Hello, and welcome to Artissima 2024. This is the AudioGuide project and you are listening to tour number 3, entitled Formulas and reiterations. Through five different artistic practices, we explore the dimension of rituality, between the intimate and the collective, presenting artists ranging from the best known names to emerging artists. Their works guide us through the perspectives of various generations and nationalities, revealing how ritual, as an individual and social practice, crosses cultures and times, linking the ancient and the modern, from everyday gestures to consumer rituals. This tour highlights the reiteration and transmission of shared meanings, deepening reflection on contemporaneity, the body and time. Dealing with rituality, contemporary art explores the invisible bonds that unite us, redefining traditions and practices that give meaning to our collective and personal experience. The five artistic practices reinterpret existing rituals and create new ones, offering insights into the cycles of everyday life and societal expectations. Each section of the fair offers the opportunity to meet artists who, with their works, stimulate reflection on practices of their era. In times of change, art remains a space to explore new ways of making sense of existence. The audioguides were developed for Artissima by the mediators of Arteco. This tour was curated by Valentina Roselli. We are ready to go. Pause your player and head for the Michela Rizzo Gallery in the Main Section along the Brown corridor at number 11, where we will begin our tour. Press play once you are there.

Our first stage in the Main Section starts at the Michela Rizzo Gallery, where we encounter the work of Hamish Fulton, born in London in 1946. In the summer of that year, George Orwell stated: “The view that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude”. From here we can approach Hamish Fulton’s thinking and decipher his wall painting. Fulton considers walking a gesture that can unite people and connect them to the world. A pioneer of Walking Art, he led the first “artwalk” student group in 1967. His statements such as “An object cannot compete with an experience” and '”f I do not walk, I cannot create a work of art” invite us to reflect on the fact that art should be about life before focusing on production. During his walks, he does not collect fetishes, but at a later stage, creates works that rework and translate his lived experiences. One of his most iconic performances, “Slowalk'” took place at the Tate Modern in London in support of Ai Wei Wei. During Artissima 2018, he carried out a Public Walk involving two hundred people walking for about an hour, arranged in regular lines on the Lingotto racetrack. True to his approach, a few years ago Fulton stated that, although the GPS on the smartphone may be useful for walkers, it makes us “lost” to convenience and to the imposition of technology corporations, creating dependency and distancing us from “wild” nature. The wall painting we see today, with the red inscription “Google George Orwell” invites us to explore the unpredictability of freedom, in contrast to the subjugation and control we experience in contemporary society. These are key themes of Orwell’s novel, which 75 years ago anticipated the dystopian world of “1984”. As the black text on the wall painting suggests, that very year Fulton walked for 18 days in the south of England, a country once famous for its love of hiking. Today, exactly 40 years after that experience, Fulton questions what remains of that territory in the light of the socio-political events that have changed our vision. This year, a public performance by Hamish Fulton, “Walking Every Direction”, will be held in Turin on November 1st at 3 p.m. in the Piazzale del Museo della Montagna. You can book to participate in it! We have finished our first stage. Pause your player and head for the Secci Gallery in the Drawings section at number D3. Press play once you are there.

The second stage of our journey takes us to the Drawings section, dedicated to the paper medium and its immediate usability. We are at the Milanese Secci Gallery. Here we encounter the work of Concetto Pozzati, who was born in 1935 in Vò, in the province of Padua, and died in Bologna in 2017. A few days before his death, Pozzati continued to plan exhibitions and a new publication of artists’ writings, keeping the contact with friends and intellectuals alive. From a young age, thanks to the influence of his uncle and father, Pozzati recognised the importance of dealing with the new world of communication, recalling the past and maintaining a strong link with the sign. His ability to mix different cultural currents - from Surrealism to Informalism and Pop Art - earned him the nickname “the pirate of painting”. Known for the reiteration of narrative cycles, Pozzati expresses himself through sequences of works culminating in a work representative of the entire cycle. A series of works on paper created between 1975 and 1976 is presented here, with works from 1977 on either side. It invites reflection on the time of relationships, emphasising the value of the letter, both in time used to write it and time used when it is received. It is an almost unprecedented cycle for the public, who are more accustomed to his pictorial work. The delicate nuances of the envelopes reveal personal elements and images such as the flower and the watch, embodying Pozzati’s typical duality: between personal and historical memory, between private and public narrative. His importance in the Italian art scene lies in his continuous investigation of visual language and image criticism. Besides being a prolific artist, Pozzati dedicated part of his life to teaching, influencing generations and stimulating reflection on the dynamics between art and society. He considered himself more of a teacher than a professor. Concetto Pozzati urges us to consider the relationship with history, image and time, offering a continuous and poetic provocation. This is where our second stage ends. Pause your player and head for the Giampaolo Abbondio Gallery in the Present Future section, on the Black corridor, at number 7. Press play once you are there.

