Exhibition as part of the 3 × 3 × 3 project curated by Carla Subrizi

Inauguration Thursday 1 February 2024

2 February - 23 April 2024
6 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Via del Vascello 35, 00152 Rome

Fondazione Baruchello, for its 2024 programme, presents the project 3 × 3 × 3 a series of three exhibitions, with three artists, in dialogue with three works by Gianfranco Baruchello. In the period between February and July, Fiamma Montezemolo, Dora García and Fritz Haeg, will alternate with three projects specifically conceived for the Foundation's spaces.
With this project, the three artists continue their research and in-depth examination of certain themes of the contemporary condition, among which are the relationships between forms of identity and borders, language and communication, and issues relating to nature and the environment.
What are the urgencies on which it is important to question ourselves today? Starting from this question, the artists put their ideas and works in relation to space, in an open, non-definitive vision of research.

Fiamma Montezemolo, opens this exhibition cycle with Tra, an exhibition that started from the lemma "Tra" found in Gianfranco Baruchello's Psicoenciclopedia possibile:

"The intermediate space. Preposition usable for both space and time. Measure of the interstice, the interval, the gap. The 'between' indicates a tension. If there is a gap between two entities, this is a 'between'. The void is the space of relationship, of change. On either side of the 'between' is the space of desire, of love, of pain: of affects. The 'between' places the subject beyond the threshold of his own identity. It sets identity in motion, it cuts the boundary that defines it. The 'between' is the space of the uncertain, of variation, of oscillation, of the alternative. The choice between several things can generate doubt. The sensitive space 'between' several images, between nuclei of images. Paths are drawn, lines of tension are drawn, clots of thought are knotted that seek other clots of thought. The space of 'between' is the space of sharing. It is the out-of-focus, the gaze on the margin, on the space that lies beyond the being of any thing, entity, identity." (headword Tra (Between), Psicoenciclopedia possibile, Treccani, 2020).

Montezemolo works at the intersection of contemporary art and anthropology and on the border as a variable category of experience, investigating the collective imagination and geopolitical articulations through an intermedial approach. In this exhibition, the artist presents a series of works including the lightbox A Map is Not a Territory that aesthetically recalls a medical X-ray: an allusion to seeing inside things. In this work, the four continents are presented in pairs that overlap each other, blurring geographical boundaries and achieving a kind of interpenetration. This image gives rise to a reflection on the permeability between 'first worlds' and 'third worlds', the phenomena of cultural hybridisation and the legacy of colonialism. In another work, the video installation Unlived, based on the work of the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, Fiamma Montezemolo wants to show how each of us leads a double life: the one we are actively living and the one we would have liked or could still live. Through a series of interviews, the artist sequences the testimonies of various professionals who on the one hand recount their work experiences while on the other question the possibilities of a different destiny.
Sacco e Vanzetti is a further video installation in the exhibition that focuses on the story of the two Italian anarchists Fernando Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who immigrated to the United States and were tried for assault and murder between 1920 and 1927. The court case is re-enacted through fragments taken from trial transcripts, letters and memories that mingle and overlap visually in a spiral projected on the floor that forms an infinite loop in the centre of the room. Lastly, Camminare, Parlare, Pescare, Giocare, Guardare (Walking, Talking, Fishing, Playing, Looking), an installation created especially for the Tra exhibition, is composed of a video, resulting from the collection of materials from the photographic archive of the artist's father, from a series of interviews, and from a number of photos collected in nuclei that recall the verbs that give the work its title. The installation is intended as a tribute to the creativity captured through biographical experience, which manifests itself in research and in giving form to the imaginary, in a continuous process that apparently does not stop even in the face of a neurological disorder such as Parkinson's.

Within the exhibition, a Public Programme of lectures and meetings will enable visitors to explore certain aspects of Fiamma Montezemolo's research, starting with the works on display.

Fiamma Montezemolo

Fiamma Montezemolo is both an artist (MFA, San Francisco Art Institute) and an anthropologist (PhD, University Orientale of Naples). She is an established scholar in border studies and a professor in the Department of Cinema & Digital Media at the University of California, Davis. She has exhibited in various institutions, among the most recent: Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City (2019), Herbert Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (2019), Munich Jewish Museum, Germany (2019), La Galleria Nazionale, Roma (2019), Headlands Center for the Arts, California (2018), ASU Art Museum, Arizona (2019), Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco (2016), and Armory Center for the Arts, Los Angeles (2014). She is represented by Magazzino gallery in Rome. She is widely published and the author of two monographs: on Zapatismo and on Chicano/a politics of representation, as well as co-author (with Rene’ Peralta and Heriberto Yepez) of Here is Tijuana (Blackdog Publishing, London, 2006) and coeditor (with Josh Kun) of Tijuana Dreaming, Life and Art at the Global border (Duke U. Press, 2012). In 2022, she was awarded the Italian Council Minister of Culture Contemporary Art award in collaboration with On Public and Nero Editions.