Francesca Banchelli: Afternoon

Curated by Angel Moya Garcia.

Francesca Banchelli’s work focuses mainly on the languages of painting and performance and is often articulated in multifaceted installations. In these complex devices the artist’s interest in the theme of time often emerges as a way of examining the possibilities of narration as a sort of story, a rhythm or a situation that generates movement and which could potentially contain a whole constellation of moments, encounters or events.

Her images include dreamlike visions of coexistence between different living beings and between these and natural objects that hold time within themselves, or inanimate objects through which we understand ourselves.  A perception of reality that becomes an awareness of these relationships on a physical, emotional and psychological level in order to research the complexity of the event. Banchelli uses time like a keystone to find balance in the encounter between the self and the world, a reconciliation between the individual, the collective, nature and occurrences on earth.  For her it is essential that art is not a value in itself, but that it can activate certain situations, maintaining a strong tension, a relationship and a direct involvement with the observer.

An event, observed from a philosophical point of view, occurs in certain circumstances or in certain places that cannot be concretely defined.  It is a revolutionary instant in which the possibility of being surprised, often generated by an encounter to some degree unusual, comes in a vacuum where the balance is lost, followed by a return to normality but with something more, a knowledge, a response, a learning.  It is precisely in the destabilising aspect of this encounter that all the performative research that Banchelli presents in a cadenced way within the exhibition is based.

The environmental installation Afternoon, presented at the Tenuta Dello Scompiglio in Lucca, draws inspiration from the theory of The Event elaborated by the French philosopher Alain Badiou, attempting to emancipate itself from theoretical thought through a vision full of imagery that observes and reflects on the rarefaction of the place in which the event can happen.  Afternoon is an unreal landscape, an alienating, abstract territory, where a thought, a moment, an epoch ends and begins again.  It is the garden that germinates the event, a fundamental and sometimes invisible world, a space of the imagination without a name as yet.

In the space, a series of silent corridors, ephemeral and extremely fragile architectures, fragmented and interrupted environments or actions that activate the installation, reveal a situation in which the complexity and lightness of the evolution of the human presence on Earth coexist simultaneously and without paradox.  A work in which the visitor is called to walk, to stroll, to observe, to confront the noise of their own steps to enter a suspended world in which anything can happen, in which they too are called to provoke, to live or to cause the event.

Performance programme
Opens: April 22, 5–8pm
May 6, May 20, June 17, July 1, July 15, 3–7pm

Thanks in particular for the collaboration in the creation of the exhibition to Gori Tessuti of Prato. 

Original music
Emiliano Zelada

Performers
Sara Capanna, Barbara Carulli, Chiara Casiraghi, Giulia Gilera, Ana Luisa Novais, Emanuel Santos, Michele Scappa, Luca Zanni

Biography
Francesca Banchelli graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in 2007, and obtained a Masters in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in London in 2010. In 2012 she won the residency for the “Deutsche Börse Residency Program” at the Frankfurter Kunstverein and first prize in “Portali Dello Scompiglio”, for the Associazione Culturale Dello Scompiglio; in 2013 she obtained the “Step Beyond Grant Project, ECF - European Cultural Foundation” and the “Exhibit Program” award, MIBACT Creatività Contemporanea (2020). Her works have been exhibited in national and international museums, galleries and art institutions