Ludovica Carbotta: Very Well, on My Own

Very Well, on My Own curated by Lorenzo Balbi with the curatorial assistance of Sabrina Samorì.

Very Well, on My Own is the first anthological exhibition dedicated to the artist Ludovica Carbotta (Turin, 1982) in Italy. It grew out of reflections on individuality and its relationship with public space, both in the material sense of the city and in the abstract and infrastructural sense of the institution. The title refers to a specific idea of privacy and individual space, where each person seeks protection from outside interference and from their own psyche. In a society that typically overexposes our subjectivities and weighs them daily in terms of categories linked to “performance” and “visibility”, the exhibition proposes a different perspective that interprets individual space and its care as generative, at both subjective and collective levels.

Throughout her artistic career, Carbotta has observed the ways in which cities define the space where we operate, by performing actual physical exercises that seek to destabilise the standard proxemics of their inhabitants and to design new choreographies of the individual body in the urban environment.

Over the years, this investigation has been extended to an imaginary and narrative level, branching out into complex systems of works. The narrative element has thus allowed the artist to conceive dystopian and futuristic images of the urban fabric, and at the same time it has become an open field of experimentation in which to expand her reflections on individuality, showing both the potential and the risks of its radicalisation in society. 

Monowe (2016–ongoing), the largest cycle produced by the artist, tells of an imaginary city inhabited by a single person. Divided into episodes, each dedicated to a place-institution (the watchtower, the house, a workshop, the museum, the courthouse), it employs the inhabitant’s monadic status to question, analyse and rethink existing institutions. 
The epicentre of Monowe, the film previewed in the exhibition, is a narrative process that the inhabitant themself undertakes by staging a prosecution and trial to which each subject is fated, for even in isolation the institutions introduced by society continue to manifest.
This series shows, at the same time, the danger of the withdrawal and disappearance of the community by describing the inhabitant’s progressive loss of consciousness. 

The individual’s relationship with social institutions also characterises her most recent work, as seen in Die Telamonen (2020–24): a family of sculptures in which each is the reproduction of another. From the 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 origin, questioning the biological constraint that determines the nuclear family model. 

This is another reworking of what the artist terms “fictional site-specificity”, a form of site-specific practice that develops imaginary contexts or materialises real places through the language of fiction, in which the work, structurally and conceptually, depends less on real space than on the fictional-narrative space it generates.

In the artist’s research, narration manifests itself as a formal procedure that shows the generative capacity of the imagination, its ability to provide tangible alternatives to the social order and to the position that individuals occupy in the environment that surrounds them.

The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual Italian/English book, edited by Caterina Molteni, published by Edizioni MAMbo, which features a conversation between Lorenzo Balbi and Ludovica Carbotta and unpublished essays by Davide Daninos, Mark Lewis, Vittoria Martini and critical-narrative texts by Caterina Molteni. The book recounts the artist’s production from 2007 to the present day through a vast selection of images and is completed by an anthology with texts by Martina Angelotti, Irene Calderoni, Ilaria Gianni, Andrea Lissoni and Yara Sonseca Mas and in-depth bio-bibliographical apparatus.

The project is supported by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture under the Italian Council program (eleventh edition, 2022), which aims to promote Italian contemporary art worldwide.