Genoa. A room with The View

Sant’Ilario village represents the last of Genoa's neighbourhoods, set amongst discreet villas and ancient buildings, and clung on a steep hill. The sea rests dozen minutes away, whilst terraced fields typical of this region lie behind. Long plots of land planted with olive trees, Mediterranean herbs, lavender bushes and bougainvillea scent the air. Liguria’s Gulf offers extended panoramas, insects sounds and perfumes typical of the Mediterranean Sea, detained by the rural enchantment of Sant’Ilario’s old buildings.

The effort of going uphill is rewarded by the sound of steps spreading over dry stone walls and then hitting fine cobblestones. There are no annoying noises but wind, rain and water – maybe because cars rarely cross such entangles lanes. Up in Sant’Ilario, there’s no escape from life and what is left of our ancestral planet earth is the merging line between the sky and the sea, outlining the horizon, from time to time, cut by plane’s roars. What is left remains at a distance, offering a chance to a selected group of emerging or established artists to find the right time for working and thinking in the process of producing.

Climbing back along via dei Marsano, right in front of the ancient village cemetery there is an old glass pavilion on the roadside, which The View has selected as its setting for exhibitions. On the opposite side of the road, The View’s office is housed in a small villa designed in the forties style of the Ligurian Riviera. The space offers a headquarters, accommodation for the artists and a large studio. The independent organisation is a contemporary art production studio founded and directed by Vittorio Dapelo and curated by Francesco Garutti. Dapelo has been founder and director of Museo d’Artista at Artimino, Florence (Italy) between 1975 and 1980 where he curated site specific projects and exhibitions by Maria Nordman, Giuseppe Chiari and Rebecca Horn among others. Between 1980 and 1994 he ran the  Locus Solus Gallery in Genova with Uberta Sannazzaro. They they hosted solo shows by Dan Graham, Robert Barry, Bill Woodrow, Sol LeWitt, Enrico Castellani, Bertrand Lavier, Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Ettore Spalletti, Alberto Garutti, Robert Mapplethorpe, Aldo Rossi, Remo Salvadori, Jan Vercruysse, Irene Fortuyn, Richard Deacon, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Katharina Fritsch, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Angela Bulloch and many others.

Founding The View, Dapelo focused on curatorial surveys and production processes of making, formulating a critical hub enlightened by a strong spirit of mutual collaboration between the author and the producer, inhabiting the ambiguous space between the artwork and the artist, the market and the collection. In 2015 and 2016, The View pierced the Ligurian landscape through the transparent surfaces of the Sant’Ilario Pavilion, transforming a metal and glass room into a little theatre overlooking the sea, a territory voted to enhance sculptures and films. Opening the new project, titled Les Pratiques Solitaires, The View tries to explore visceral thoughts and intimate obsessions of five emerging and mid-career Italian artists. They were invited to Sant’Ilario to conceive and produce five projects able to stage a small counterpart in the Italian contemporary art scenarios. Each work is accompanied by an artist’s book, a publication including curatorial texts and documentation of the project.

Anna Franceschini, Diego Marcon, Andrea Romano, Andrea Sala and Sofia Silva were invited to realize a series of pieces in close dialogue with Theview team, artisans and manufactures. The authors told five short stories using cinema and sculpture as medium; the final idea is to show in an empty room overlooking the sea that exists in the most intimate and hidden part of their own minds as if their thoughts were suddenly naked.

The five artworks shaped a final choral project (even though Diego Marcon’s fictile sculptural group is opening on 21 December 2018), exhibited subsequently into the glass pavilion, in the same day, following a sort of informal roaster. Anna Franceschini projected Veramon! (2018) a 16mm archivistic film, a things-reanimation visual process, envisioning multitude of design table sets, kitchen equipment, vintage TV and computer monitors, merchandise of any brand, radios, telephones, packaging for all sorts of goods, occupying two private domestic rooms’ shelves, floor and ceiling. Andrea Romano produced a series of graphite prints on cotton paper titled Arianna and Highlight (I) e Arianna and Highlight (II) (2018); Andrea Sala introduced a sculptural agglomerate made of concrete and different colours cultured marbles while Sofia Silva showed oneiric black and white paintings on paper and on canvass. As a challenge to the notion of grand narratives, Les Pratiques Solitaires works deliberately with the idea of the private, the small-scale, the idiosyncratic and the personal, suggesting an alternative mode of narrative-making. Individual memory appears not only laterally inscribed into the landscape, but is vital to the constitution of memory in and of Sant’Ilario’s hill.