current photographs, by means of what I describe as digital body art, that I used a year before in the video Romantici. The eleven works were exhibited using a stereoscope, a very old technique that once again recalls the number two… How many times, when we meet someone important at a certain point in our lives, do we wonder what would have happened if we had met somewhere else, at another time, in another era? This is the tragedy of being able to live only one existence, one thing at a time, something I have always been obsessed with (and I think it shows a bit in ConiglioViola). It is also the dialectics of possible worlds. This is what I use art for, to live the lives I haven’t lived, as well as escaping from my own. Beforehand, in the PAC garden, you quoted the phrase by Battiato… “abbandonare il pianeta” (abandon the planet). The heart of Nous Deux is an image, tender but brutal, of the two children in prison, which also appears in the video Le vent nous portera. Here prison is the metaphor for the determination of our existence, Bastille-like… and art is the hot air balloon/rabbit that the children dream of escaping on. M: Brice, can we talk about you and your work now? B: The point is that I have no interest in documenting something that’s in my head, there’s no point in that, what I want and hope to do is create worlds that can be shared.

7 The audience is fundamental

B: As I grow up in the art world I am acquiring parameters, tools and tactics. I don’t think that’s wrong, because if I want to share a world, at least now I know what type of world to share, the characteristics that the world should in order to be shared and used, metabolised by the art system. All of this is the aesthetic, the appearance, the way in which an idea becomes a phenomenon – it’s a stupid thing to say. What I have to do is create bridges with the people around me. Because the audience is fundamental in my work, no doubt about it. M: And fundamental in your life too. B: Yes, you see, many artists don’t say it but the audience is always fundamental, actually I think it is even more fundamental for those who don’t say it. M: What audience? B: Not long ago I changed my mind about the people I want to talk to because in the art world there is a different audience to what I was used to dealing with before, which was more heterogeneous. I found this out gradually. I think that my work has to be accessible, art must be close to things… But that’s a different question. In the contemporary art world it often happens that the “appearance” of a work ends up hiding the contents, and this is due to facile prejudice, a limit common to many of those in the trade. Yet I believe that the real work of art should be sought right there, in the difficult balance between what is apparent and what is hidden. Recuperate, for example which also played around with music, famous songs, and was a very complex project… paradoxically it was more difficult for the art audience than the “normal” one.
M: What do you mean by a normal audience? B: Not specialised – the audience I gain access to when my works become theatre pieces, for example. In those situations I have seen it all, from the pensioners at the Grinzane Festival to the 15 year olds who didn’t even know the songs we were redoing and thought they were new tracks…

7 Inflatable Tvs

M: To get back to Recuperate, where do square roots come into it? B: It is a nonsense title, undoubtedly I liked the play on words, and the special effects, the allusion to maths. M: Why the 80s? B: The last legendary era! And I am passionate about the women from that era, I liked the music, naturally, but in particular I was interested in the fluttering legend of these figures. Unlike Vezzoli, who I am always likened to for this project, this is not a nostalgic evocation, but a dialectic with the present. In that period, unlike the present, those female figures were legendary, they were there, like symbols. And I wanted to refer explicitly to Italian music, home-grown music – because I wanted to use something of my own, and not be using foreign music. These performers convey a strong rapport between music and image – and therefore between Dionysian and Apollonian. This has the power to create an identity. M: Have you ever made music videos? B: Some, a really funny one with Loredana Berté. But I prefer to remain an artist, so no-one can tell me to show the guitars and no-one asks me… then I would probably be asked to make videos for tracks I don’t like, no way! That would be impossible. I have made videos for songs that never had them. Recuperate explored that very relationship between music and image which was typically 80s, but also mine: with this music submerging you in a hazy world with the potential for thousands of images, and then associating one image with a track, according to a precise strategy. A precise choice for something that could be infinite, yet at the same time a door open on the flow of identification. M: That relationship has now broken down. What do you think of Big Brother? B: I think it’s a piece of clever bullshit, the programme is terrible but the idea was a turning point. Here television is a mirror of daily life, whereas before it was like theatre,where I can watch something that is “above” me – and it was to get back to that that I did Recuperate. As an exhortation. The set for the show had a huge inflatable TV, which contained the theatre, as I was saying M: Great idea. B: Sometimes these great ideas come because the set has to fit in the boot of your car.

