Enduring Midnight
a performance by Francesca Grilli
4 June 2015
On Thursday, June 4, 2015 at midnight, Fondazione Memmo Arte Contemporanea presents Enduring Midnight (2007), a performance by Francesca Grilli, which will take place in the Stables of Palazzo Ruspoli on the occasion of the finissage of Conversation Piece | Part 1, an exhibition curated by Marcello Smarrelli.
Francesca Grilli’s artistic practice, mainly concerning performances, focuses on characters living on the margins of society, both physically and socially: deaf musicians, albino singers, aged dancers. In the video work shown in the exhibition, Faster than light, realized thanks to the research conducted in Rome during her residency at the American Academy and produced by the Fondazione del Monte di Bologna, the artist concentrates on the delimiting phases of existence, infancy and old age, discovering that magic creatures, which enable us to overturn society, certainly exist. The resistant body of elders becomes the truthful testimony of time.
For Enduring Midnight the artist will ask Lina Vasta, a Soprano who is now resides in The Giuseppe Verdi Retirement Home for Musicians in Milan, to sing again in front of an audience, but in the middle of the night.
Enduring Midnight does not want to be an experiment of a mise-en-scène, but the rebuilding of a vision of the artists’s sonorous, poetical and analytical memory about the passion and its durability. Always starting from an autobiographical analysis and from the need to narrate what is part of her history, the artist tries to create a space by filling it with various traces of her own experience and memories. Moreover, it affects the acting performance at multiple levels. Firstly, the most evident is that of the emotional, which is also determined by the chosen setting of the performance, in this case the end of the exhibition.
Finally, a more personal and intimate level, which comes from a time far from the performance, is a re-emergence of repressed personal memories, imaginings and readings, apparently unrelated to each other.
Francesca Grilli (Bologna, 1978)
Solo exhibitions (selected): Anger, Umberto Di Marino, Naples (2015); Variazioni per voce, Macro, Rome (2013); Contemporary Locus 3, Bergamo (2012); “The conversation”, Nuove Arti Award, Mambo, Bologna (2010).
Group exhibitions (selected): Percorsi nel contemporaneo, Macro, Rome (2013); Carte blanche à la Rijksakademie, Cinéma 2 – Centre Pompidou, Paris (2013); Viceversa. Padiglione Italia. 55. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte di Venezia, Venice (2013); Corpus, Madre, Naples (2012); Sleepover, Serpentine Gallery, London (2010). Francesca She has also participated in numerous performance festivals including: Drodesera Festival, Centrale Fies, Trento; Mantica, Teatro Comandini in Cesena; DNA, Romaeuropa Festival, UOVO Performing Art Festival, Milan and Santarcangelo dei Teatri in Rimini.
Credits
Enduring Midnight, performance by Francesca Grilli
Soprano Lina Vasta
Piano Accompaniment Marco Alibrando
Production Francesca Grilli / Fies Factory One/ Studio Grilli
Co-production Centrale Fies, Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam
Thanks to Galleria Umberto Di Marino, Naples
Press office: Margherita Cardelli