Careof takes part in this second vibrant edition of Studi festival, presenting the work of artists currently involved in the FDV Residency Program, the residency program for creatives at Fabbrica del Vapore.

Through FDV Residency Program, Careof promotes projects of international exchange and mobility, inviting artists from all over the world and offering them an important opportunity for professional development and connection with the local territory.

Riccardo Giacconi / ArteVisione 2016

Riccardo Giacconi is the winner of ArteVisione 2016, a project by Careof and Sky supporting young Italian artists. The third edition offered the ten selected finalists — Aves Project, The Cool Couple, Irene Dionisio, Elisabetta Falanga, Roberto Fassone, Gaia Formenti, Valentina Furian, Riccardo Giacconi, Martina Rosa, Caterina Erica Shanta — a professional growth opportunity through ArteVisione LAB, a workshop with experts from the audiovisual and cinematic sector. The final prize consists of producing a video work supported by collaboration with a renowned international mentor, the artist Adrian Paci, and 4 months of residency at Careof.

On display: Dinosauri, video, 25 min., 2016
The video, created during the residency at Bevilacqua La Masa in Venice, tells the story of the encounter with the Tuareg community of Pordenone, the only one in Italy. The Tuareg, or “blue men,” are a nomadic people whose original territory is the Sahara Desert, but they do not belong to any state. Near Pordenone are the areas of the grave and the magredi, arid landscapes formed by gravel deposits from the Tagliamento, Meduna, and Cellina rivers. It is there, as well as at the Natural History Museum of Venice, that the events narrated in the video unfold.

The Cool Couple / ArteVisione 2016

The Cool Couple, finalists of the ArteVisione 2016 award, received a scholarship consisting of a three-month residency at Careof. The duo, formed in late 2012, bases their research on the processes of production, distribution, and consumption of collective representations. The Cool Couple aims to trigger critical reflections on the consequences of our actions along the unstable margin that separates the visible from the invisible.

For Studi Festival, The Cool Couple decided to open the doors of their new studio, making themselves available to discuss their artistic practice and recent projects, such as Approximation to the West: a research on the West and its crisis. Through the analysis of a particular geographical area, Carnia in Friuli Venezia Giulia, and the period between spring 1944 and May 1945 — a time frame in which the region became the first republic in Italy and later the promised land for some tens of thousands of Cossacks — the duo created resonances not only with European history starting from the post-World War II era but above all with the present.

Serena Porrati / At the heArt of Forging

Serena Porrati is the winner of the Premio FOMAS Group - At the heArt of Forging, organized in collaboration with Careof, which aims to promote contemporary art and enhance the relationship between art and industry through the involvement of artists. In particular, the Prize aims to bring the artist closer to the practice of metal forging and its working techniques, providing the artist the opportunity to create a work with the technical and production support of skilled and equipped personnel.

The studio expresses an interest in material understood as a system of memory, accumulation, and amnesia. The elements are conceived as a flow that floods and overflows, redefining the concept of essence and coexistence. Periodic and computer systems converge, revealing the viscosity and porosity of everything. Time does not exist or exists only in the form of lazy temperature variations. The interior coincides with the exterior, the process unveils the object to reach its dissolution.

NASTYNASTY© / Turbo Vanish

NASTYNASTY© are Emiliano Biondelli & Valentina Venturi. Active since 2008, their research focuses on the impact of photography on our culture, on the dynamics of meaning generated by images, and on the power they have to influence our perception of the world and criteria of authenticity. Photography, video, and publishing are the fields where NASTYNASTY© operate and experiment.

On display: Turbo Vanish, video installation loop, 1 min, HD format, and two photographs printed on fabric, 2013/14

“You can have any color as long as it’s black,” wrote Henry Ford in his autobiography published in 1922, referring to the well-known Model T. Drastically standardizing manufacturing to allow everyone to purchase a car. On the other hand, we speak of a machine, that is, the automobile as the ultimate machine. Because machine, by dictionary definition, is “any device or apparatus constructed by properly connecting two or more elements so that their relative motion transmits or even amplifies human or animal force or natural forces, and capable of performing predetermined operations with a saving of effort or time.” Tuners seem stubbornly and successfully opposed to all of this. Customizing their car to the point of making it almost unusable for the purpose it was built for, working on it with an exhausting expenditure of effort and time. Heroic attempts of opposition to the established present of capitalist purchasing, consumption, and junkyards, transforming mass-produced products into unique objects. Singularities. Is it already art? Not quite, but it is obsession, which produces an aesthetic. The Turbo Vanish project focuses on this aesthetic, appropriates it, alters its codes with a shift in intentions, and puts into communication two worlds kilometers apart: that of Tuners and that of contemporary art. Turbo Vanish is a project on Tuning; tuners obsessively modify their cars, turning them into something unusable; the cars lose the purpose for which they were produced as they are transformed into sculptures with enormous expenditure of time and energy. This desperate attempt to create “post-apocalyptic spaceships” is actually in service of photography, driven by vanity.