From La Biennale di Venezia to MACRO. International Perspectives is a new exhibition project conceived and curated by Paolo De Grandis and Claudio Crescentini, devoted to the presentation of some international installations from La Biennale Internazionale di Venezia - 56th International Art Exhibition at the MACRO’s spaces, as site-specifically reconstructed and remodelled.
Promoted by Roma Capitale - Superintendent Capitolina of Cultural Heritage and organized in cooperation with PDG Arte Communications, the project sees converging together the art "prospects" of two cities working to help the experience of international art travel throughout the country. From precisely Venice to the Capital, two cities that are linked by historical and immense artistic traditions, which have been able to further enrich this heritage so as to give voice and life to contemporary art and to discover and emphasize this resource by documenting existing assets and promoting both initiatives and international connections. The research was initiated by Paolo De Grandis in 1995 with the creation of outdoor pavilions at La Biennale di Venezia and the presentation of new countries.
From La Biennale di Venezia to MACRO. International Perspectives is the "journey" of many significant international art exhibitions that were held at La Biennale Arte to the Capitolina museum experience, where they will live new atmosphere and curiosity. Therefore, innovation lies in the path that the
works will follow from one city to the next and from one space to the other, enriching themselves with meanings, feeding a new audience and changing in the new context especially created for MACRO by the various international artists that were invited to participate.
The project will be inaugurated by the exhibition GOLD WATER: Apocalyptic Black Mirrors II by Marìa Verònica Leòn Veintemilla, curated by David Rosenberg, one of the most interesting artists on the current international art scene, recently awarded in Ecuador as "Woman of the Year" (Arts & Culture
section). Marìa Verònica Leòn Veintemilla will re-read at MACRO the conceptual exploration of her art that took place precisely at the 56th International Art Exhibition 2015 within the framework of the Ecuador pavilion, for the first time at La Biennale di Venezia.
With her work Gold Water: Apocalyptic Black Mirrors II, the artist will bring to the MACRO Hall two big containers filled with photographs and video art installations. The work is inspired by two of the natural primary sources of health and two of the elements fundamental for human life and global economy: water and gold. Extracted from their original context, they are critically re-examined through history, society, economy and culture in relation to global economic values. Both elements, which are key to the future of humanity, are life sustaining, physically and economically, and yet a paradox exists: in order to extract gold often water sources are destroyed. In the artistic and conceptual project of Marìa Verònica Leòn Veintemilla, the convergence of Art and Science forges an artistic amalgam, a prophetic myth of a future dystopia caused by man's annihilation of nature and his blind obedience to consumerism.
In order to illustrate the vitality and energy of water, its movements and its transformation from one form to another, the artist prefers the video art technique, personally creating the digital work, shooting and editing videos, painting and drawing characters and symbols, writing texts and looking after the sound. "The
selection of videos becomes an ideal technique, because the moving images allow me to show in series all the similar ‘apocalyptical’ phases that different cultures are living simultaneously in parallel dimensions; a technique that leads me to the utmost abstraction of the high-tech industry that breaks into the spirit of water and the soul of human beings", says the artist.
The video-audio installations designed by Marìa Verònica Leòn Veintemilla combine different elements such as drawings, objects, pictures, videos and sounds, all of them interconnected and displayed in a “technotheatre” where water reveals a new state of mind as a source of life.
Several videos transform the scenario of a water bottling plant: a mix of rhythms on a metal background gives rise to stars that open and change like new techno-galaxies. Starting from the mechanisation of this landscape, the work features an industrial choreography where the workers of the bottling plant flow to the sounds with steps and synchronised robotic movements, endlessly repeated. This impressive metallic concert gave the artist her first notes to create new codes for her "techno-constellations" or "metallic visions" and to impose the last guideline of market demands that enclose the natural pristine virtue of water. Nature can be defended and the work of Marìa Verònica Leòn Veintemilla strongly defends the ecosystems that are in danger through her artistic cosmology.
Gold, another capitalist symbol, object of desire, economic index will turn into a promise of beauty through a revolutionary nexus of creativity. After a transcendental journey to Ecuadorian ancestor’s practices with gold, where they used special techniques like hammered and embossing to elaborate unusual figures and gold masks with original physiognomies, like bizarre extraterrestrial creatures bordering with space, she places the genuine talent of pre-Columbian cultures within a cutting edge structure, to catapult new ideas and artworks stemming from this process to future cultural contexts, and onto the avant-garde international art landscape. In order to prefigure a new collection of gold in the contemporary art scene, the artist recycles these practices to work with "virtual gold," or artificial gold (acrylics, oils, gold leaf, gold sprays, etc.) giving us the illusion of having easy access to this metal but in actuality mimics only its appearance, its light and its powerful reflections.
One can see and hear a new ritual with virtual gold in a special performance: the artist comes into animistic communication with ancestors and enters into a trance; her hands make circular movements in a virtual golden vase (acrylic in this case); her voice and expressions give life to a cosmic language without words - a kind of language from Babel -, a universal language, sung and spiritual in which the ancestors send us transcendental messages and ancient codes for a healthier future. Inspired by words like "divinity", "conscience", "reflection", "prevention", "purity" and "splendour", the artist creates sounds that highlight the wisdom of our ancestors and ancient cosmology, entering a representative field of gold light with the idea of purifying our conscience and our way of life for a better future. Marìa Verònica Leòn Veintemilla gives to her virtual masks the expressions of our times: desperation, extreme stress, sadness, madness and exhaustion, "global anxiety". In other masks are the expressions of suffering, harm and the exploitation of many miners. Some others could be seen as special extraterrestrial creatures that communicate in deep space. Thanks to this new project that includes innovative features and "virtual recycling", the image of gold lives an unusual transformation assuming new connotations and revealing new aesthetic applications for the art market and jewellery.
As said by David Rosenberg: ”The artist creates rudimentary and temporary architecture within the architecture of the museum, by installing an industrial container, a kind of uterus or athanor (alchemist's oven), opening and defining its territory. Visually, the various works on display at MACRO oscillate between
kaleidoscopic geometry and hypnotic and expressive oversized self-portraits. Raw materials, nature and the artist's body are transformed into artistic expression vectors: there is an integral process where concepts, thoughts and emotions come together and harmonise in various ways, reaching a point of incandescence where a new state of mind is created, regenerated and purified.”