[siteorigin_widget class="BWGControllerWidget"][/siteorigin_widget]
HAMISH FULTON
London, 1946
[siteorigin_widget class="BWGControllerWidget"][/siteorigin_widget]
20 April – 2 July 2022
Opening: 20 April, 5 – 10 pm
During Biennale Arte 2022, Galleria Michela Rizzo presents a group show establishing a dialogue among some of the artists with whom it has shared an important, long-standing path over the years.
The members of the waiwai research and design agency – winner of the Golden Lion at the latest Architecture Biennale, as represented by Wael Al Awar – will be the special guests of the event, as they are part of the project curated by Elena Forin for research into environmental issues and new construction materials.
Landscape, the value of experience, the spontaneous generation of forms, experimentation with systems for measuring space and energy, critical issues in the relationship between development and protection, sustainability and the socio-political dimension of local areas and exchanges are some of the themes addressed by the works and artists involved in the project.
With their different lingos, research and backgrounds, Hamish Fulton, Antoni Muntadas, Cesare Pietroiusti, David Rickard, Mariateresa Sartori and waiwai research and design agency open a dialogue on these junctures by recounting the environment, natural resources – whether apparent or hidden – and social and economic constructions, thus reformulating the concept of imagination and enhancing the ability to look, feel, think and build beyond the usual.
Each of these voices of contemporary research identifies energies and dynamics rooted in space and its many dimensions, thereby restoring aspects that often remain invisible through their work. Mariateresa Sartori focuses on the analysis of an immaterial force such as the wind and questions the concepts of emptiness and nothingness in two groups of works exhibited for the first time on this occasion. David Rickard dwells on the local and political significance of an element such as water and involves the gallery’s audience in an argument that focuses on the value of time and that of collaboration. Antoni Muntadas, on the other hand, notes some of the words that characterise the social dimension of space, thus showing the reinforcement of variables related to control and the progressive dissolution of those arising from the development of free thought.
Cesare Pietroiusti delves into exchange, property and the relationship between gifts and debt and that between gifts and time, thereby enabling the audience to experience these nuances concretely through two cycles of specially created works.
In addition to space as a force, a political and social field and an economic and mediating sector, there is also space as a landscape: the experience of the individual in the environment is indeed the basis of Hamish Fulton’s research, whose large wall painting shows part of a 2838 km journey he made from 11 September to 13 November 2002. Walking into distance beyond imagination is the extreme synthesis of a journey through five countries and a variety of different landscapes: walking beyond imagination seems to be the attitude shared by all the artists included in (in)visible fields, space as energy and provides the basis of the research that enabled waiwai research and design agency and Wael Al Awar to receive the most sought-after prize at the 17th Architecture Biennale with Wetland. The project inspired from sabkhah, a solid ecosystem of natural salt flats in the United Arab Emirates, turns to reject brine of desalination water (an industrial waste) of UAE to produce a new cement capable of replacing Portland cement (the production of which is responsible for 8% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions). Thanks to a group of scientists from Abu Dhabi, Tokyo and Sharjah, the project continues to grow and expand: its cross-sectional look at the environment and resources is leading to the creation not so much of a new material as the development of real alternatives to known systems and mechanisms.
By going beyond imagination and feeling the vibrations of space, you can reach unexpected, albeit often invisible places.
Special thanks to the National Pavilion of the United Arab Emirates – La Biennale di Venezia.
Hamish Fulton (London, 1946). His particular artistic condition doesn’t allow him to be restricted in an atelier or in a specific city. Indeed, we can call his city, or more specifically his atelier, the places that he visited through his long walks, heart of his works.
Until now, I never walked with a smartphone. we can say that if a smartphone Gps is useful for walkers (also because it can save lives), in my opinion, we are “lost” by means of its use. We are lost for convenience, for the imposition of the technological corporation, because it creates a dependence, we are lost in our mechanical rejection of the savage nature. For all the time we spent in the human activities by our smartphones, at the same time we are opposed to the nature, we watch in the opposite direction. Nature is lost to us, specially to children.
Hamish Fulton in Il Giornale dell’Arte, n.392, 2018
Fulton, being the master of Walking Art, follows a “leave-no-trace ethic” about his walks; he doesn’t collect any materials of the routes he has taken with the aim to show them in galleries; however, he translates his actions in a large variety of media, combining descriptions based on written texts, photographs, illustrations and wooden sculptures communicating his walking experiences to the visitors. The term “Walking Artist” was invented by Fulton during the Seventies; he doesn’t define himself a Land Art artist, as well as he affirms that none of the two terms of “Walking Art” refers to any particular artistic mean or material; walking becomes the basis that creates his art; it places the artist in connection with Mother Earth. In another interview released to Il Giornale dell’Arte, in 2018, the artist sustains that he cares about another practice that connects him with the question of the environmental protection: the “Deep Ecology”, based on an “ecocentric” system of values that follows an environmental ethic, reflecting about the role of the human being as well as a part of the ecosphere.
In 2017, Fulton held a solo exhibition at the Galleria Michela Rizzo named Unlike a drawn line, a walking line can never be erased; in 2018, during Artissima show, he realized a Public Walk organized by Zurigo’s Häusler Contemporary and Galleria Michela Rizzo, in collaboration with Turin’s Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti and the Educational Department of Castello di Rivoli, Contemporary Art Museum. The project included two hundred people walking for an hour on the historical car track of the Lingotto Fiat.
