Good morning, and welcome to Artissima 2024. This is the AudioGuide project and you are listening to tour number 01 entitled Daydreaming, which, inspired by this year's theme, will allow you to discover works by artists of different generations, spanning a wide variety of techniques and languages. Artissima is now in its 31st year, and is as rich as ever, with 189 galleries from 34 countries. As in previous years, there are three curated sections: Back to the Future is dedicated to historical research, Present Future to more current research, and Drawings is dedicated to works on paper, which are collected in the centre of the Oval. Daydreaming, unlike dream activity, has yet to be studied extensively. It is a condition with hardly definable contours, in which, although conscious, we tend to separate ourselves from direct perceptions and live a parallel time in which we pursue expectations, desires and fears. In these moments reality and fantasy rule our minds as equals, as consoles of an ephemeral world. Today we will move among doubts, expectations, visions and reflections, in search of the ambiguities that challenge our knowledge of what surrounds us. The audioguides were developed for Artissima by the mediators of Arteco. This tour was curated by Sergio Manca. We are ready to go. The first stage will be the MATTA gallery, in the New Entries section, at stand number 4 on the fuchsia corridor. Now pause your player and press play once you are there.

Imagine for a moment walking into a pet shop and finding yourself surrounded by aquariums full of fish. As you lose yourself observing the movements of this colourful mass, which seems to be conducting a dance subject to its own codes, accompanying notes begin to surface in your mind. What if the fish themselves were the composers, or rather the authors, of this unusual score? We are in the space of Matta, a gallery located in the historic INA building on Corso Sempione in Milan, designed in the 1950s by Piero Bottoni. The young gallery, opened in 2022, exhibits innovative art projects with a site-specific focus. For its first participation at Artissima, MATTA is exhibiting the work of Danish artist Clara Hastrup, who was born in 1990 and trained at the Glasgow School of Art and the Royal Academy in London. Her work often emphasises the humorous paradox that arises from the combination of unpredictability, often linked to living organic elements, and artificial, cold, logical and crudely highlighted technical structures. This meeting invites us to reflect on the dynamics of technology, on the relationship between humans in the consumer society and other species, but can also unexpectedly trigger spontaneous emotional responses and imagination games in us. Behind a curtain we find the installation entitled Fishphonics: Accelerando, built through a system of aquariums connected to percussion musical instruments such as xylophones and metallophones. Projected from above, beams of light shatter in the water and reach the sensors at the bottom of the two tanks. Passing through them, the fish cast a shadow on a photoreceptor which, by means of a microcontroller, activates the instruments, causing them to play. The title refers to the possibility that the pace will increase, if the fish will grow or multiply. The effect is both familiar and disorienting: music-making is delegated to unconscious nature, the work is never the same and the sounds that emerge from it follow one another in unexpected, sometimes pleasant, sometimes alienating ways, with an inevitably hypnotic effect. All the elements that make up the installation are recontextualised in an ironic and at times playful system, which is not intended to be a means of proving theses or achieving goals. Indirectly, however, the relationships between opposites, between dimensions that we habitually perceive as incommunicative, emerge. The seemingly complex technological component turns out to be trivial in its strict functionality, when confronted with the fascination of nature, which remains seductive and incomprehensible to our eyes: what needs and environmental stimuli direct the movement of fish? At the heart of it all remains the fascination of the spectator experience, of letting oneself be accompanied by the relationship between sounds and movements, in which our mind will occasionally try to find an order to make sense of, but in vain. Our next stage will be the Ermes Ermes Gallery, which overlooks the blue corridor. The stand is marked with the number 8. Pause your player and press play when you are there.