8 Musical wallpaper

M: Is the rabbit inflatable too? B: Did the rabbit come before the TV? I can’t remember… M: Because the rabbit is big, it wouldn’t fit into the room we’re in now B: Nooo… M: Why did you make it so big? B: Megalomania M: You made it for Venice… B: No, in actual fact it came about before then, for the Biennale dei Giovani Artisti a Napoli. At that time the rabbit had a green belly and people could go in there and cuddle up together. Using the chroma key technique I projected the scenes outside on surreal backgrounds. M: Do people get close in the bellies of rabbits in general, or because rabbits are always at it… or because of the colour green? B: Because with green or blue you can use the chroma key technique, the technique I use for my videos. But this was all live – it was a VJ set – when you remix your images live, and project them, not holding them back and just letting them flow… it’s hard work but this VJ set, which was all the rage at the time, worked a bit like wallpaper, which is how it should be, because the music that DJs play is exactly that. I don’t mean that in a negative way – in actual fact it was a historic turning point: when music became a soundtrack, a continuum, whereas before it had an ending, a structure, a crescendo. A DJ set, on the other hand, is a loop: musical wallpaper. To create a set that would really get into people I got the people to get into the set, and turned them into protagonists.

9 From the other side of the sea

B: That was the birth of the Coniglio. Then it got a name: I asked a girl during an exhibition what to call it and she suggested Gesù (Jesus). Prophetic. In fact in 2007 when I wanted to make some noise at the Venice Biennale I decided that I would make it “walk” on the water, complete with wings, with an eyepatch to turn it into a pirate, mocking the Lion of St. Mark’s and that… M: Why, because the Lion of St. Mark’s was a pirate? B: It was a parody – it had wings. From the allegorical point of view, the rabbit and the lion are diametrically opposed, one is courage and the other is fear, right? So now I’m going to make a rabbit more aggressive than this lion. The lion in this case became a symbol for the art system and… M: Were you already tired of it or did you still want to upturn stereotypes? B: I wanted a rabbit that would be more ferocious than the lion. Which seemed tired, blindfolded, bent over. So it was a spectacular, amusing gesture, which was also autobiographical, because that’s the way I felt, coming to art from the other side of the sea, who knows which one. You’re in the sea, you don’t know where you set off from… but you’ve got there and I wanted to arrive in that way: with a joyful but critical project, explosive and sensational, destructive and sensational: that’s what ConiglioViola is, that’s how I see it. The attack was directed to art – it was a warning: look, art has to look outside itself, not just to itself. It’s terrible when art only looks to itself, it’s a narcissistic mechanism… and you know what happened to Narcissus. M: He fell into the fountain. B: He committed suicide by dint of falling in love with himself, quoting himself… M: Don’t you run that risk yourself? B: Why… me? Yes, we all run that risk. Naturally. I try not to take inspiration from the system, but from something outside it… M: A while back I said something – I’m not sure why I said it, but I am totally convinced of it: the question of responsibility – in my view you are very responsible, when you work on a project you don’t let anything get in your way, you put everything into it, you want a lot and you use lots of different languages. In other words, you feel the need to do something full, not for yourself but for others. This is what being responsible is about. B: … M: You want the people that end up in front of your work to be happy. B: Yes. Happy or in any case that… that’s the role of art. If not what use is it? Art isn’t a book of philosophy. If it was a treatise… it would be a really bad one… so when I see artists who think they can explain something or make a documentary, bah! What is that? There are other people who do that better than you. As much as it’s still in fashion, making documentaries or explaining ideas… I’m just not interested. Works must stir something up, hook you in or engage you, reveal something, envelop you, fling things open. You have to work with the sense of wonder.

10 With a sense of wonder

M: You produce performances but you don’t operate in the first. B: Well it depends. I could operate in the first person, but perhaps I am too shy right now. I used to put on performances every day, without a stage, therefore more risky… I made gestures, risked being beaten up at times, then in the end I didn’t get beaten up, I don’t know why, I think people maybe understood that my gestures were innocent. In any case performance art interests me up to a point, the only piece I really did was the pirate attack. For me the rest is theatre. And if I produce proper theatre shows I want professionals on stage. M: but you risked in another way, when one of your works was at the centre of a national scandal, and even caused an exhibition to be cancelled… Ecce Trans caused a massive scandal, everyone was talking about it, it started arguments, people taking stances, furious comments, TV reports. You messed up big time. I’m really not into provocation for its own sake – contemporary art is chock-full of it nowadays, and I see that as a symptom of its weakness, its crisis point, its emptiness. So can you explain what it was you set out to do? B: Pasolini said that when the work of an artist is honest it always creates scandal because the artist’s vision bursts in on the lives of people. You see, when I was invited to take part in that exhibition, (which incidentally was not a great exhibition, or a necessary one) I got to thinking that I was one of the few living artists in the show and that it was therefore my duty so say something about the present. I don’t care for gratuitous provocation either! Provocation is only worthy of the name when it reveals truths, otherwise it is just vulgar, offensive, facile and useless, there is so much of it around these days, it just ends up being about getting publicity! That time, however there was an emergency that had to be addressed, and I had the opportunity to do it. In that year (2007) the issue of homosexuality was a thorny political issue in Italy, and to talk about sexuality I wanted to focus in particular on transsexuals, who in my view are the only figures that effectively are not integrated, that are outsiders in our world. There was that ridiculous case, a simple photo in which Sircana, possibly quite by chance, was driving past a transsexual, and it caused such a scandal… The paparazzo who took the photo had sold it to an important publisher who however did not publish it… I got the photo off the internet and manipulated it in a fairly simple way to replace the figure of the transsexual with that of Christ, taking inspiration from a passage of the gospel according to Matthew, which was also, not incidentally, a favourite of Pasolini’s. In that passage Jesus, who in the first place was a great provocateur, a rebel, says that we can see him in every person “on the margins”. So the image of the transsexual in question, that caused such a furore, became a perfect Imago Christi. But there was another level to it. I decided to put a price tag on the photo, €100,000, which was what the original paparazzo was paid for it. This was to highlight the stupidity of contemporary journalism, that feeds off easy scoops to distract our attention, and a way of underlining how an artist can create an even more scandalous revelation (on sale at the same price as the original, and with the price there for all to see!), because the artist’s camera, even when it is directed towards reality, captures details that escape the common eye. In the end the furore that Ecce Trans created showed that I hit the spot… but the scandal was not in the work itself, which was orthodox and faithful to the Gospel, but in the judgement of those who condemned it from behind a shield of facile, hypocritical moralism. M: you paid a high price for all this B: …honest traders always earn a bit less! M: And now, what do you want to do? B: I want to invent a ship – not a pedalò anymore – a flying pirate ship, I don’t know, with as many people as possible on board, each with what he or she can bring. I want to be even more multimedia in a way: it is very difficult from the practical point of view, but it fulfils my need. To trace new routes to wonderland.

