01.11.2017 - 05.11.2017
CRIPTA747 RESIDENCY PROGRAMME 2017

Open Studio 

Fellows: Diogo Evangelista, Viktorija Rybakova.

Scientific Board: Fanny Gonella, João Laia, Caterina Riva.

Cripta747 is pleased to present the works developed by Diogo Evangelista and Viktorija Rybakova during their stay in residence over the past two months.
Cripta747 Residency Programme is the new project of resindecies of Cripta747 realized with the support of Compagnia di San Paolo. It provides artists, curators and researchers with the opportunity to live and work in Turin while developing individual projects and immersing themselves in the region's creative environment. With a focus on both material and conceptual production, CRP aims at implementing and rethinking new strategies in research and artistic practices, refocussing the attention onto the production processes, whether the outcome is a work-in-progress, an event, or an exhibition. CRP allows the establishing of long-term relationships with artists and introduces audiences to international issues.

Diogo Evangelista's work revolves around themes of desire and transformation, exploring the animist potential that the human imagination has to appropriate concepts, images, and environments. Through the research developed during his residence at Cripta747, the artist explores his interest in the observation of the unspectacular.
A series of objects with geometrical bodies, made of pure asphalt, make ecological issues, Eastern philosophy, archeology, and science fiction come to mind.
The weight of these black stones is evident as soon as you enter the space. In the exhibition, the sculptures are set up on the formworks into an alike arrangement, reminiscent of an ethnographic archive where finds made in an era when society was deeply dependent on fossil fuels are kept.
Despite the use of simple materials, the composition is complex: groups of stones contribute to form a whole, without losing their plastic independence. The artist is interested in how people move in relation to the space, as if they were walking on a sort of lunar surface.
Science fiction tells about these possible future scenarios. In some way, these monoliths recall the future proposed by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Their geometric and austere shapes seem to contain information we cannot decipher and look seemingly impenetrable.
Diogo Evangelista reflected on how to display these monoliths in the middle of an empty room. The stones stand wisely scattered in the rectangular space and none of them upstages the others because of any particular characteristic. All of them are mutually valorizing and the whole is in balance. Like in a zen garden, the arrangement of the elements in the space, the relationship between the stones, the expression of a universal essence, and direct intuition refer to an abstract geometry which holds all these suggestions together.

Over the past few years, Viktorija Rybakova has been researching human eroticism and the idea of the body as a sensitive fabric. In residence at Cripta747, she focussed on the theme of desire: the desire to touch and to be closer to the subjects of our fantasies.
Sexuality is a call for a complex inner life, a need for connection beyond one's own body.
Once our hearts start beating around the 22nd day of our existence, they give the first visible sign of life and therefore a deep inner complexity that is hard to define with words. No other emotion gives a more heightened feeling than a sense of sexual energy that links us up to everything that is.
“What name can you give the source from which all names have sprung?” (from the poems of Lal Dĕd) Desire is the most laborious force that plays with visual and material sensations. As humans we tend to name the things we want to own.
Therefore we create the whole world of meanings and language to come closer to the horizon of our fantasy, the subject or affect we desire for. The basis of capital markets and established material values largely depend on the economy of desire. As Georges Bataille writes ”By work man orders the world of things and brings himself down to the level of a thing among things. The more humanised men are the more their exuberance is diminished.” Once we own the desired object, the desire itself is no longer there. Desire wants nothing to do with hierarchies of consumption and dependence.
In her creative life the artist wants to stay with unknowable potential, and in the meantime she wants to get closer to her emotional body and play with it through language. She believes poetry can open another dimension in our sensing bodies. Shown works: Orecchio di Venere, an installation with silk fabrics of the XIX century; In The Innerness of The Desire, an artist book that exploded in the space.