Sketching out situations that verge on the (extra)ordinary in the terrains vagues of the public space, Colomer creates a fiction that bursts into and disrupts reality.The parade will focus on the relationship between individual and public space, and its reappropriation, the subjective view of the city which can be picked up and carried when need be, like in Anarchitekton, or engaged in intimate dialogue, and finally urbanization as occupation of space and the search for a perennially unstable balance between order and entropy.
All of Colomer's works outline an implicitly political artistic art, because every unplanned and direction-less action in the public sphere is potentially the seed for a radical rethink of the social dimension. The retrospective is created in partnership with the MACBA museum of contemporary art in Barcelona and sponsored by the Spanish Embassy in Italy and Institut Ramon Llull, while the Modena Parade/CorteoModenese action, curated by Daniele De Luigi and Federica Rocchi, and co-promoted by the Amigdala collective, will feature the participation of:Cittadella primary school – IstitutoComprensivo 9, Modena; Adolfo Venturi secondary school, Modena; Vecchi Tonelli state music school, Modena; FMAV School of Advanced Studies; FMAV Education Department; Dugoni Facility Management; the new cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena; Quale Percussione? museum-workshop; and Le Chemin des Femmes choir. The exhibition also presents some projects produced especially for the occasion of the FMAV exhibition.
One of these is the project for Modena Parade/Corteo Modenese, a large wood-and-iron table that occupies the central room of the Palazzina dei Giardini, made in close conjunction with the public performance “Modena Parade/Corteo modenese”.The table collected the thoughts and actions of the workgroup over the 10 days of Cantiere organized at OvestLab (which will be followed by three more appointments open to the public on 16, 19 and 20 March, from 3 to 7 pm, at OvestLab) and now it becomes the platform to visually represent the participatory process involved in planning the parade.It is not a faithful reproduction, but an evocation of its different elements: buildings, streets, masks, costumes, images and words.At present, the pupils and teachers from the Adolfo Venturi secondary school have taken part in building the table, together with the students who took part in the workshop held by Jordi Colomer on 18-20 February at the FMAV School of Advanced Studies, and the public who took part in the open workshop at OvestLab.
The artist put the work together while actively collaborating with them all in a collective act of creation. It invites us to reflect on our relationship with death and the public space during the pandemic, offering us room to regain possession of it. The installation is an ongoing work in progress: still unfinished at the exhibition opening, the participants in the performance have to complete it with the materials that they made for the occasion and carried in the parade.A work about and for the city, it is the live photograph of a day of collective celebration.
The exhibition also includes the Crier sur les toits project, consisting of 24 posters. The nameis French for “shouting from the rooftops”, shouting something out loud to let everybody know.It is a participatory project that reconsiders the role of spectator and storytelling as an act of liberation, inviting people to openly shout out their thoughts.Put on for the first time in Rennes, France, in 2011, for the occasion the artist has added images made on the rooftop of the central registry in Modena, while involving staff from the council office.
Lastly, Jordi Colomer will direct filming during the Modena Parade / Corteo modenese with Milo Adami. The artist’s film will be produced by FMAV and the MACBA museum of contemporary art in Barcelona.It will become part of the collections managed by FMAV and will be put on in the retrospective on the artist in the Catalan museum’s programme for 2024.The photographs of the parade documenting the event will be part of the exhibition catalogue published by Franco Cosimo Panini which will come out during the exhibition at Palazzina dei Giardini.
