Lorenza Lucchi Basili
Ottantadue movimenti/Eighty-two movements
a project by Dorothee Bienert, Dortje Drechsel, Marina Sorbello, Antje Weitzel
October 31 – December 13, 2008
Fri-Sat 2-6.30 and by appointment
Schwedenstrasse 16
13357 Berlin, Germany
projectspace [at] uqbar-ev.de
When the curatorial team of uqbar invited Lorenza Lucchi Basili for her first solo exhibition in Berlin, she was completing her residence at Baumwollspinnerei in Leipzig, working on the photographic series that would have subsequently become Space eight-two, Leipzig. Reasoning upon the small exhibition space at uqbar, Lucchi Basili decided to take advantage of the reduced size of the venue by presenting there, in a collapsed form, the whole body of photographic work she had realized so far from Space one, Paris, dating back to 1995, to the last series produced at the moment of the invitation, the Leipzig one. This is the extremely simple basic concept of Ottantadue movimenti/Eight-two movements: transforming the project room in an ‘impossible museum’ hosting the largest retrospective of her work to date, and at the same time opening a ‘window on the anywhere’ as in J.L. Borges’ El Aleph.
Selected images from each of the eight-two series were thus prepared in a small, uniform format (10,2×15,3 cm) under plexiglas, and mounted on a specifically designed steel support, produced by Fusina srl, an Italian firm specialized in innovative design concepts and in collaborations with artists.
The layout, as it is customary in Lucchi Basili’s practice, grew out of the characteristics of the exhibition space, and in this particular instance it focused on the space’s name: uqbar, again a clear reference to J.L. Borges, this time to Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, the opening entry of Ficciones, probably one of the most influential books of the past century. Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius is a philosophical divertissement: Borges speculates on the gradual infiltration of an imaginary world, endowed with its own history, geography, physics, and philosophy, into our ‘familiar’ phenomenological world, by means of an enciclopedia that, by describing the alternative world, creates the conditions for its existence and inexorably determines its eventual takeover. This narrative mirrors into one of the main aspects of Lucchi Basili’s research, namely her photographic approach to built artifacts that brings out unexpected/unsuspectable phenomenological layers subtly connected to the buildings’ deep symbolic nature. The whole body of her photographic work then represents a sort of visual enciclopedia of a concealed phenomenology that parallels the Borges one.
The installation in the gallery space starts from a quotation of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius and develops very much like a bifurcation diagram typical of the dynamics of non-linear systems: a thin line that gradually expands to cover the whole wall space. Like bifurcations, that describe the transition of a system between different dynamic regimes, the unfolding of the visual enciclopedia, starting from work belonging to Space seventy-four, Hong Kong where architectures emerge from a deep fog, narrates the passage to the other world that is mysteriously contained in the familiar urban environments we are accustomed to live in, and gradually takes over the wall space.
This order, however, was not fixed once for all as visitors were called to interact with it by purchasing single pieces at a symbolic price and by taking them away at once, thus disseminating the pieces across the outer world. The layout has thus been constantly changing as a consequence of its exposure, like Borges’ imaginary world whose contours are shaped by the perception of the observers/inhabitants.
The project of Lorenza Lucchi Basili is the last of a trilogy of exhibitions at uqbar exploring the relationships between art and architecture, after the ones by Aleksander Komarov and Romana Schmalisch.
Lucchi Basili’s exhibition has been supported by the Italian Cultural Institute in Berlin, by Regione del Veneto and by Oredaria Arti Contemporanee, Rome. The partial technical sponsoring of Fusina srl is also gratefully acknowledged.
uqbar
a project by Dorothee Bienert, Dortje Drechsel, Marina Sorbello, Antje Weitzel
Schwedenstrasse 16
13357 Berlin, Germany
T +49.30.46069107
projectspace@uqbar-ev.de