Domenico Quaranta

Happiness is more than just a glass of wine and a sandwich, as the pair suggested in another famous hit, where it is not difficult to identify a Christological undertone: happiness also means overcoming vana curiositas (dreaming of Hawaii) and inauthenticity, to gain access to true love, that between Al Bano and Romina, first and foremost, and for everyone.

But this is merely the most immediate interpretation of the song. It is clear that after this reconciliation on earth, there is another that awaits in heaven (“you’ve got to believe”), where past glory becomes silence and shadows, but where, on the other hand, there is a way to a better world and also “a more human way to say I love you”.

ConiglioViola has discovered Al Bano and Romina’s secret message, and brought it to light. The duo are talking about life after death. And ConiglioViola’s exercise points up the impressive similarity of the lyrics of the song with the words of Giovanni Raboni (from Quare tristis, L’opera poetica, I Meridiani Mondadori, p. 997): “Dopo la vita cosa? ma altra vita, / si capisce, insperata, fioca, uguale, / tremito che non s’arresta, ferita / che non si chiude eppure non fa male” (After life, what? Another life, / you see, unhoped for, tremulous, the same, / a tremor that cannot stop, a wound / that does not heal yet does not hurt). But I believe that the exercise does not stop here, with the revelation of the profound message conveyed by Al Bano and Romina. It is a little like the situation in The Others, the 2001 film starring Nicole Kidman, where for most of the film we think we are dealing with living characters who are afraid of the dead, only to find out that those we took for living are actually dead, and the film therefore looks at life through the eyes of death, not at death through the eyes of life. If I can be forgiven for a bookish, ostentatious reference, the situation recalls that of Federico Ruysch’s mummies: “As once from death / It shrank while yet alive, not otherwise / Shrinks from the vital flame / Our nature, naked waif; | Not happy, no but safe”.

The moral is a very simple one. Who ever said that pop flees death? Politics, and unfortunately often religion flee from it, so reluctant to remind us we will die, and even (in the case of politics) so quick to promise a hundred and twenty years of life. But pop cannot be said to avoid death; it looks it in the eye.

We have the triumph of death in songs like The End by The Doors (“My only friend, the end”), that in Apocalypse Now acquired even greater force when teamed with the dying words of Kurtz (“The horror! The horror!”).

Switching from twentieth century pop to its eighteenth century counterpart, we can find a bloodthirsty spirit, in the age when Frederick the Great lashed his soldiers with the cry, “Dogs, did you think you would live for ever?”. Traces of this can be found in unexpected places, such as the Marseillaise, where not only are we exhorted to “cut the throats of the fearsome soldiers” of the uprising, so as their “impure blood quenches the furrows” of the French countryside, but also to hope that on the point of death our enemies still find time to contemplate the glory of the forces of liberty (“Que tes ennemis expirants / Voient ton triomphe et notre gloire!”). All moving sentiments that give Mireille Mathieu’s ‘r’ added rasp and elicit the tears of both men and women in Casablanca.

And we have many eschatological pop songs, like those of Paolo Conte, which are at times nihilistic (“Areonautico è il cielo | vuoto, abissale sarà | senza orologi quel viaggio | tra stelle e cenere andrà” (Aeronautical is the sky | an empty abyss | a journey without clocks | between stars and ash), but at others more hopeful (“un’altra vita per noi | oltre il dialetto che hanno i santi, / arcano come certi amanti… / un’altra vita verrà, e un’altra vita sarà / oltre le lune e gli uragani / e le tue mani sopra le mie mani…”) (another life for us / beyond the dialect of the saints / arcane as lovers… / another life will come, and another life will be / beyond moons and hurricanes / your hands on mine…”), where God sometimes appears in person, refusing to lend you his bike.

