Workshop Indovarsi

The Fondazione has at heart to accompany young artists for the development of the carier and projects.

The Fondazione has imagined Indovarsi, a 15-day artistic workshop for the 5 recipients of the WONDERFUL! Art research program 2024 1st edition – Maria Manetti Shrem, of the Museo Novecento, Firenze (Italy). The partnership between the Museo Novecento and the Fondazione was born from the desire to extend the historical and artistic links between the cities of Florence, Nemours, and its neighbor Fontainebleau into the present. These links forged between the crown of France and the Medici family date back to the Renaissance and are marked by the handing over of the Duchy of Nemours by Francis I to Giuliano de’ Medici in 1515.

It is in homage to this relationship that art has helped to weave between these territories, that the Indovarsi workshop borrows its name from the neologism of the Florentine poet Dante. In his immense work, the poet uses the Italian vernacular for the first time, to the detriment of Latin reserved for scholars, punctuating his text with invented words. Appearing at the end of the last lines of Paradise from The Divine Comedy, in the face of the unbearable radiance of the ultimate vision, indovarsi is composed of the preposition in and the adverb dove, literally meaning “to put oneself in the where” – a way of suggesting the mystery of the incarnation, “to give place” rather than to take place. Through this poetic gesture, Dante sets in motion his questioning and our ability to let the “where” become oneself. It is through this prism that the Fondazione Claudia Cardinale has taken hold of indovarsi, as a living, active call, which sets in motion and gives rise to the very desire for momentum, the need to tend towards this “where”. It immerses into the reader like an instant soluble solution.

A few weeks before their final exhibition in Firenze, the four visual artists Friedrich Andreoni, Lucia Cantó, Benedetta Fioravanti, Giovanna Repetto and the curator Benedetta Casini, came to throw themselves into a new space, that of the Picardeau and its territory, to connect with it in a spontaneous creative impulse.

The dense program of the workshop was kept secret until the last moment. It offered long immersions in nature, such as the Fontainebleau forest and the rivers, visits to the local major sites : the Château de Fontainebleau, the Musée de Préhistoire d’Île-de-France or the Musée Départemental des peintres de Barbizon. A collective sound workshop with artist and sound designer Vincent Tordjman, as well as an encounter with the artist duo Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain (Marcel Duchamps price nominees 2024). By the end of these fifteen days, the artists and the curator produced videos, sound work, and performances presented to the public during an ephemeral event at the Picardeau, headquarters of the Fondazione Claudia Cardinale.

Giovanna Repetto is a visual artist, her practice is characterized by a strong multidisciplinary imprint. Her gaze is focused on the limit between the real and the virtual, on the archeology of space and its representation. During her residency at the Fondazione Claudia Cardinale, she worked on the concept of involuntary memory, explicitly referring to the anecdote of Proust’s Madeleine. During the opening, she offered the public some madeleines baked collectively by the group in residence at Giovanna’s invitation. On the packaging that protects the shell-shaped cake are the individual memories of the workshop participants, evoking their own synesthetic experiences. Giovanna Repetto also presented a small pocket mirror that belonged to the actress and occults one side of it with a marker, as if to preserve it’s past memory. The other untouched reflective part is left active, as a space to record the present.

Benedetta Fioravanti is a visual artist. Her research is based on the observation of daily life, experienced directly or mediated by the consumption of digital images. She works primarily with the moving image or through a specific site, using her personal archive of images to explore, juxtapose, or compose new narratives. For the workshop Indovarsi of the Fondazione Claudia Cardinale, she projects her video inside of a camper van, both as a raw and intimist projection space. There she presents ” Would you love me”, a video in which scenes filmed during her residency are put together with images collected online, accompanied by a sound composition whose text, written by Lucia Cantò, is the result of a collaboration between the artists. With the sound contribution of Vincent Tordjman and Mathilde Mallen.

Friedrich Andreoni‘s research questions the sculptural and psychological dimensions of sound and matter. Through different media, including sculpture, sound, performance and video, he explores how these volumes inhabit the memory of space and time, moving between emission and reception, event and trace (what happens and what remains), literal and imagined, signified and meaningful. The video work Sometimes, created during the workshop Indovarsi, Andreoni plundges the underground water network of the Château de Fontainebleau into the haunting rendition of Odetta’s song “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child”. Recorded in the Chapel of Notre-Dame-de-la-Persévérance in Barbizon, the former studio of the French painter Théodore Rousseau, the melody loses its sharpness and blends into the atmospheric space of the chapel. Andreoni takes this ethereal recording into the Renaissance-era water network beneath Fontainebleau, following and filming the ancient paths of water.

Lucia Cantò is a visual artist. Her sculptural practice condenses everyday relational actions into forms with a strong symbolic value. The artist is inspired by insignificant details extracted from the complexity of the human apparatus. The use of concrete materials is a response to a sentimental reality that tends to remain evanescent. At the Fondazione Claudia Cardinale, Lucia focused on writing, which has accompanied her sculptural practice since its origins. For the public, the artist proposes a two-voice reading of a new poetic text “Anche in un castello si può cadere”, together with Claudia Squitieri, Claudia Cardinale’s daughter.

Benedetta Casini is an independent curator and researcher. Since 2015, she has been dedicated to promoting artistic projects that connect Europe and Latin America, and is part of the curatorial board of BIENALSUR, based in Buenos Aires. Her research themes include the erosion of public space in neoliberal cities and the transformations of work in post-industrial society. At the Fondazione Claudia Cardinale, she produced a personal text ” The secret garden”, a kind of diary that proceeds through fragmentary images: everyday scenes from her residency in Nemours alternate with observations on the work of the artists with whom she shares the living space.