How much can our daydreams be influenced, directed or even constructed by mass communication? As our mind moves away from the perception of reality and towards possibilities, expectations and desires, it is probably conditioned by the linguistic patterns and structures of our culture and by suggestions to which we are continuously exposed. Let us travel back in time to the 1970s and think about what factors contribute to the architecture of popular culture. Immediately we think of advertisements, TV series and photostories. All based on recurring and recognisable formulas, prepared for superficial enjoyment and laden with stereotypes. This universe so distant from the intellectual world, yet omnipresent in everyone's life, attracted the interest of a young French artist in 1974, who came to Italy in search of new ways of understanding art. The artist's name is Nicole Gravier and she is presented here by Ermes Ermes: a gallery founded in Vienna in 2017, which since 2021 has been based in Rome in a 15th century palace. Gravier's work is mainly photographic and revolves around what she calls "fundamental problems", namely the linguistic codes underlying the production of images and the dissemination of stereotypes. The first series she works on concerns American detective dramas, which are also very popular in Europe, in which she identifies certain elements that are constantly repeated, such as narrative structures or certain shots. The artist directly photographs television in the moments she considers significant, showing similarities between different episodes and revealing how certain images are recurrent to the extent that our mind immediately associates a reaction with them and even manages to predict them. She is especially interested in secondary, connecting images, in which objects are charged with emotional values. From 1976 to 1980, she produced her most famous series, entitled Myths et Clichés: starting from the observation of photostories in vogue at the time, the artist extracts recurring images of situations in which the female protagonist is shown as weak and a victim of events, highlighting patriarchal stereotypes and denouncing the power of conditioning the dreams and behaviour of young girls. After selecting the images, she replicates them with constructed photographs in which she herself appears in the guise of several female characters, elaborating a discontinuous narrative in which the artist replaces the hapless heroines of the original stories. However, her photographs are often contaminated by contradictory and disturbing elements: next to typical objects such as telephones, letters and alarm clocks, glossy advertisements or essays on revolution appear, making the images ambiguous. Through selection, identification, and the play on language, Gravier addresses popular materials with biting acumen, confronting us with the problematic nature of the stimuli to which we are exposed daily without being fully aware of them. Our next stage is the Petrine Gallery, which overlooks the corridor in front of the entrance. It is located in the Present Future section and its stand is marked with the number 4. Pause your player and press play when you are there.

The young Parisian gallery Petrine opened in September 2022 in an old photographic studio in the 10th arrondissement, just a few steps away from the famous Folies Bergère, celebrated by Toulouse-Lautrec and Manet. For Present Future, the gallery exhibits some works by German artist Lenard Giller, created this year. Giller, who was born in Munich in 1997 and specialised at the UCA in Canterbury, has already presented his works to the international public since 2020, exhibiting at major institutions such as Art Basel and MACRO. His practice spans different media, from photography to video to sound. Often these techniques interact in composing the final project. Giller's interest is primarily in time-based technologies and their mechanisms of representation and perception. He analyses, deconstructs, reinterprets and compares them. The artist states that he does not like what he calls consumable time, but is more interested in reflective time. The first is pre-established and imposed, has a pre-established duration and is intended for complete consumption: it is packaged to be sold and used until it is exhausted. The second is fluid and arbitrary, constructed in fieri by the person experiencing it, who moves within it in absolute freedom. His works seek to give the viewer the possibility of a reflective time: he often creates looped video works with a fixed camera or composed of empty spaces and static images, such as the Productions project in which he declares the reduction of content in the transitions from one medium to another, starting from the relationship between the Disney animated film Cinderella and the related sticker album. In his works, sound accompanies us in the passage of time, but does not mark it: sometimes it is white noise, which becomes imperceptible very quickly. Contrary to films or songs as we usually understand them, his works are created to be enjoyed in a context of free visitation, without time grids: they are able to insert themselves into our perception acting with the same effectiveness, whatever the amount of time we decide to dedicate to them. At Artissima, he brings two new independent works based on the concepts of interaction and superimposition: a sound track in which city noises and studio-produced melodies blend on the same frequencies, and a video in which a piano, in its sinuous and reflective form, is framed from different distances. The length of each shot corresponds to the length of 16mm film needed to cover the distance between the camera and the object. Once again, systems from different worlds, as well as time and space, end up losing their boundaries, acting enigmatically on our perceptions. Our next tour is the See you next Tuesday gallery. We find it at number 8 in the Back to the future section, facing the white corridor. Pause your player and press play when you are there.

