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Ivana Spinelli, Laura Rositani, A partire dalle dee, Kabul Magazine, 2022 >>>
Ivana Spinelli, Spazio (abstract), Casa dell’Architettura, Roma, 2017 download >>>
A year ago, I visited Ivana Spinelli in her studio. As we had been planning for a while, we went through her body of work, looked at finished, unfinished, almost finished pieces, and discussed her latest exhibition. Then we talked about books, and I think that was the moment when she grabbed a folder from a shelf that was filled with exercises – writing exercises.
When I was in elementary school, a particular exercise used to be performed with poor conviction, but still remains in my memory: alphabet worksheets. A page filled with «f»s, one with «c»s, one with «d»s. Lower case, upper case, block letters, cursive.
In a book in many ways revolutionary, Marija Gimbutas finds in the etchings performed onto terracotta objects and sculptures during the Neolithic era a form of script – a script that precedes cuneiform writing, and that was developed by a non-migratory, matricentric civilization based on agriculture, probably peaceful and devoted to the cult of the goddess, which got wiped out by the coming of Indo-European civilizations.
The remaining signs, which other archeologists interpreted as ornamental motifs, are angular shapes that look like the letters V, M, and W – or zigzags. They were etched onto terracotta surfaces, such as vases and plates, and sometimes overwrote the bodies of votive statuettes dedicated to goddesses and female ancestors. These weren’t symbols, but signs: in fact, each time the graphemes formed linear structures in a different way.
Ivana Spinelli thought that this script – that got lost, as everything else from Ancient Europe’s pre-Indo-European culture – needed to be learned again. Of course we don’t know what those signs meant exactly, but mostly they were associated to goddesses, animal shapes (…)
Cecilia Canziani
Bulletin #24, Droste Effect, March 2020 (EN/IT) Read all the article >>>
Claudio Musso, Against the Grain, Bulletin #23, Droste Effect, Feb.2020 (EN/IT) >>>
Elisa Del Prete, Semiotic Circuit, Bulletin 22, Droste Effect, Jan 2020 (EN/IT) >>>
L’artista attraverso esercizi manuali e ripetitivi di scrittura cerca di appropriarsi di questa energia femminile che permea tuttora il nostro inconscio e di portarla nella nostra dimensione presente. Non c’è nostalgia nella sua ricerca, ma un’operazione di riscrittura di una parte remota del mondo che determinate griglie interpretative hanno finora ignorato. L’artista sente anche l’esigenza di spostare il segno dalla carta: le sculture diventano disegni nello spazio e spesso esigono di essere mosse in un’azione performativa. Sempre all’insegna di un’operazione che non intende essere filologica, ma avviene sotto la spinta dell’urgenza di riaprire le possibilità di un mondo per lo più ignoto e perduto.
Letizia Ragaglia
Zigo Zago Stickers, 2019 In The Language of the Goddess, published in 1989, but continuing the research begun in the mid-1950s, the archaeologist and linguistic expert Marija Gimbutas finds out in a specific type of engravings on terracotta objects and sculptures from the Neolithic age a form of writing preceding the cuneiform alphabet, which would testify to the existence of a matrifocal, sedentary civilization based on agriculture, probably peaceful and devoted to the cult of the goddess. An ancient European Gilanic society that was swept away by the impact of the Indo-European peoples. These signs, whose meaning we are unable to read, have the angular shapes of a V, M and W and are mostly associated with a powerful and at times terrible life-giving female, central to the social construction of this lost civilization. According to Gimbutas, they are everywhere, but we can’t recognize them. Ivana Spinelli’s work focuses on the analysis of codes, signs and languages and on the way in which they circulate, shape us, connect us.