And thanks to ConiglioViola’s deconstruction, Al Bano and Romina can now be included in this vein.

Maurizio Ferraris

­So the artist knocks on his or her own door, creating an incumbent expectation that borders on silence. He never abandons his waiting position, not moving a muscle, but prepares himself by assuming a position, that of the long neck, a retractile movement that enables him to rise up out of himself, to detect and at the same time distort things. We know, and it is probable, that the artist is a man with no head on his shoulders, and therefore no neck either, we all realise it: this evident fact is also taught to children in schools, something that is condemned as a sign of irresponsible asociality. The artist, as Thomas Mann says, is not a good reformer, due to his particular love of vulgarity and life, which in the end are the same thing.

The artist does not organise reserves, or accumulate supplies, or wait for someone else to bring him gifts to exchange, because he does not have eyes to hear or ears to see. So he knocks on his own door, thus giving rise to an iterative spectre beyond the door that goes in and out. Like the tortoise, the artist takes on the door, carries the door with him and under this shield travels about with his neck outstretched, ready to withdraw having captured a glimpse.

This glimpse inevitably ends where it started. The artist with the long neck makes a peacock’s tail and finds himself discovering repetition, his own body like a simulacra waiting behind the door. Basically the artist never expects visitors so he consoles himself by opening up and closing himself behind and outside the door, which in this way functions as a mirror. And there, on this concave and specular shell, the past buries its future, and the glimpse turns into an oversight and perverse hallucination of many ubiquities.

Putting his neck round the door means exposing something perturbing, like saying that Lacan opens the door and finds Freud waiting for him! In any case the artist loads his neck on his shoulders and continues his journey, listening out for other apparitions, ready for other revelations, and to fling the door open on the absence of the other.

The creak of the door contends with the muffled sound of laughter, artist’s laughter, that of Zarathustra, who knows how opening the door only means moving air and inevitably placing the door in the domain of time: the door of the moment.

Here space and time no longer coincide, no longer engage like fortunate coincidences. The prudent geometry of the aperture cannot contain the incursion of the spectre that rushes in swiftly and tumultuously, we might say, at breakneck speed. The invasion happens without reason, otherwise it would not be possible to laugh, to spark off the disinhibiting process of laughter that checks comparison and the advent of absence. Also because Lacan warned the artist that reality is impossible. So art becomes the practice of the long neck that expands its own circumnavigation, exploiting the confirmation received, comforted by the information that outside lies the desert, and perhaps not even that…

Thus art becomes the compensation for a wait that leads to no visitor, a way of playing the double role of guest and host, of those who deceive the wait with Nietzschian tactics, speaking out loud and at the same time not speaking, in order to give rise to the illusion of a meeting. Humorously the artist gets to work, following the new adage: seek and you shall not find. In this way he manages to and at the same time practices distancing himself from every meeting, reducing the real to a mere encumbrance, the mechanical movement of opening and closing the door. Opening and closing the door of the moment becomes a paper fan that moves the air, a jagged movement that covers and uncovers alternations of details, flashes of figures and bursts of signs.

Without effort and without work, with much ostentation, that however does not mean without skill, the artist repeatedly goes up on his neck, with the style of his neck, lightly producing the meaning of a Zen proverb: “Clapping with one hand.”

The artist has only one hand, which is focussed and obsessed with expertise, with the sparkling and nocturnal use of the left hand. The artist’s hand is proverbially sinister, strengthened by a peal of laughter that isolates and amplifies the gesture. Satisfied with his own incompleteness, the artist perfects his own mutilation, cutting off his right hand (if it ever grew) in the hinge of the door. Basically the artist puts his right hand in the door, which means out of the picture. Having thus disarmed himself, he prevents the right hand from knowing what the left is doing, thus losing all reserve and brazenly leaving his artfully done works open to view.

Achille Bonito Oliva

Martina Corgnati

At first glance, Romantici looks like a variation on a family photograph from the end of the nineteenth century, revisited with gentle humour, a tribute to Niépce and Daguerre. But the image is immediately shaken up by imperceptible, then more evident movements of the people in front of the camera. In a sort of semantics each body expresses its discomfort at the long wait involved in the daguerreotype pose. This necessary slowness, which photography has now left behind, is recreated thanks to the use of video, which shows a backstage version of the creation of the final image, an exploration of techniques and media without temporal frontiers.
The filming creates a kind of video clip, with music alleviating the slow passage of time, and words which interact beautifully with the images. The work evokes the complexity of ConiglioViola’s universe, where it is difficult to identify the conceptual, musical or visual genesis of the projects and the ideas that unfold like images in a kaleidoscope.

