Careof presents “Do the words” by Irina Novarese, a research on infrastructures and on the urban movements through words. 

Which words and concepts can define a city and its identity? How can we observe the changes of an urban reality by using words? Which influences do the new cultural realities have on the preexisting one? Does the presence of new inhabitants add shades to the language?

The artist Irina Novarese starts from these questions, but she is also guided by them. She decided to focus on the city of Milan and to explore it, looking for words and sentences that could tell its identity. In this way, she collected a catalog of many words: “found words”, thanks to her research in the archives of the city; “words in the space”, with a research in the urban context of Milan; and “words of history”, collected thanks to her cooperation with the experts from different sectors. 

All this material has found its expression in a big installation made of LED stips, adhesive sentences and sounds. In the space of Careof, it shows an extremely personal version of the history and the context of Milan, with a free and open interpretation. 

Irina Novarese explains: “It is an investigation of the city of Milan. It’s like discovering the city for the first time and finding new doors to open, places that I see and from which I collect information. These are contexts that offer a gaze on the urban and cultural space of the city”.

IRINA NOVARESE - BIOGRAPHY

The work of Irina Novarese (Turin, 1972) includes installations, drawings, videos, art books and projects of interdisciplinary collaboration in which she works as organizer and artist. She graduated at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Turin and she got a Master in Art in Context at UdK of Berlin, where she has been living since 2000.
She presented her works in personal exhibitions in Italy, Germany, Spain, Venezuela and the USA. She took part in some collective exhibitions, such as the 10th Biennale di Architettura of Venice (2006), the 2nd Ghetto Biennale of (Haiti 2012) and the 12th Biennale of the Havana (2015) at the MOR Museo orgánico Romerillo.
Besides many collective projects, she is working as co-founder and art director of “HIER&JETZT: Connections” since 2017, a project that offers a program of residence and exchange for artists in exile in Berlin. She has been a member of the residence project The Watch, in a former DDR watch-tower, since 2021. The main focuses of her research are urban realities, the metropolitan space and our right to the city, as well as the ongoing research of creating active cultural communities based on the idea of resemblance and on a shared vision of an open society.