The artist masters them and then subjects them to some sort of testing, translating them into different media such as drawing, video, installation, sculpture. Spinelli speculated that this lost writing had to be learned again. Even if we cannot understand the meaning of this language, in the meantime we can put it back into circulation: through the Zig Zag Protofilosofia series (2017–18) the artist has begun to disseminate these signs on posters and flags on the occasion of public art interventions. She has translated them into a series of movable sculptures and finally developed an app for WhatsApp. By installing it on your mobile phone you can communicate through icons that restore the language of the goddess to our time. It is not a question of a philological or nostalgic operation, but of interrogating the past in view of the present and at the present time, to provoke a small revolution through an interference: an icon is a threshold, from which another world can perhaps resurface and change ours. Cecilia Canziani
(…) Baustelle actually emphasises the idea of building, designing and forming a particular place, a special identity through its purpose and intended use. According to Marc Augé, a French anthropologist, the notion of (an anthropological) place presupposes a specific and symbolic building of space. An anthropological place is one which is ‘simultaneously the principle of sense for those who inhabit it, and the principle of comprehensibility for the one who sees it’. A place is created by people and residents through their relationships with that territory, with their neighbours and others. In the process of building relationships, Baustelle is a synonym for the constant building of human relations, bounded by the space wherein these processes are reversible and changeable. Very subtly and intelligently, the artist threads through a metaphor of human relations, and does so precisely through the process of making a place (in the sense of a house that never becomes a home), and/or the real needs of individuals and their
(non-)functional realities. Spinelli deliberately emphasises the process of building space as incomplete, positioned between that which is irregular, interrupted, undefined, and that which is slowly beginning to assume a form and to finally make sense. Actually more in the nature of a location, that space is at the point of transition of conflicting identities that do not manage to form a place, leaving the site itself at a crossroads of polarities, inside/outside, here/there, private/public. According to Gaston Bachelard, the relationship inside/outside presupposes a field of torn-apart dialectics, as well as a relationship between yes/no, being/non-being, and in the context of a symbolic-spiritual epithet, we can translate this relationship to the level of difference between order and chaos, a space of control and a space of non-control. (…) Baustelle, Una Popovic
In sehr provokanter Weise geht Ivana Spinelli mit dem Phänomen Terrorismus um. Das wesentliche Instrument der Selbstmordattentäter, der Sprengstoffgürtel mit Dynamitstangen, nutzt sie als modisches Accessoire in ihrem Zyklus von Zeichnungen unter dem Titel „Global Sisters“. Einzelne und Formationen mehrerer Figuren sind dort in aufreizenden Posen wie auf dem Laufsteg einer Modemesse arrangiert. Das Instrument des selbstinszenierten eigenen Todes und des kalkulierten Mordes an möglichst vielen anderen Menschen zum Zeichen des Protests, der Anklage und der Erhöhung der Angst wird hier zum Zeichen des radical chique. Ivana Spinelli treibt in ihren sehr präzisen und ästhetischen Zeichnungen von grazilen Frauenkörpern den Widerspruch zwischen Ästhetik und Vernichtung auf die Spitze. Tänzerische und balletthafte Gestik paart sie mit der Bereitschaft zum Töten, die auch vor schwangeren Frauen nicht haltmacht. Mit ihren Zeichnungen nimmt Ivana Spinelli auch Bezug auf das Niveau der Debatten in Medien und Öffentlichkeit, die vereinfachen, banalisieren und alles konsumierbar machen. Am Ende ist dann alles werbungskompatibel, marktfähig und als Dekor nutzbar. Das Spielerische und Leichte der Zeichnungen organisiert vordergründig Gefallen. Letztendlich revoltiert der Ekel gegenüber dem Tötungswillen und schafft eine produktive Diskrepanz, die so nur Kunst ermöglichen kann.
Matthias Reichelt
Catalog, Global Fight Club, Distillery ed.