There is a film of the original version of the song Romantici (a hit at the Sanremo Festival in 1982, belonging to a genre much favoured by ConiglioViola, who are often engaged in rediscovering gems from pop culture). This vintage clip is a long sequence shot of Viola(!) Valentino in front of a fixed camera, performing a series of movements totally out of sync with the lyrics and music. The frontal viewpoint and awkward, improbable moves of early music videos echo those of the daguerreotype, where the result is not down to chance, as it can sometimes be with snapshots, or Cartier Bresson’s ‘decisive moment’, but is rather a question of patience and posing skill, being able to bear the fixed, insistent glare of the camera charged with the task of immortalizing the moment.

To return to the image, at a closer look the resemblance between the people posing appears considerably more evident than the likenesses that are usually difficult to make out in family photos, even when you really look for them. It is the same actor playing the various roles, directly involved as an integral part of the work, as often happens in the collective’s work as authors/artists/actors. Identity, perception, objectivity: Pirandello’s One, No One & One Hundred Thousand all lined up together. Each playing the same shared role: intent on keeping their balance, striking a good pose, trying to achieve an image of dignified composure, and find the right way to hold that troublesome bag. Aware of posing for eternity, all responsible for the end result, except the cat, which must adroitly be kept out of the way, oblivious of the importance of the event.

And these innovative, rare family photos certainly were an event, an important occasion and a ceremony that rapidly acquired the stuff of a ritual. When photos were not taken in sophisticatedly-decorated studios, the photographer would be called to the house and everyone would line up for him in the front room, dressed in their Sunday best. In Romantici, the photo on the wall, where the baby has not yet made an appearance, tips a wink at the repetitive nature of the ritual and mise en abîme.

It is widely held that the best photographs are family photographs. The gentlemen pirates of ConiglioViola know it and do nothing but seek out, invent and reconstruct families to photograph. They are never alone, thanks to cultural and historic belonging, against a background that hops between eras and time periods, linguistic and technological mixing. In a joyful mélange of references to the archetypes of art history or popular culture, from advertising to pop hits, or the realm of fairy tales, they continue their voyage through time with intelligence, wit, the poetry of nursery rhymes, and last but not least, a sparkling spirit of provocation. And their entirely startling evolution lends the distinct impression that they are only just at the start of their journey…

Laura Serani

I wonder if I shall fall right through the earth and come out
among the people that walk with their heads downwards!
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

By observing and radically challenging the space we live in, contemporary art represents a dual driving force of identity and otherness that has the power to move our cities. From this point of view the role of art is a genuinely strategic one. On one hand it provides a screen for social tensions to project ideas, impulses and protests onto; on the other it gathers and conveys a free, topical cultural condition which is not present in that particular art market system that bows down to its own “centres of power”.
Drawing on this we wanted to engage creatively with the Giornata del Contemporaneo event staged by the Italian Association of Contemporary Art Museums and the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities. Together with the PAC we are hosting a singular, provocative anthological exhibition of the works of ConiglioViola.
The work of ConiglioViola, with its atypical history as an artistic brand that encompasses video art, experimental theatre, photography, performance art and the internet, represents the opportunity to contaminate cultural architectures with unsettling creations and “meta-works” that spark off disquieting symbolic implications and experiences.
The title of the exhibition, Sono un pirata / Sono un signore evokes the pirate attack on the Venice Biennale in 2007 and preserves the subversive power of ConiglioViola, which intends to involve visitors in “a sort of magical operation” which has the feel of an initiation rite, the crossing of a threshold which is closed but “openable”.
But to create worlds that can be shared it is necessary to go beyond the mirror, to cross over to the other side. As Lewis Carroll wrote, this must be done without fear, upturning one’s point of view, because everything might become its opposite.
What is apparent non-sense therefore becomes a deeper search for meaning, not without psychoanalytical and social implications.
The artistic journey of ConiglioViola reveals a multifaceted oeuvre, from its nocturnal, fantasy, dark side to its more melancholy, enigmatic or pop aspect. Visitors will be drawn into a broader exploration of the role of contemporary art. And they will discover an artistic presence that coexists with all the consequences of the difficult position of being on the margin, which is however essential (in my view too) for those who are never completely in, yet never completely out, in the quest for a different perspective on things. In the sign of indigo, the colour purple, a hue of the soul that is duty-bound to pursue a transversal approach, ever guided by a vision of the unexpected that is unsettling and thought-provoking.

Massimiliano Finazzer Flory
COUNCILLOR FOR CULTURE | Municipality of Milan

Pop divas are real elements of daily life that the artist fantasizes about, and then bodily incorporates into works of art. Because each of them represents and narrates their surroundings, and as we all know, when writers from Bagnacavallo tire of writing about their home town and imagine they are in Zurich, they get it badly wrong, because they have never been to Zurich, and they describe it as Bowie described the chill of Warsaw from a cosy recording studio in a lavish French castle, with a few notions floating down an affected version of the Vistola river.

