Bianco - Valente: Relational

“The most resistant element is not cement, wood, stone, steel, nor glass. The most resistant material in construction is art.”

For the 60 anniversary of the foundation of the building born from the genius of Gio Ponti and Carlo Maurilio Lerici, the Italian Cultural Institute of Stockholm opens to public Relational by Bianco-Valente, a public art projct curated by Adriana Rispoli.

Through an irregular network of electroluminescent cables that form dozens of weaves, the artists cover the facade of the Palace of the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm, creating from the visual point of view that which has been its mission since its foundation exactly 60 years ago: a place of meeting, exchange and sharing. “Relational is a network of light, a luminous, evident, irrefutable sign of trust in relationships, in the interaction between individuals who have at their disposal dialogue as one of the ways necessary to keep existing in the world.” (Maria Sica Director of IIC of Stockholm)

The dialogue with architecture and urban space is in the DNA of the artistic research of Bianco-Valente that not by chance have made this installation in different contexts, including the inner courtyard of the Madre Museum in Naples and the rationalist building which is the home of the Library of Potenza, two places which are par excellence points of relationship and the meeting of knowledge. On this occasion, however, the comparison with architecture encountered a very intense moment of challenge.

“With a ship-shaped hull characterized by broken and asymmetric lines, with sudden voids in the details of the roof and in the edges, the irregularity of this building finds a visual unity in its ‘skin’ made of glossy white mosaic. With the setting of the sun, the reflective shine of the ceramic gives way to the sidereal blue of Relation, which, like the underlying architecture, is perceived as a unitary organism that seems to rise from its support, becoming an element in itself. An element able to cancel the architectural dynamics of the façade and modifying the relations and perspectives of the spaces in which the building is inserted.” (Adriana Rispoli)

Bianco-Valente
Bianco-Valente (Giovanna Bianco and Pino Valente) began their artistic project in 1994, investigating the body-mind duality from a scientific and philosophical point of view.

The aesthetic representation of cognitive and emotional processes, both linguistic-verbal and perceptive-sensorial communication between people and the search for connectivity have always been the common thread of the research deployed by artists who use more expressive languages. The visible or invisible network has become in recent years the hallmark of the work of Bianco-Valente, whether it materializes with great visual impact on public monuments or creates an interweaving of sentences and dialogues in different idioms. In all the modalities, the goal basically remains the same: to attribute, to give back—even visually—a value to a fundamentally abstract concept such as the relationship.

Bianco-Valente took part in several exhibitions in Italy and abroad among which: Museo MAXXI (Rome), MACBA (Barcelona), Museo Madre (Naples), Fabbrica 798 (Beijing), Palazzo Strozzi (Florence), Triennale di Milano, Urban Planning Exhi­bition Center (Shanghai), Museo Reina Sofia (Madrid), Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Roma), Museo Pecci (Prato), Kunsthaus di Amburgo, NCCA – National Centre for Contemporary Arts (Mosca). They also made site-specific installations in Lebanon (Becharre), in Marocco (Marrakech), New York (ISP 2014 Whitney Museum at The Kitchen), Rio de Janeiro (Casa Italia - Rio 2016).

Relational has been realized thanks to the bequest of Birgit Christina Brorsdotter Persson, who with great generosity and love towards our country wanted to give us the possibility of adding a new element to the cultural dialogue between Sweden and Italy.