A curatorial team for Localedue: Giulia Morucchio and Irene Rossini
When did your collaboration start? Could you talk about your very first project together?
We started our collaboration while attending University in Venice. Our first project together was curating the screening of a documentary film (RMHC – Hardcore in Rome, by artist Giulio Squillacciotti) in the frame of a series of meetings with the author in a Venetian cinema. The projection was also followed by a DJ set in a little venue outside of Venice’s most touristic routes.
Last year, we traveled to Albania for a residency at the Department of Eagles, an institution founded by curator Vincent van Gerven Oei, whom Giulia first met while researching for her Master’s final essay. During our stay in Tirana, we delved into the history of Italian radio and television broadcasts, that were received as interference on the Albanian shore, and welcomed as an alternative to official national communication controlled by the Communist regime. We gathered some materials from public archives, but the most part came from interviews with people from Tirana and other main cities in the country.
Our project became, under this regard, an exploration of Albania’s collective memory, and, at the same time, an inquiry into the way Italy was perceived on the opposite side of the Adriatic Sea. We collected sound materials and visual notes in a private blog that is the first draft of what we would like to become a publication. The Department of Eagles has been a good support for our research, as its mission is to explore and investigate Albania’s recent past.
At the moment we are working as temporary artistic directors of LOCALEDUE, a non profit art space in Bologna, Italy. Our first exhibition as curators at LOCALEDUE, Tre casi di cosa, was actually outside the gallery’s walls, as it was part of Nesxt, an independent art spaces festival that took place in Turin during Artissima Art Fair. In that occasion, the works on display called into question the position of the object as an inanimate “other”, projecting on it human values and characteristics (Millenium Combo, Carola Bonfili), initiating processes of co-creation (Bread Sculptures, Špela Volčič), or treating the matter as a living force (Colpi liberi su un corpo elastico and Forza in un senso e forza contraria by Vittorio Cavallini).

From left to right, Špela Volčič, Bread sculptures, Vittorio Cavallini, Colpi liberi su corpo elastico, Carola Bonfili, Millenium Combo, centre: Forza in un senso e forza contraria, Vittorio Cavallini. Tre casi di cosa, installation view. ph Špela Volčič
How and when did you get in contact with LOCALEDUE? What was the peculiarity of this space that pushed you to apply to the open call?
We heard about LOCALEDUE at the beginning of the past year, as some artists we are interested in were exhibiting there; we knew about its reputation of being a space open to experimentation by young artists and curators.
We decided to apply to the open call because we felt the urge to confront a physical space and to compose exhibition moments, born out of the topics we are interested in, or from our dialogue with the artists.
As we started to work there, we were struck by the network of people involved in the gallery: from its founder Fabio Farnè, to the curators and artists who have exhibited there. Throughout its activities, LOCALEDUE has formed a collective identity that makes it a point of reference for the young artistic scene in Bologna.
In a previous interview, you said that you both share a particular interest in the relationship between visual arts and architecture. Are you going to deepen this interest throughout your program at LOCALEDUE, by thinking about the context in which this space is placed (in Bologna, inside the circuit of MDA – Manifattura Delle Arti)?
This is for sure something we would like to explore during our time at LOCALEDUE. We are currently working on it: we would like to organize a series of lectures, or meetings – their nature has yet to be defined – in order to expand this topic, as well as to touch upon another one of our interests, the relationship between architecture, art and sound.
Manifattura Delle Arti, where LOCALEDUE is located, provides a great starting point for this reflection, not only because it gathers together different realities (a film library, as well as several studios and art galleries, and MAMbo, the city’s museum of contemporary art) but also because it is a recently renovated area in the centre of Bologna, whose project of requalification has involved Aldo Rossi, an architect who is well known for his theoretical considerations about the responsibilities of architecture in relation to the dynamic of the city. The whole area itself, then, inquires into the relationship between art and architecture, also questioning the role they play inside the city landscape.
Let’s talk about Stinky Inky, an exhibition by Francesco Cagnin and Stefano Carniato, the first show that opened your curatorial path for LOCALEDUE: a reflection about calligraphy, the simple graphic mark and its several, layered implications. Why did you choose to start working by presenting this topic? Is it something that gives a shape and a common thread to the next steps of your program for LOCALEDUE?
We decided to invite Francesco Cagnin to open our program, as we were interested in his approach to exhibition-making. His interventions are often intertwined with the space hosting them, such as Untitled (Zero Branco, July 25 2014), generated in response to the space were it was going to be displayed.
However, Stinky Inky follows a slightly different path: the works stem from the dialogue with Stefano Carniato, calligrapher and philosopher. When we started to discuss the exhibition with Francesco and Stefano, what interested us most was the possibility of opening up the language of visual arts, involving other vocabularies and knowledges. This multidisciplinary and layered approach is for sure an aspect we would like to deepen while working at LOCALEDUE. In the specific case of Stinky Inky, calligraphy becomes the backbone for building a discourse about the body, its movements and traces. But also about the structure of language and its visual representation, and how much they can become representative of a certain discipline, or a way of thinking the context which produced them. Those, among others, were the subjects of a talk by Stefano Carniato, held on December 1st, aimed at activating – or, as Stefano would say, cuddle – the works on display, in which all of these matters are treated with great irony.
Even though it moves in a complete different direction, also the second exhibition – a solo show by Stefano Faoro – has a strong link with written words. Faoro’s attention lies in the the possibility of exceeding the meaning inherent to words, that often become sounds, transposed into a performative dimension. For LOCALEDUE, he has developed a new project titled Inauthentic Afternoon, reflecting upon the ideas of inhabiting, resting and indeterminacy. Inauthentic Afternoon is composed by different elements – an audio track, some Xerox copies of his handwritten notes, a piece of furniture. Through them, Faoro builds an environment whose parts are undetermined and potential: in this uncertainty, it is amplified the artist’s writing process, which generates texts that exist at the same time as image, voice and written words.
by Eleonora Castagna
in Focus on Europe
Jan 13, 2017