MATtam 28
Manto Arte Temporanea | Temporary Art Manto
short exhibitions in found spaces
Isolo17 Gallery | Piazza Isolo 17 | Verona
Gianluca Balocco
Naked Plants. Cerimonia.
Saturday March 21 2015
only between 5:00 and 7:00 PM
Naked Plants is the result of a project that lasted two years of work in growing and photographing living and naked trees, that are suspended for a few moments in a real setting. The installation reproduces in real time the events recalled in the book. In the planned action, the sequoia gets raised, accompanied by a Gong sound ritual, until it is displayed in all its nakedness and completion, lit by a set of LED dynamic floodlights. The audience will be asked to sit on pillows around the plant, to keep silent and meditate. Then the participants will be asked to nourish the roots of the plant with water, a symbolic gesture of man to honor an ancient living being of his planet.
In the early 1980's I studied photographic techniques and based my artistic research around this medium. In 1993 I presented the results of my work in the XLV Biennale di Venezia as a photography and video installation. The work evolved from a three-month study of a group of 20 long-term female patients in a psychiatric hospital. A few years later I created a similar work with a group of poets who I met through the Modern Art Museum of Marseille. Some of my most important exhibits of the 1990's were in the following museums and galleries: The Contemporary Art Museum of Umbertide, "Mystery and Myth" in the Fukuyama Museum of Art, Chiba Prefectural Museum of Art, and The Museum of Art - Kockhi, Ilda City Museum, "Five Rooms between Art and Depression (A.Bonito Oliva) at Museo Correr Venezia. In 1995, in collaboration with a group of psychoanalists, In 1997 I was invited to create an installation at the Lingotto di Torino for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Bion. In the 1990s I directed the following short films: The Tube (1994), Poets don't cast shadows (1995), Brain Beat (1995), Rapid Eye Movements (1996), Twenty Five Thousand Days (1996), and October (1997).