Alle gute Kunst handele von Eros und Thanatos, hat der Kurator Jean Christophe Amman einmal gesagt. Und von Utopie, möchte man ergänzen. Insbesondere die Arbeiten der Italienischen Künstlerin Ivana Spinelli, diese endlosen Variationen eines l’Amor Fou als Selbstvernichtung, bringen diese Dreier-Begriffskonstellation mit wenigen zarten, aber aussagekräftigen Linien auf den Punkt. In Spinelli Arbeiten verdichtet sich auf einzigartige Weise ein alter Konflikt von Anziehung und Abstossung, von Begeisterung und Ekel, körperlicher wie politischer Art. Das Ungeheure, dass ein Mensch sich mit einem Sprengstoffgürtel in eine Bombe verwandelt, die Verzweifelungs- oder Verblendungstat, die ihre eigene Geschichte, das biografische Hineingeraten in die Situation, fast stets durch ihre mörderische Monströsität verdeckt, wird bei Spinelli zum “radical chic”. An die ästetische und handwerkliche Bravour der sado/maso-artigen Arbeiten vom Tomi Ungerer gemahnend und mit sicher ebensoviel Psychopatologie aufgeladen wie die Verschnürungsbilder von Hans Bellmer und Unica Zürn, präsentieren sich die kleinformatigen Zeichnungen als leichthändige Provokation – jedoch mit großer Bedeutungstiefe. Schon bei Ungerers “Fornicon” zeigt sich nicht nur der Einzelne, auf die phallische Fickmaschine geknebelt, sondern die ganze Familie – auf einem kollektiven Masturbator reitend – von diabolischen Spiel affiziert – die sichtbare sexuelle Perversion gerät zur Metapher für die Perversionen der politischen Verhältnisse. Spinellis Protagonistin stürzt in der jüngsten Zeichnung der Serie endgültig ins Verderben, das Bungee-Seil wie einen tödliche Nabel-schnur mit dem Explosivgürtel verbunden. Ihr “go go go!” Geschrei, das der eigenen Vernichtung nur Bruchteile vorausgeht, suggeriert die Chance zu einer Akzeptanz des Unakzeptierbaren: der politische Selbstmord wird als Sport geläutert, massenfähig. (…)
Olaf Arndt
Krise: Einübungen in den Ausnahmenzustand, Villa Ichon, Goetheplatz 4, Bremen/ 27.11.2009-09.01.2010
HIndustan Times, New Delhi, Saturday, May 10, 2008
(…) What follows is the most arresting work on display: the Global Pin-up. A multi-me-dia installation, the artist traces the journey of creation of a ‘brand’, how it fuels consumerism and ultimately leads to the destruction of society. (…)
Namita Kholi
America Oggi, New York, Dec 18, 2005
“Global Sisters” è il titolo della sua mostra che comprende oltre ai disegni, rigorosamente in bianco e nero, anche un video dedicato a donne-guerriero.
Ivana Spinelli riproduce con il timbro il logo che ha realizzato e ne fa dono alle persone intervenute, come una sorta di ringraziamento.
Velia Majo
Artissima, Disegni, 2021
I. Spinelli Menininkės anksčiau tik M. Gimbutienės knygose matyti archeologiniai radiniai, kai kurie septynių tūkstančių metų senumo, dabar – Vilniuje Istorijų namuose veikiančioje parodoje „Deivės ir kariai: Marijai Gimbutienei – šimtas“. Čia eksponuojamas ir vienas iš M. Spinelli darbų, kurį įkvėpė Gimbutienės idėjos – tai „Šiuolaikinė Gilanija“.
Ieva Žigaitė
Exit Book, Revista semestral, Madrid, n.13,2010
(…) El proyecto original contaba con artistas como Harun Farocki, Coco Fusco, Martha Rosler, Jenny Holzer o Ivana Spinelli, y examinaba diferentes aspectos de la relación entre el terrorismo y los medios: la construcción mediática del terror y el terrorismo, la configuración visual de las acciones terroristas, la experiencia de la amenaza y el miedo constante hacia la otredad, o la relaciones entro el terrorismo y otros tipo de violencia, como la guerra y la violencia de Estado. (…)
Miguel A. H. Navarro
Fashion and politic, Yale University Press,, 2019
Like Steven Meisel, but far more ironically, ltalian artist Ivana Spinelli has literalised this connection of fashion, sex, consumerism and terrorism in her cartoon series ‘Global Sisters’ (fig. 50). Critic Franco Speroni describes Spinelli’s posse of glamorous, terroris Barbie-dolHike action heroines as ‘global pin ups … blending the televised icon of a Miss ltaly with the Graces of the Renaissance and bodies traversed by the chronicles of terror and the images of seduction of the globalised mediascape’.(…)
Rhonda Garelik
Segno online, Dec 4, 2021
Fondazione Sardi per l’Arte, promotrice del Premio, ha assegnato la seconda edizione del Premio CAROL RAMA a Ivana Spinelli in quanto risultata la miglior artista, presente in fiera, che interpreta, attraverso la sua ricerca e il suo lavoro, l’ideale di creatività femminile non convenzionale e la libertà artistica che Carol Rama incarnava e trasmetteva. (…).