At what times can images surface in our minds that surprise us or end up disturbing us? We enter the space of See You Next Tuesday, a Basel gallery that presents itself as a platform for questioning pre-established hierarchies and narratives, with a focus on introspective dynamics and the feminist dimension of artistic work. In front of us, on a large canvas, a female figure reclining in an armchair seems absorbed as she watches a black bird in a cage. The title of the work can be translated as "The Spectator", which suggests that the movements of the captive bird are presented to her as a kind of macabre spectacle. The side walls almost seem to manifest the series of visions that might crowd her mind as she witnesses them. The artist who painted them in the 1980s is Annette Barcelo, a Swiss painter born in 1943, who for a long time remained almost unknown outside Switzerland and has been experiencing a phase of rediscovery in recent years, which has also led to important monographic exhibitions. Her paintings are inhabited by a myriad of animal and hybrid figures, as in a kind of private fantasy bestiary that emerged from her imagination. If we look carefully, however, we notice that totally depersonalised female figures often appear among them. These female archetypes are like the masks for a grand theatrical representation of women's lives, in which we find scenes of birth, death, rituals and sexual relations. In a series created between 1987 and 1989, the protagonists of the paintings are placed in contact with water, a generating, protective and purifying element. They are often depicted naked, inside boats or in the act of bathing in a tub. These containers seem to recall pods, shells or wombs. Working on an ancient iconography, associated for centuries with voyeurism or the idealisation of female hygiene, Barcelo seems to reflect on the ambiguous condition of this imagery. Despite being in seemingly intimate and reassuring spaces, surrounded by water that is a source of purity and protection, like a kind of amniotic fluid, these women experience a dimension of anxiety. Their fears, in the moment of loneliness and nakedness, seem to emerge in the form of monstrous, predatory animals, watching them ravenously as if they were waiting. Barcelo's work is simultaneously psychoanalytic and political, in which myth, man and monster intersect, repeatedly exchanging roles. The painterly gesture and colour palette hark back to expressionist painting and art brut, producing images that engulf us in a condition of danger and precariousness, instilling in us the feeling of being the authors of a daydream that all too often takes on the contours of a nightmare. Imagination, however, merely weaves the threads of a real existential condition, as private as it is shared. We are almost at the end of the tour. Our last stage will be the Clima Gallery. We find it on the pink corridor A at number 15. Pause your player and press play when you are there.

The fertile, sometimes ambiguous relationship between reality and imagination lies at the heart of the pictorial research of two artists presented at the fair by the Clima gallery, opened in 2016, which has been housed in the courtyard of a historic building in Porta Venezia, Milan, for about a year now. Here we encounter the works of Valerio Nicolai, born in Gorizia in 1988, but resident in Milan, and the New Yorker Justine Neuberger, born in 1993. Nicolai works with different techniques, including sculpture and installation, as shown by the unrecognisable matryoshkas created during his Roman residency at Smart or the gigantic strawberry inhabited by a pirate exhibited at the Quadriennale in 2020. The artist's medium of choice, however, is and remains painting. Different elements coexist in his paintings, often presenting themselves to us with paradoxical features. The artist often starts with objects and situations that are extremely familiar to us, such as furniture and household appliances, but also advertisements and colloquial expressions. These everyday elements, often considered banal and recurring, become in the artist's mind cues for imagining transfigurations and new possibilities. In an ironic, yet always cultured way, the artist gives new attention to the ordinary by using a different gaze, which from a lateral point of view, through the use of associations and references, succeeds in merging formal appearance with a disorienting re-functionalisation. Dimensions alter and the unexpected lurks everywhere. Through his eyes we discover that even a minor, insignificant element can conceal the sublime within itself: the veins of ham become lightning bolts of a romantic storm, furniture rises like architecture and small piles of cotton on the floor evoke large clouds. His works bring to mind, albeit without direct quotation, those masters of a century ago who were the first to look at nature and objects, seeing in them the possibility of a secret life, such as De Chirico and Savinio. And it is no coincidence that the artist himself is fond of the great Max Ernst. However, his repertoire shows us at the same time broader and subtler, freer thanks to the fickleness of inspiration: he likes - as he himself admits - to look at random things and work with what he has at hand. The relationship he establishes with everyday reality is the same as with reading the classics: we approach them as something universal and crystallised, but the moment we appropriate them, it is our emotional state and our imagination that give them new light and new life. The encounter between the personal, imaginative dimension and contemporary experience is also the starting point of Neuberger's pictorial research. In this case, however, reality is unhinged and demolished by the constant irruptions of figures that seem to emerge from our inner dimension. Children, acrobats, jesters and skeletons inhabit the canvases, coexisting with cars, pots and modern buildings. The space of figuration becomes indistinct, objects and characters no longer respond to the laws of perspective and proportion. It almost seems as if an apparently normal situation has evoked nostalgia, hopes and fears and that these have materialised before us, disrupting our points of reference and suspending the timeline. A spark seems to awaken folklore figures linked to the traditional Jewish upbringing received by the artist, leading us to recall the works of Chagall. However, the erudite mysticism and soft, almost smoky use of colours seems to project us into the visions of an Odilon Redon grappling with the 20th century. Our tour is over. We hope that it has stimulated and intrigued you. If you want another perspective on the fair, go back to the info point or the AudioGuides landing page and select another podcast! See you soon and enjoy Artissima!