The third stage of the tour takes us to the Present Future section, dedicated to works that explore transition and transformation. At the Giampaolo Abbondio Gallery we meet Elyla, an activist artist from Chontales, Nicaragua. The artist’s name combines the Spanish pronouns “él” and “ella”, he and she, so we address Elyla using Loro, they. Elyla’s practices address issues of gender, belonging and origin, restoring ritual to a role of resistance. Traditions are subverted along with the power structures that support them. An example is the 2014 video “Solo Fantasia”, in which the plumage of the dress recalls a Nicaraguan national festival. During the performance, a shoe heel breaks, but the parade continues under the surprised gaze of the audience and the dissent of the local authorities. This year, Elyla’s work was present at the Venice Biennale 2024, in keeping with the title of the exhibition “Strangers Everywhere”. The concept of the foreigner is repeatedly engraved on the animal hide, part of the performance “Yugo Chontal” held in Panama in 2024, along with shoes and other elements such as the packsaddle, which evoke a crude condition of domination and subordinate roles, denying dignity and voice. Elyla explores and challenges the meaning of mestizaje, a concept indicating the process of cultural and racial mixing, emblematic of many Latin American societies with a colonial history. Originally referring to the intermingling of indigenous peoples and European colonisers, today the term includes interactions between traditions, languages, religions and social practices, forming unique and complex cultural identities. For Elyla, cochoneidad (or queerness) is the main anti-colonial weapon for disrupting hegemonic cultural narratives and re-appropriating sexual dissidence as ancestral memory. It is a path of deconstruction of imposed rituals, through the re-appropriation of symbols linked to the body and the territory. This is where our third stage ends. Pause your player and head for the Francesco Pantaleone Gallery, on the Pink A corridor at number 3. Press play once you are there.

The fourth stage on our journey takes us to the “Monologue/Dialogue” section, at the Francesco Pantaleone Gallery. Here we encounter the works of Alina Kopystia, a Ukrainian artist based in Zurich, born in 1983. Central to Alina’s research are the complexities of the body and freedom, addressing issues of gender and identity through textiles, embroidery, performance and video. Having grown up in a family working in the textile industry, she has chosen not to follow the same path, but uses fabric as an expressive and narrative medium. At first glance, the colours of these materials take us into a dimension of pale tones and retro patterns. However, by getting closer and reading, one can grasp the contrasts and complexities of her message. The works are in fact made from bed sheets belonging to sex workers, whose testimonies Alina has collected in various countries. The stories turn into embroideries, enriching her work with insights that invite reflection on gender issues, the body as an instrument of pleasure and work, and on the power dynamics between those who offer and those who receive a service. Often the threads with which she embroiders come from the tights or garments of the subjects she encounters, allowing the physical object to also become a narrative device, imbued with gestures and stories, creating a complex short circuit between intimacy and privacy. Alina carries out this narrative process with irony, without the ambition of presenting a sociological investigation. She tells individual stories, adopting a perspective of discovery and self-analysis, like what took place during the residency that allowed her to meet and interview Palermo-based sex workers and leading figures of the local queer community. The slow gesture of embroidery, transformed by feminist voices in the 1970s into an instrument of denunciation and protest, is here used by Alina to challenge the rigidities of gender binarism, questioning what is allowed and what is forbidden based on the body we are born into. We have finished our fourth stage. Pause your player and head for the Remota Gallery, in the New Entries section, Fuchsia corridor at number 5. Press play once you are there.

The last leg of our journey takes us to the New Entries section, from Remota, a gallery in the city of Salta, Argentina, which seeks to promote local art, in its wide range of aesthetics. Presented here is the work of Mar Pérez, who started painting at the age of four and discovered oil painting at the age of eleven. At the age of thirty, he had to stop because of a rash on his hands, an interruption that lasted until his forties. This condition becomes an opportunity to explore multidisciplinary approaches, interweaving individual and collective practices also in theatre and film production. The Marseille Tarot cards came into the artist’s practice more than ten years ago as a form of self-knowledge through images, colours, numerology and magnetism. This encounter between the artist’s painting practice and Tarot shows us a profound connection: both reveal themselves in layers and there is no single way to read them. The Tarot cards connect to the role of transformation, evoking the gender transition that allowed the artist to have a new identity. The same cards are reproduced on the foam spray cans we are looking at, recovered from the ground among the carnival remains. These cans become a support, transforming waste materials into narrative vehicles. Other paintings by Perez on different formats recall abstract landscapes, in which colour dialogues with the light reflected from the mountains and gorges of the Cafayate landscape in Salta. In his paintings, he still superimposes tarot iconography. Pérez reveals his message to us starting from what is the darkest. Synchronicities, coincidences of events that have no obvious connection but occur simultaneously or in rapid succession, find their place in his creative process. In his works, one perceives the slow time of oil painting, the space of reflection that it generates, the decision, the waiting, the shininess, the opacity and the darkness, in a play of manifestations and appearances. We finished our fifth and final stage. We hope that this tour has stimulated and intrigued you. If you’d like another perspective on the art fair, go back to the info point or the AudioGuides landing page and select another podcast! See you soon and enjoy Artissima!