Darat Al Funun: VISITING

VISITING
Andrea Anastasio, Stefano Arienti and Alessandro Sciarroni in Darat Al Funun.

A project organized by the Italian Embassy in Amman
Curated by Davide Quadrio

Dates: 2019 October 15 – November 14
Location: Darat al Funun, Amman

VISITING is a project curated by Davide Quadrio organized by the Italian Embassy in Amman with the support of Darat al Funun and in collaboration with Arthub, Shanghai/Hong Kong.

The project is centred on the identification of objects belonging to the everyday life in Jordan and other places. The dialogue between the work by Andrea Anastasio and Stefano Arienti, together with the special performance by Alessandro Sciarroni, brings into Darat al Funun, a vernacular complex turned into a museum, new life through juxtaposed objects inside this architectonic complex, both outside in dialogue with the complex architecture and garden’s structure and in a white box space inside one of the main building.

Through aesthetic or functional sabotages, micro alterations obtained by subtraction of the parts or material/chromatic manipulation of the identified objects, the scope is to generate narrations centred on the routine of individuals, their social fabric, the relationship with the becoming of existence, with the forces behind it and the awareness of its duration.

The project is clearly based on an open-end process that will be bringing together all these elements and ideas into a site-specific installation that will insinuate into Darat al Funun its archeological site, its architecture and garden, bringing back some feelings and echoes of the once familiar, inhabited houses. The exhibition calls for specific interventions by Andrea Anastasio and Stefano Arienti, with an ideal closure with Alessandro Sciarroni performance in the archeological site, ideally spreading the energy of this project from the past to the present time.

Andrea Anastasio will display a series of artworks created transforming “ready-made” objects, found on site or “transferred” from Italy and other places where the artist worked and lived, with the aim to generate narrations directly linked or originated from the meeting with objects, spaces, domestic environment or public architecture from Jordan.

After extensively visiting Jordan, Stefano Arienti intends to elaborate the poetic of the mutant mutable, of memory and simple gesture reconnecting to locations and personal experiences of the past. His personal feeling will generate site specific objects and interventions, in an open dialogue with Andrea Anastasio artworks. By extension, voices of the same choir.

The spinning of Alessandro Sciarroni’s performance among the roman ruins ideally turns the wheel of time showing our humanity as a continuous struggle to be, to leave traces and inevitably coming back over and over to the same place between beginnings and ends.

The project Visiting is a gesture, a reaching out, a platform to encounter Amman and Jordan in a delicate, almost reserved way.

On the occasion of the opening the curator Simone Frangi is invited to take the topic of this project and bring it to a philosophical level focusing his intervention as an open dialogue on the theme of watery thinking, as an analogy of a not binary understanding of the world in its human and not human subjects. His introduction will open the fragility of artistic interventions by the invited artists to a transversal need of openness, mutual understanding and tolerance.

The talk will take place before the opening at 18:00 at Darat al Funun, followed by the Alessandro Sciarroni’s performance at 19:30.