Con Audace Resa: Cantieri Montelupo at

Flashback Habitat

curated by Christian Caliandro

22/02/2025 - 18/05/2025

Pav. B/C - Ponte Peter

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Cantieri Montelupo is the artist residency programme curated by Christian Caliandro and realised by Fondazione Museo Montelupo from Montelupo Fiorentino (FI) with the support of the “Toscanaincontemporanea” call for artists. Launched in 2021, the project resulted in a series of works created by the artists with the active participation of local ceramists and the entire community of Montelupo Fiorentino. Since its beginnings, the project has been based on a few simple rules: the artists invited to work with local ceramists must have no previous experience in ceramics, and they do not start with a pre-defined project; in fact, the aim has always been to initiate truly spontaneous and unpredictable processes, through equal dialogue, creative collaboration and exchange between visual artists and craftsmen, and the involvement of the community of residents and participants in the workshops that have taken place month after month, year after year. The exhibition at Flashback Habitat in Turin is therefore an expression of the growth of this project, which has seen the artists immerse themselves in the environment and reality of the workshops assigned to them, and the significant development of the relationship with the ceramists who have accompanied them in their research, through an anthology of the works created over time.

 

- Marco Ulivieri showcases the objects that resulted from the fragmentation and progressive recomposition of the fragments: the participants in the 2021 construction site, the first in the series, composed their works using Ulivieri's works as 'building materials' and exchanged them in turn.

 

- Emanuela Barilozzi Caruso, also in this edition, together with Ceramiche Giglio, Ivana Antonini, Veronica Fabozzo and Angela Corsani Sartoria, among others, created ceramic and fabric lingerie suits, halfway between fashion, design and craftsmanship, that perfectly fit the participants' bodies (they were actually made from clay casts).

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- In the summer of 2022, Elena Bellantoni, together with Patrizio, Stefano Bartoloni, Sergio Pilastri and the participants of the workshop, created "Mi sono seccata", a work of performative, relational and sculptural nature, in which the slabs of clay became a sign and a memory of the dried-up torrent: “a work of full contact between me and the river that is not there, almost evoking its presence through a movement, a gesture".

 

- In the same edition, Serena Fineschi, together with Ivana Antonini and the other participants in her "Primavera dell'impazienza" (Spring of Impatience), (re)created hundreds and thousands of popcorns with slip, which can be found in the bowls on display.

 

- In 2023, photographer Maria Palmieri, together with Patrizio Bartoloni, created a surprising innovation in photoceramics, traditionally bound to a very rigid and decidedly 'funereal' layout. Instead, through a radically experimental work on surfaces and the interaction of photographic image, glaze and firing, she came up with the series of objects entitled “Rudralith” which includes plates, bowls, jugs, refractory bricks - that seem both new and ancient.

 

- With Stefano Bartoloni, Alessandro Scarabello has transferred the creative phase he was in at the time of his residency (November 2023) to the field of ceramics: thus, starting from the experience of the "Heretic Exercises", the original series of paintings to which he has devoted himself in recent years, he has begun to test his style on tiles, pieces, fragments of refractory material, exploring with the help and advice of Stefano (an excellent ceramic decorator), the opportunities and resistances offered by deviations, errors, slips.

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- During the the fourth edition, Veronica Montanino, together with Ivana Antonini, has created three soup tureens of different sizes, with a classic terracotta exterior that recalls the centuries-old tradition of Montelupo and Tuscan ceramics: by lifting the lids, however, one discovers a whole world of living, breathing, pulsating and glazed forms. It is almost as if we are witnessing the discovery of a parallel dimension, one of those alternative worlds, found in cracks and crevices, with fully developed civilisations, discovered by accident which we occasionally find in Philip K. Dick’s novels.

 

- Giovanni Ceruti, the youngest of the artists involved, began with a simple yet brilliant idea: he asked Stefano Bartoloni what was the most common and famous motif of ceramic painting in Montelupo. The little bird is undoubtedly one of the most characteristic figures: a relatively recent motif, introduced in yellow, blue and green in the 17th century, the subject of a thousand variations throughout the 20th century (including the famous one by Aldo Londi for Ceramiche Bitossi); a fascinating motif, moreover, in its ambiguity, precisely because its great success coincides with the beginning of the historical decline of the tradition. Ceruti's residency therefore focused on learning and apprenticeship: a process based on learning to paint the figure in every detail, every passage, every curve and every surface - just like an apprentice craftsman working in a studio, an atelier - resulting in two hundred saucers decorated with the figure of the bird, always the same, always different.