This is the AudioGuide project and you are listening to track number 3 entitled Techné. An itinerary in the name of research and experimentation, discovering artists who have made technique a central element of their poetics: from the recovery of artisanal roots to digital developments, passing through chemistry and mechanics. The common thread is the “workshop”, not understood exclusively as a physical place of production, but as a mental, creative, virtual space. From the oldest atelier to the digital workshop of the future, the workshop becomes a nerve centre where different disciplines, techniques and professions confront each other in an intense dialogue with the contemporary world. The AudioGuides were developed for Artissima by the advisors of Arteco. This route was curated by Camilla Zennaro. We are ready to go. Pause your player and head for the Main Section, where our tour will begin. You will find the Nächst St.Stephan Gallery along the Pink A corridor at number 23, Press play once you are there.

Our journey begins with the Austrian gallery Nächst St. Stephan, which this year presents in the Main Section Sonia Leimer, an Italian artist living and working in Vienna. Leimer's works tell us about the close relationship between art, technology and experimental science. The artist and the craftsman, as well as the scientist, have much in common. But first of all, they possess a very powerful epistemological tool: the ability to produce knowledge and, at the same time, to”'materialise” it in a new body. Thus Leimar, with a particular scientific approach, materialises and makes visible something that is normally intangible to the human eye. Dust Buddy is the series that the artist is presenting on the occasion of Artissima 2023: an expanse of particles of terrestrial dust and industrial dust nestled on the floor, bronze and aluminium sculptures of different sizes that Leimar has reproduced starting from an accurate photographic analysis under a microscope. These particles, less than 1 mm in size, remain suspended at various heights in our atmosphere. They are mostly cosmic dust, or artificially made dust related to industrial manufacturing processes. On the wall we find Artic, a device made of high-tech materials such as fibreglass, ceramic and insulating fabric, the same as those used by the European Space Agency to build its satellites. Linking up with her previous production Space Junk, the artist brings up a problem that is very often ignored: the presence of space-derived debris in orbit and on the Earth's surface. In a present shaped by increasingly accelerated technological and scientific progress, Leimer's works materialise - through the act of creation - the essence of the contemporary in its most intrinsic ambiguity. Pause your player and continue towards the Copperfield and Max Goelitz Galleries stand in the Monologue/Dialogue section, along the Light Blue corridor at number 5. Press play once you are there. I’ll be waiting for you!

For the Monologue/Dialogue section, the Copperfield and Max Goelitz Galleries offer a joint presentation focusing on materiality, technology and tradition, with the latest productions by Lou Jaworski, Oscar Santillan and Rebeca Romero. For all three artists, the digital plays a fundamental role in the process of creating and manipulating materials, but what they have in common is their relationship with ancient traditions and cultures. Rebeca Romero's practice, in particular, combines pre-Columbian iconography with advanced scanning techniques and 3D modelling,thoroughly investigating ancient stories projected into a future civilisation. Her laboratory takes the form of an online museum or a digital archive, excavation grounds for data collection, which she then reassembles and recontextualises, creating artefacts: objects, canvases and futuristic installations with the intention of challenging the dominant historical narrative and colonial tradition. Originally from Lima, the artist is the winner of the fifth edition of the OGR Award, the prize promoted by Artissima and Fondazione CRT. She is back at the art fair during these days presenting a selection of works including Datura XL: a 3D modelled sculpture made of a bioplastic material of natural origin covered in garish paint. It depicts a sacred plant revered in many indigenous cultures because of its aphrodisiac properties; a simulacrum with a profound mystical character that relates the use of foxglove to animist beliefs. In her work, in fact, artificial intelligence very often plays the sacred role of oracle , associating post-humanist imagery with ancient traditions on the borderline between human and non-human. Pause your player and head for the main entrance of the trade fair. You will find the Papillon Gallery in the Disegni section at number 12. Press play once you are there. I’ll be waiting for you!

Welcome to the Drawings section. The Papillon Gallery introduces us to French artist Charles Le Hyaric, whose series on paper - Aquarelle phocéenne - transports us into a parallel imaginary, that of the cité Phocéenne: Marseille. Just a stone's throw from the sea. Throughout history, Provence has been the chosen location for many artists; from Impressionists to exponents of the later avant-gardes, anyone who has passed through the south of France has experienced its metamorphosis, bringing with them and in their practice perennial traces of places and visions linked to the Mediterranean. This is what happened to Le Hyaric: an artist who has made Marseille his home, or even more so, his en plein air studio. In his practice as a draughtsman, he brings together disparate knowledge ranging from biology to astrophysics via chemistry and mathematics. We could call him a true alchemist on paper. In fact, his key is the metamorphosis of materials: paint, acrylic, rust, sea salt and natural pigments subjected to crystallisation, oxidation and deterioration. A specifically technical game, but dictated by chance, in which every natural or chemical element unconsciously participates in the transformation process. His interest in the manipulation of materials becomes a formal investigation of how various elements, natural and otherwise, behave in different contexts, altering their state and blending together. Transformation thus becomes evolution. Thus Le Hyaric gives us back on paper marine memories in green and blue tones, specimens of flora and fauna alternating with memories of human and non-human presences, universal objects and more intimate memories linked to the cité Phocéenne. This is where our third stage ends. Pause your player, proceed down the central corridor towards the Back to the Future section. On the right you will find the Vistamare Gallery at number 1. Press play once you are there. I’ll be waiting for you!