But critics like these messy historic/geographical lucubrations that ennoble the daily life they have come to hate. And they like it even more when they can season the lot with the sauce of psychoanalysis. Perhaps with the help of a bored philosophy teacher, who saw himself writing important treatises but is actually teaching at the Bartoletti School to earn a living. One day this jobsworth teacher mentioned Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. The critic was in the front row listening to him, while the rest of the class was playing fantasy football. Perhaps in that moment of daily life, made of boredom and football, the thing took a negative turn, and the critic became a psychopath. Then the bad teacher spent another morning illustrating the painting of Leonardo’s in which the outline of a bird is visible. After that the critic started to look at every work of art as a puzzle to solve, like: fill in the dotted spaces and an image will appear. It all got worse when many young artists noticed this tendency and realised that the best way to win the admiration of the Psychopathological Critic was to become psychopaths themselves. So it was that they all started including hidden birds in their pictures. And everyone was happy. The critics were happy every time they solved a riddle, the artists were happy because they had been elevated to the rank of neurotics, and the gallerists were happy because thanks to these pathologies they were making more money than Lacanian psychoanalysts.

Viola Valentino, as she appears in the works of ConiglioViola, on the other hand, has no hidden psychoanalytical references. Viola is like Gertrude Stein’s Rose: Viola is Viola is Viola. Who would have thought it? The very Stein who told the story of going to see the Medrano circus in Paris one night with Picasso and a few other scroungers from Rue de Fleurus. They liked it so much that Picasso even started painting clowns again, as he had in Spain, drawing on an enthusiasm born out of everyday life and not the meanders of psychoanalysis. In the same way, ConiglioViola draws on the everyday life of twenty years ago: the musical tastes of older sisters who followed the unattainable divas of the day on the Festivalbar programme. Divas who are probably now in the contacts of the mobile phones of Mr. Brice Coniglio. But their vicinity does not diminish their historic importance, because they have always been that way: distant but nonetheless “familiar in his mouth as household words”, as Shakespeare says in Henry V.

ConiglioViola’s pop divas are indeed household names, the stuff of conversations around the dinner table with the older sisters, their great fans. Just like de Chirico’s trains were talked about over dinner with his father, a railway engineer.

Trains, clowns and singers are not the fruit of Seelenkrankheiten, but visions of daily life. Yet there is a further level that makes these everyday elements magical, and that makes them into art, not just because they are on show in a museum. It is the transfigurative capacity of the artist, who identifies aspects of the most banal things that non-artists simply do not see.

ConiglioViola’s pop divas reach their full power when they are crystallized in the perfection of their utmost splendour, enveloped in the amber of memory where they will never age. The imperfections of the clothes; the odd missed note during their live performances; the tangle of cables on the stage; the sweat: all these things disappear. ConiglioViola’s taxidermic operation removes all unwanted details from the animal being video-preserved. Everything is magical, glossy, perfect. It is not a difficult task, because the original material was already laden with allure. The pop divas of the early

80s were masks that underwent a new transformation every season. “Who knows what Berté’s new look will be this summer?”, we wondered anxiously before going to sleep. And then we would be captivated at the sight of Loredana dressed as a pirate or a nun, in Warhol’s Factory or under a waterfall, or Rettore, who morphed year by year from extraterrestrial to kamikaze to country singer. Decades later we laugh to see Madonna doing the same things as the diva from Castelfranco Veneto. But she has more money to plough into it, and therefore manages to conquer Indonesia, while for Rettore even Canton Ticino was a result. Italy, unfortunately, lost its global artistic supremacy in the seventeenth century.

Unlike normal works of taxidermy, however, those of ConiglioViola are not mournful things. A stuffed fox, with its paw raised in a pathetic gesture of vitality, and glass eyes that betray neither fear nor cunning, is a dismal sight. The digital embalming of the 1982 version of Milva, on the other hand, magnifies the singer’s original splendour. Also because in these works you do not actually see Milva or Berté or Alice. What you see is ConiglioViola reclaiming 80s pop divas and transforming their music and ideas. ConiglioViola also invites us to do the same: “Recuperate le vostre radici quadrate” (reclaim your square roots). Perhaps the term roots was chosen by a paralinguistic process: as in Jewish or Arabic words that contain age-old three-letter roots that give terms their meaning, in ConiglioViola’s videos we perceive ancient (in pop terms) diva-related roots that give meaning to the art of the Coniglio. Those roots are square because the splendour of those pop divas is still vastly superior to what came after them. While the divas of the 80s were whimsical, astounding, ever-changing pop-singers, those of the following decade took on the saccharine, temperamental and arrogant form of the top models in George Michael’s videos, grouped together as if in a school photo. And ten years later the divas that delight the chat room onanists in are the vacuous soubrettes on television, the bubbly showgirls, the presenters in their miniskirts and stilettos, the paid habituées of the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia, all so very feckless and interchangeable. And who knows what will happen in the next decade, when the magnificent pop divas of the 80s come up against their descendants, who will quite likely be sportswomen, especially swimmers?

