Franca Marini Urban Lines

see installation    see video

January 20 – February 10, 2009  franca marini urban lines Palazzo San Galgano, Siena, site specific-installation
inauguration Tuesday January 20th – 18.30
SanGalganoSquare contemporary art exhibition series curated by Massimo Bignardi
Università degli Studi di Siena, Chair of Contemporary Art History, sponsored by Siena Local Council Department of Culture
exhibition coordination and presentation text by Esther Biancotti

Wednesday January 21 - 4,30pm  Urban Lines video screening
screening room, Palazzo Fieravecchia, via Roma 47

press release

translation Heather Holloran
On Tuesday, January 20th at 18.30, in Palazzo San Galgano, seat of the Faculty of Arts, the inauguration will take place of the exhibition Urban Lines by Franca Marini, a further offering in the series of contemporary art exhibitions SanGalganoSquare, curated by Massimo Bignardi and organized under the auspices of the Chair of Contemporary Art History within the context of the Second Level Degree Course in Art History in collaboration with the School of Specialization in Historical Artistic Heritage and sponsored by the Siena Local Council as part of the programme promoted by Marcello Flores of the Department of Culture.
The Sienese artist Franca Marini, after an extended stay in New York, has returned to exhibit in her home town with the work Urban Lines, a sculpture created specifically for the cloister of the Palazzo di San Galgano and a video that will be screened on Wednesday January 21st at 14.30 in the screening Room of Palazzo Fieravecchia. Both works were born of a reflection on the city of New York which the artist develops with two different languages, that of plastic representation and that of image in movement.
“Increased involvement and participation in the living cultural beat of the city and its territory” - notes Prof. Roberto Venuti, Dean of the Faculty of Arts - “is the measure of what the university is seeking to be, in the main an authoritative interlocutor, aware, willing to engage in analysis and critical comparison, measuring the growth of a new participatory consciousness”.The series of contemporary art exhibitions SanGalganoSquare, – points out Professor Massimo Bignardi – “with the exhibition dedicated to Franca Marini turns its attention to what is happening today, in the field of plastic arts in Siena, showing the extent of my students and my own desire to relate to the city, to experience its day to day creativity”.
The sculpture Urban Lines - writes Esther Biancotti in her presentation text - is an artwork which offers a wide variety of viewpoints, of perspectives, it invites the eye to gaze through it, a space to be crossed, a web of brilliant threads that creates a further element of dialogue with the exhibition space, no longer rigid and constricting but dynamic, never unambiguous, subject to multiple interpretations and the fundamental stimulus in the creation of the artwork. The forms radiate freely in space, like the roots of a post-industrial world re-emerging from its ruins, and dictate the development of the sculptural composition: forms which are light, suspended, almost Calderian, returning to base after reaching different planes, a movement that grows denser from the fringes toward the center and then away again in a continuous motion.
The choice of materials used for the construction of the sculpture is a logical consequence: industrial materials that speak of the city, on which the artist intervenes with cuts, lacerations, burns and spray can writing, simple materials, brought to life by an ardent manual skill, by a desire to experiment and break through rigid mental barriers. The uneven skein, perceived through the plastic form of the sculpture, evokes urban reality as a tangle of randomly intertwined social relations.
The same social reality is the starting point for the creation of the Urban Lines video. Fleeting images, fast-moving, frantic, almost enrapt, alternate with computer processed images, renderings of previous works, where intersecting lines and geometrical compositions are superimposed on the branched spacial structure of the sculpture, creating moments of strong emotional intensity. The abundant but absolutely deliberate use of 'video masks' expresses well the sense of emptiness and depersonalization that characterizes the city dweller of any great metropolis: a vacuum resulting from the juxtaposition of planes that intertwine and separate figures, overlapping shadows that blur and lose themselves in one another.
The confused street noises enrich the musical score specially composed for the video by Gianpaolo Cappelli & Car_Ma (Carlo Torrini and Maso Ricci). The music follows the sometimes intense, sometimes softer rhythm of the images, from the broken architectural skyline and avenues of New York, animated by the frenetic movement of a multiracial crowd to the quiet of the Tuscan countryside; a slow progression of sound emphasizes the conclusion of the video with its panning shot of Rome, wrapped in a warm and human atmosphere, filtered by a disillusioned eye.
Three different urban realities, all an integral part of the background of the artist, which starting from the dimension of the journey, become a metaphor for the collective dynamics in which the individual rediscovers, in universal experience, the intimate certainty of his own existence.

organized by: Esther Biancotti, Irene Biolchini, Claudia Gennari, Silvia Giannassi, Valentina Landi, Silvia Leonardi, Antonio Locafaro, Sara Manetti, Martina Marolda, Marco Mascolo, Claudia Mennillo, Jacopo Rossi Napoli, Pasquale Ruocco, Stefania Santoro.