We are in the Present Future section, where the Vistamare Gallery presents the artist Sara Enrico to the public. In the history of thought there is perhaps an unjustified aversion to the surface: we define something as “superficial” to figuratively mean its lack of substance or depth. But what if we started to see the surface as the key to turning away from being constantly closed in on ourselves? Perhaps, in the end, reality truly is a superficial thing. And if so, it would mean that the important things are the liminal relationships we build with other bodies, the juxtapositions, the approximations. Surfaces in the work of Sara Enrico - an artist from Biella born in 1979 - become the central focus of the work she is presenting at Artissima 2023: The Jumpsuit Theme, part of a broader research that the public can explore further with the exhibition Tainted Lovers, at OGR-Torino. Sara Enrico is an artist who treats sculptural matter as fabric. Referring to the revolutionary and emancipatory garment of the suit, Enrico creates curious anthropomorphic forms that she lays on the ground in a state of apparent inactivity. Using the ancient technique of the cast, she records the subtlest details of the material: zips and seams, joints and streams of colour emerge on the surface. The plastic and architectural appearance of the concrete contrasts with the delicate sinuosity of the folds, in an apparent state of softness that hides behind flaws and imperfections the strength of a claim. Here, surfaces become a direct representation of 'contact': membranes of separation between the material and the immaterial, interstices where, the artist says, deepest anxieties and desires lurk. We have finished our fourth stage. Pause your player, proceed down the central corridor and head for the Isabel Hurley gallery in the Back to the Future section at number 9. Press play once you are there. I’ll be waiting for you!

Our journey continues with the Isabel Hurley Gallery in the curated Back to the Future section. We now meet the Spanish artist Marisa Gonzalez. There is a universal convention that the best portrait of an artist is the one that depicts the artist in his or her studio, in the intimacy of the artist’s workplace. So it is for Marisa González. Her studio in Chueca is located in the vibrant heart of Madrid; a 200 square metre flat with only a few centimetres free of objects. In one corner, amidst an accumulation of vintage printing cameras, the latest Apple technology stands out. Marisa Gonzalez's workshop-archive tells the story of a revolutionary artist, a pioneer of multimedia art and technology applied to creative processes, and an icon for contemporary feminist movements. It is 1974, Gonzalez has recently left her studio in Madrid to continue her studies in the United States with artist and teacher Mary Beth Edelson. In those same years, the perpetuated crimes of the Pinochet dictatorship became international in scope, and became the starting point from which the artist developed the series Violencia Mujer, a photographic project in which she combines an investigation into violence against Chilean women with her profound interest in new technologies as a form of communication. Presented for Artissima 2023, Descarga - Violencia Mujer, is a technical and performative experimentation that brings together more than 100 photographs in fax paper on acetate, which the artist created by manipulating a photocopier. There is an obsessive and almost uncontrolled repetition of expressions from which emerges a shared sense of brutality and despair, amplified by the almost material contrast between the monochrome background and the vibration of faces and profiles. We have finished our fourth stage. Pause your player and head for the South Parade Gallery in the New Entries section along the Pink B corridor, at number 12. Press play once you are there. I’ll be waiting for you!

Our journey concludes with the New Entries section. The British gallery South Parade presents a new work by British artist James Fuller. We are used to thinking that reality consists mainly of objects. But if we look at things more closely, we soon realise that it all starts with relations. If for Sara Enrico the relation was synonymous with the surface, for James Fuller it is all about the interface, about connecting devices between different systems. In his studio in Athens, Fuller experiments with cutting-edge techniques and industrial materials such as wax, silicones and metals. For Artissima 2023, he presents the Electroplated wall sculpture series, metal sculptures moulded inside hollow silicone objects made by roto-moulding, a special rotational printing technique in which intuitive gestures and interfaces combine in a procedure that is as controlled and reproducible as it is random. "I like rough edges, complicated shapes that involuntarily swell and sag under their own weight," says Fuller. In fact, the living, performative part of his work can be found in the parallel elements he inserts. It sometimes happens that the writing insinuates itself into the materials like an infiltrated guest; it shapes them, it scratches them sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes in the most vulnerable part, the visible surface, the interface to which the spectator is invited to relate. If you are interested in learning more about the artist's work, head for New Entries Bar, a special project curated by Cripta747 that promotes the work of the 17 young galleries in the New Entries Section. We have finished our fifth and final stage. We hope that this route 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!