The first anthological exhibition dedicated to the artist Ludovica Carbotta (Turin, 1982) in Italy takes as its starting point her work on individuality and the relationship with public space in the tangible sense of a city and, in the abstract and infrastructural sense, as an institution. The title “Very Well, on My Own refers” to a specific idea of privacy and individuality in which everyone seeks shelter to cope with the interference of the outside world and their own psyche. In a society characterised by the overexposure of our subjectivities, weighed daily by categories tied to “performance” and “visibility”, the exhibition suggests a different attitude, in which individual space and one’s care of it become generative on both a subjective and collective level.
Throughout her artistic career, Carbotta has observed the way cities define our field of action, performing actual physical exercises in an attempt to destabilise the inhabitant’s common proxemics and design new choreographies for the individual body in the city environment. Over the years, she has broadened this investigation on an imaginary and narrative plane, structured in complex systems of works that prefigure dystopian and futuristic images of the urban fabric and reflect on the potential and risks of the individual’s radicalisation within society.
Exploring how individuals connect with their surroundings is the focus of the exhibition’s incipit. The artist experiences the city with her own body through empirical processes that venture beyond previous knowledge and conventional methods of measurement. “The thing that fascinates me about measurement,” she explains, “is to fix a small moment, or measure a fragment, an insignificant thing, or even find my own way—trying as far as possible not to rely on my previous knowledge—to measure something (a physical phenomenon, landscape, time).” Il viaggio è andato a meraviglia (esercizio uno) (The Trip Went Marvellously (exercise one), 2010) crystallises the artist’s attempt to become an integral part of an urban landscape, with the aim of being able to understand it from within. In her actions, the order of magnitude is the body, the space it occupies, the motionlessness it can exert, the shadow it may or may not cast on the road surface. In Non definire la superficie (Don’t Define the Surface, 2011) the artist seeks to cross the city without casting a shadow, thus accomplishing the unlikely disappearance of her physicality from the scene.
The comparison with the urban dimension, both real and imaginative, is explored on several occasions, both in Carbotta’s artistic work and throughout the entire exhibition, in which works such as Wrapped in Thought (Costruttore di mondi molto simili al nostro) (2009) and Invisibile Modulor (2009) translate urban dust and dirt into artistic material, and Cast Bloc (2012–24) is revived for the Sala delle Ciminiere space as a barrier between the exhibition area and its users, leading them to interact with the movement.
The body is transformed from a unit of measurement into a generative element in the site-specific installation Images of Others Have Become Parts of the Self (2024), a work the artist directly created in the exhibition space, echoing Scala Reale (Real Scale, 2011). It engages in a dialogue with the architectural surroundings. Just as she did 13 years ago, Carbotta crafted—without the aid of blueprints—a wooden structure capable of supporting her weight and raising it as high as possible.
She created her most recent series of sculptures, Paphos (2020–24), using a similar additive principle. In this project, the artist reflects on the idea of growth and transformation in relation to sculptural practice. The original nucleus of these bronze, ceramic and water-borne resin artefacts is manipulated over time by the artist, who connects it to a process of growth.
The other series on display is Die Telamonen (2020–24), a family of sculptures in which each is the reproduction of another. From different methods of sculptural production and the resulting formal results, each member of this family has generated their own history and psychological profile. Marked by the weight of the past, the Telamons seem to reject their origins; they question the biological constraint that determines the nuclear family model and generate concrete and symbolic possibilities to imagine other forms of community. The artist links the actual weight of the statues to that of the emotional charge animating every family member. The act of construction, recurrent in Carbotta, thus acquires additional meaning in her most recent productions: expanding beyond its more material, sculptural and performative dimension toward the fantastic creation of interpenetrating places and whole psychological horizons. The sculptural group thus represents a reworking of what the artist terms fictional site-specificity, a form of site-specific practice that develops imaginary contexts or materialises real environments through the language of fiction. In this formal procedure, which exalts the capacity of the imagination to provide tangible alternatives to the pre-established social order, the work, structurally and conceptually, relates less to the real space it has been inserted into than to the fictional-narrative space it has generated.
The use of fiction, memory and the reworking of experiential knowledge for the purposes of sculpture can be traced to the installation The Original Is Unfaithful to the Translation (2015), a work composed of architectural elements reproducing some of the rooms in which the artist has lived, just as her mind preserves them. The project analyses the domestic sphere in relation to transfiguration, memory, time and the theme of individuality and private space.
Ludovica Carbotta’s reflection on the human condition of isolation has crystallised in recent years in a research project entitled Monowe (2016–in progress), her largest cycle of works. It tells of a fictitious urban agglomeration inhabited by a single person. The 2016 installation of the imaginary city Monowe (Entrance to the City) at the Cavaticcio Park in Bologna (realised on the occasion of Dopo, Domani, ON, curated by Martina Angelotti) was an important part of the project that concluded, on view at the MAMbo, with a preview screening of the film of the same name. The medium-length film, winner of the 11th Italian Council (2022), was executively produced by BoFilm for the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea. It is set in a courthouse. The narrative epicentre is a judicial process against the sole inhabitant of the city, who shows themself at different ages: childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age (presented on screen by Lina Nilausen Carbotta, Willem Nilausen Trullas, Elionora Nilausen Trullas, Ondina Quadri, Michele Ragno and Benedetta Barzini). In Monowe, the elimination of the otherness that typically inhabits cities defines the only existing subject’s need to embody multiple points of view, such as the judge and defendant at the same time. Describing the citizen’s progressive loss of consciousness and the nonexistence of plurality in institutional places, the film highlights the danger inherent in the withdrawal and disappearance of the community.
The exhibition continues with works that reflect on the material and symbolic value of ruin, a privileged place of fictional site-specificity in which the artist adopts an archaeological look at both the past and an imaginary future. The work Plenum (2015) shows potential future archaeology; created based on reports of the archaeological excavations of the synagogue at Ostia Antica, it is accompanied by a voice recording and audio signal in Linear Timecode that reinforces the evocation of a future setting. Falsetto (2017–18) is composed of archetypal architectural models (the arch, the bridge, the wall, the tower, the tent) that prefigure a future in which we must re-imagine the structures with zero empirical knowledge. In other works, the artist hypothesises the impact of natural disasters on cities—as in Dodici e un minuto (Twelve and One Minute, 2008)—and imagines a near future in which infrastructure and other non–places are transformed into dwellings, as in Overcrowded Village (2008).
The exhibition concludes with a selection of works using the casting process, both from a formal and conceptual point of view. “Emptiness” becomes a metaphor for an invisible boundary to be investigated through empirical and intuitive methods. In Patologia da decompressione (Decompression Illness, 2008) the artist undertakes the personal measurement of Lake Como’s watery landscape to locate and calculate the deepest point of the basin. Experimenting with a new relationship between solids and voids, she produces Solid Void (2012), a video created with the stop-motion technique on a topographic map of the city of Turin. Starting from a subjectively assigned centre, the artist transforms the city through a game of collages in which she consolidates building cut-outs, eliminating areas of circulation. She represents the city as unique, with no routes and interstitial spaces. It thus appears as an unbroken solid, closed in on itself with no passable places.
at MAMbo, Bologna
until May 5, 2024