Antonio Rovaldi

Accademia Carrara, Bergamo

February 13 - May 18 Maggio 2020

The artist Antonio Rovaldi brings the End. Words from the Margins, New York City project to Bergamo, presented last November at Harvard University.

The exhibition The sound of the woodpecker, hosted from 13 February to 17 May 2020 in the spaces of the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, represents the second chapter of the End. Words from the Margins project, New York City, promoted by GAMeC in partnership with the '' Harvard University (Graduate School of Design), the Kunstmuseum of St. Gallen and Magazzino Italian Art of Cold Spring (NY), with which the artist won the fifth edition
of the Italian Council, the program for the promotion of Italian contemporary art in the world of the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity and Urban Regeneration of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities and for Tourism.

Curated by Lorenzo Giusti, Director of the GAMeC, together with Steven Handel, Visiting Professor of Ecology at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and Francesca Benedetto, Design Critic, the exhibition - as well as the entire project - is an eulogy of the journey, of 'physical crossing of the most marginal spaces, and is based on the idea that precisely from these borders - not only geographical, but also political and anthropological -, a
conscious rebirth of society.

The project presents the most iconic metropolis in the world from the point of view of its suburbs and the extreme edges of its five boroughs - Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, The Bronx, Staten Island -, along which Rovaldi walked, and returns the experience of the artist in a photographic series capable of representing its complexity.
In his research, Rovaldi has addressed issues such as green in the suburbs in relation to urban expansion, urban debris, the link between photography and literary production, and still photography as a visual novel that is built around the city.
From this experience, a series of images was born that can present a peripheral and less known New York, with its vast lagoons near the ocean, motorway junctions and uncultivated and not easily accessible areas.

In addition to the fifty black and white photographs in analogue print that will occupy the walls of the exhibition space, the exhibition will present some geographical maps created by the landscape architect Francesca Benedetto that show the urban, geographical and meteorological transformations of the city, alongside a sound installation and two bronze sculptures made especially for the exhibition.

Five Walks. NYC, 2017-2020 was born from the collaboration between the artist and the sound designer Tommaso Zerbini and offers, through a constant flow of voices and sounds, the image of an elastic geography in which boundaries expand step by step, stop after stop , with the slow and thoughtful rhythm of a long walk.

The first of the bronze sculptures represents the copy of a limulus (horseshoe crab), a Pleistocene, armored and primordial creature, beached along the American East Coast and in particular around New York, with which the artist intends to remind us that edges of the city have ancient forms and stratified geological times. The second is a debris from a keyboard found along a Staten Island beach which, positioned vertically on a base like a small monolith, could recall an ancient and future deity at the same time, a devotional object from a city submerged in gray waters. of the ocean.

The installation is completed by the video The Rest of the Images, created in collaboration with the director Federica Ravera: a film that is documentation of the artist's practice and, at the same time, of the close relationship between walking, the photographic image and construction of a sequence.

In parallel with the exhibition, GAMeC, in collaboration with the G. Carrara Academy of Fine Arts in Bergamo, will promote a series of workshops, excursions, explorations, meetings and conferences that will involve artists, architects, urban planners, philosophers and writers.
During the appointments of the first cycle of the Public Program in 2020, Antonio Rovaldi's experience in New York will be transformed into a model of investigation to explore the boundaries of the city of Bergamo.

THE VOLUME
THE SOUND OF THE WOODPECKER BILL: NEW YORK CITY

The Sound of the Woodpecker Bill: New York City, published by Humboldt Books, forms the centerpiece of the project.
It is divided into five chapters - like the five boroughs of the city -, each made up of a selection of one hundred black and white photographs documenting the walk around the perimeter of each borough.

The volume includes, in addition to the text by Antonio Rovaldi, the maps created by Francesca Benedetto and contributions by Francesca Berardi, Cecilia Canziani, Anna de Manincor, Claudia Durastanti, Lorenzo Giusti, Steven Handel and Mario Maffi.
Through their interventions, the authors share an ordinary, hidden and distant New York, helping to provide an essential and contemporary look through which to glimpse the future of the city, its neighborhoods and its inhabitants.

The publication will be presented for the first time in Italy on Wednesday 26 February 2020, at the Sozzani Foundation in Milan; will follow the presentations at the Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimò (New York University) promoted by Magazzino Italian Art of Cold Spring, and at the Kunstmuseum in San Gallo (Switzerland).