In the end it is neither here nor there. For some of us the figure of the diva will continue to be what we saw on the stage at the Sanremo music festival or in the first sparkling variety shows on the Mediaset channels between 1978 and 1985. We can live embalmed too, fixing these equally embalmed pop divas into a loop of .avi files, while outside the world goes on without us.

Tommaso Labranca

In Bomarzo, in soft light, when the season explodes in the brightest of greens, the stone creatures appear without a past, timeless, almost as if challenging the torment of routine. A giant in the act of dismembering his unfortunate victim. An elephant picking up a soldier. An enormous tortoise bearing the tiny figure of a woman standing on a ball. A surreal, bizarre population of terrifying beasts, giants, pagan divinities, bears and dragons. A riotous fantasy that knows no rules. The Ogre’s wide open mouth and empty eye sockets hide the bitter sentence “qui ogni pensier vola” (here every thought flies), and a room with chairs and a table carved out of stone. There is nothing monstrous apart from the distorted proportions, outlandish digressions and wild fantasies to sedate the urgency of the expression. Along the path, frightening visions alternate with the attractive sight of nymphs and sirens with extraordinarily beautiful faces. With this classically-composed, romantic construction, Vicino Orsini, signore di Bomarzo, paid homage to the memory of his wife Giulia.

The Coniglio, on the other hand now want to bring down then reopen the curtain, where the singing continues like a anthem to love, fleeing from the monsters in the park and from our inner demons, where, at last “ogni pensier viola”.

Antonio Arevalo

Ci sarà – escatological tribute to  Al Bano & Romina  Power / HDV video /  4’09’’ /  2008

Most of ConiglioViola research in the field of video art is strictly linked with the experimentation with electronic music. The process there consists in selecting well-known music hits from the past and re-arranging them with a new version developed by the artists. Once the song is so re-written, the artists then produces a video for it in which they also play as performers. Through the use of video, the artists unveil a double meaning implicit in a song that is already rooted inside the collective imaginary. It attributes new meanings to the song, distorting its common perception, that which Arthur Danto would refer to as “transfiguration of the commonplace”.

The case of the video Ci sarà (2008) is emblematic of this kind of research. The song Ci sarà was a hit by the singing couple Al Bano & Romina Power, stars of the 80s, and this song is commonly regarded as a love song. In the video by ConiglioViola the song lyrics are read like a text that talks about the afterlife. The artists here portray themselves like two children at the time of their funeral, but instead of a Church the ceremony takes place on the stage of the San Remo music festival.
In the installation, at the feet of the video-projection, the ghosts of the two singing children are projected onto two open coffins.

ConiglioViola also engraves the song Ci Sarà on a limited edition of violet vinyls.

The work turned out to be prophetic, as it was followed by a sudden interruption in transmissions connected to a separation, difficult private events and a deep-seated personal crisis.

Brice Coniglio spent almost a year in Paris thanks to a grant from the Dena Foundation, undecided whether to arrange his creature’s funeral or give it a new life. Symbolically and performatively the official website, www.coniglioviola.com, was shut down. For months the home page of the site, which had always been the point of departure and driving force behind the Coniglio’s undertakings, was emblazoned with the words “Fine primo tempo” (End of the First Half) and access to the site was blocked.

In the catalogue of the solo show Sono un pirata/Sono un signore the philosopher Maurizio Ferraris signs an interesting critical essay about this work .
Gallery:

The project is composed by eleven photographies plus the video Le vent nous portera. The eleven images are linked each to other by an ideal tale in which the artists – through a complex work of “digital body art” – modify their own presen images to represent themselves as two children. (watch the original backstage pictures)

Le vent nous portera / HDV video /  4’00’’ /  2007

The exhibition is composed by two section:

1. Tunnel with steroscopies. A completely obscured tunnel. On the walls eleven luminescent couples of holes invite visitors to look inside. Here the whole collection of eleven images appear in a miniturized and three-dimensional version, thanks to the use of the ancient techinique of stereoscopy.
   At the end of the tunnel is projected the video Le vent nous portera, featuring the artists-children beyond the bars of a prison.
2. Labyrinth with lightboxes

tunnel with stereoscopies : installation view

The prison – from which the two children dream to escape in the video – is a metaphor of the relationship between the artist and his work, that can give him eternal life but also immobilize his life. But the prison is also a metaphot of life itself, in its being determined, from which the art consent to escape to invent different possibilities.

nous deux: light-boxes installation view

Nous Deux tells in an autobiographical and sometimes melancholic fairy tale, an attempt to escape from time and from reality but also escape from Art.

