NEBULA

Single-channel video multi-channel audio color sound 33’

Commissioned and produced by Fondazione In Between Art Film and co-produced by Studio Giorgio Andreotta Calò for the exhibition Nebula 2024. Courtesy of the artist; Fondazione In Between Art Film; Annet Gelink Gallery Amsterdam; Galleria ZERO… Milan; Sprovieri London

GIORGIO ANDREOTTA CALÒ

studied Sculpture at the Academy of Venice and the Weißensee Kunsthochschule in Berlin. He was an assistant to Ilya and Emilia Kabakov from 2007–11. He participated in international residency programs such as the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Villa Arson in Nice and the International Studio & Curatorial Program in New York. His work has been exhibited and presented in numerous personal and group exhibitions at institutions such as Oude Kerk, Amsterdam; and Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes promoted by the Italian Ministry of Culture including the PAC – Piano per l’Arte Contemporanea (2021), the Italian Council (2017), the Premio Italia Arte Contemporanea (2012). He took part in the Biennale Arte 2011, and represented Italy at the Biennale Arte 2017. He lives and works in Venice where he teaches Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts.

Immersed in an atmosphere suspended between dream and reality, the Complesso dell’Ospedaletto is both the place where this work was shot and where it is being exhibited. Here, far from the mountains it calls home, a sheep wakes up and begins to make its way through the building, its solitary route taking in the grandiose, monumental spaces of the church of Santa Maria dei Derelitti as well as those, more functional and pared-back, of the former hospital––sites that, at different times, provided succor to the soul and to the body. The video camera accompanies us on a journey in which temporal dimensions and meanings filter into each other, charting the enigma of a sheep that, rather than being led by a shepherd, leads the viewer. Punctuating this reconnaissance of a space that is as physical as it is symbolic, we hear the recurring sound of a little bell, which seems to offer the senses a possible orientation and which, echoing off-screen, amplifies the oneiric atmosphere of the work and the questions it poses. The memories of the artist’s childhood––it was here that his father worked in the early 1980s––overlap with the experience that the public has today of these same spaces along the exhibition route, on the basis of a principle of gradual accumulation and slippage between memory and perception. In the year that marks the centenary of the birth of Franco Basaglia, the artist pays homage to the revolutionary vision of the Venetian psychiatrist, who made it possible for us to redefine the political and medical borderline between health and illness, care and custody. The artist does so by means of a work inspired by the title of the exhibition, which offers a spatial and metaphorical meditation on the search for meaning but also on its loss, on reality and the imagination, on rationality and the inner life. The film ends on the words of a woman who, alongside the other presences within the space created by the work, questions our acquired notions of truth and hope.