Martina: I don’t know how much faith you have. But in my view, what is arguably your most lyrical and atmospheric project touches on this very subject, being built around sharing as a narrative as well as being an autobiographical strategy… I’m talking about Nous Deux.
Brice: Just a second though, to talk about this I have to go back to ConiglioViola, which sprang from an idea of mine, a need, and in the beginning it was almost like an anonymous creature crawling around the web, with no-one knowing who had given birth to it. At a certain point, however, I felt the desire to share this project with the person I was closest to. There was this obsession for the number two, which for me is a perfect and impossible number, as my astrologist told me. Well I wanted to go beyond the dream of “forever”.All artists tend to project themselves into the future, because their works inevitably outlive them. That wasn’t enough for me, I wanted to project my relationship, artistic or personal, it’s the same thing for me! Into the past too, so I could really say “forever”.
Nous Deux is an imaginary autobiography. Mine and that of my then partner in crime. There are 11 images (because 1+1=2) telling the story of two naughty children, us two. They were created by manipulating current photographs, by means of what I describe as digital body art, that I used a year before in the video Romantici.
The eleven works were exhibited using a stereoscope, a very old technique that once again recalls the number two…
How many times, when we meet someone important at a certain point in our lives, do we wonder what would have happened if we had met somewhere else, at another time, in another era? This is the tragedy of being able to live only one existence, one thing at a time, something I have always been obsessed with (and I think it shows a bit in ConiglioViola). It is also the dialectics of possible worlds. This is what I use art for, to live the lives I haven’t lived, as well as escaping from my own. The heart of Nous Deux is an image, tender but brutal, of the two children in prison, which also appears in the video Le vent nous portera. Here prison is the metaphor for the determination of our existence, Bastille-like… and art is the hot air balloon/rabbit that the children dream of escaping on. Martina: Brice, are we talking about you or about your work now?
Brice: The point is that I have no interest in documenting something that’s in my head, there’s no point in that, what I want and hope to do is create worlds that can be shared.

from “Interview with Mr. Rabbit ” by Martina Corgnati
In “Sono un pirata / Sono un signore” ed. Silvana 2009

(watch the original backstage pictures)

On June 7h, 2007 (day of the opening of the 52nd edition of the Biennale) an enormous Pirate Rabbit, almost 6 metres high, winged like the Lion of San Marco, with one eye covered with a classic pirate’s eye patch, crossed the whole Canale della Giudecca on board a large raft, as far as the Giardini (the official venue of the Biennale) and from there – at around 6pm – it fired 52 cannon shots at the buildings of the Biennale.
Then two rabbit-like pirates disembarked from the ship into terra firma to raise the Jolly Roger, with the logo of a large “Vitruvian Rabbit” over the gardens, the place traditionally used to host the flags of all the nations.

This action, that somebody read as neo-futurist, was intended by ConiglioViola as an act of conquest and reappropriation – although an ironical and provocative one – in relation to an Art System that is often revealed to be “blind” and with one eye “blindfolded”.
The fact that a Winged Rabbit – an animal symbolising “cowardice” – is leading the pirate attack is no coincidence, considering that the Winged Lion – which should in fact represent courage – seems to have ceased to inspire heroic choices and actions!

[…] IX. From the other side of the sea

Brice: That was the birth of the Coniglio. Then it got a name: I asked a girl during an exhibition what to call it and she suggested Gesù (Jesus). Prophetic! In fact in 2007 when I wanted to make some noise at the Venice Biennale I decided that I would make it “walk” on the water, complete with wings, with an eyepatch to turn it into a pirate, mocking the Lion of St. Mark’s and that… Martina: Why, because the Lion of St. Mark’s was a pirate? Brice: It was a parody – it had wings. From the allegorical point of view, the rabbit and the lion are diametrically opposed, one is courage and the other is fear, right? So now I’m going to make a rabbit more aggressive than this lion. The lion in this case became a symbol for the art system and… Martina: Were you already tired of it or did you still want to upturn stereotypes? Brice: I wanted a rabbit that would be more ferocious than the lion. Which seemed tired, blindfolded, bent over. So it was a spectacular, amusing gesture, which was also autobiographical, because that’s the way I felt, coming to art from the other side of the sea, who knows which one. You’re in the sea, you don’t know where you set off from… but you’ve got there and I wanted to arrive in that way: with a joyful but critical project, explosive and sensational, destructive and sensational: that’s what ConiglioViola is, that’s how I see it. The attack was directed to art – it was a warning: look, art has to look outside itself, not just to itself. It’s terrible when art only looks to itself, it’s a narcissistic mechanism… and you know what happened to Narcissus.[…]

from“Interview with Mr. Rabbit ” by Martina Corgnati
In “Sono un pirata / Sono un signore” ed. Silvana 2009

The series of eleven photographs of the Pirate Attack to Venice Biennale were exposed the first time in 2009 during ConiglioViola’s solo show Sono un pirata/Sono un signore at PAC Pavillion of Contemporary Art in Milan.

PAC: installation view