Benni Bosetto

with Xenia Perek | Curated by Giulia Civardi

For her first show in the UK, Benni Bosetto presents a newly commissioned performance that explores everyday rituals and the transformative power of magical thinking through sound and
choreographed gestures.

Ambiente X takes the form of a day at the office. Two workers perform mundane tasks of a routinised work activity: they file paperwork, make coffee, talk on the phone. Gradually, this conventional language transforms. They begin to speak in reverse, chant, talk to mirrors. The lights go off – system anomaly. The set recalls a near past. Simultaneously, it stages the ever-present collective timescape of work and productivity.

Ambiente X conflates different temporal layers in a progressive negotiation of linear time. It fuses the measurability of work performances with magical thinking, namely that which is imaginative, illogical, ineffable, and therefore, technically inoperative. Gestures and movements are used as devices to construct a different experience of reality for therapeutic purposes, to preserve one’s autonomy in moments of uncertainty, and create new body-languages. Bosetto turns to magic, the primitive, and dance rituals to investigate the potential of recollecting ancient memories and exploring different reality- systems alongside the given one.

The performance score is played on a loop to reach a state of trance that alters the perception of time. Through repetition and endurance, the body incorporates the ability to record like a mechanical device. By alternating everyday ‘rituals’ – understood as a series of social customs, practices, or conventional acts – from the dominant socio-economic order with imaginary and symbolic gestures, the performers create small interruptions. Gestures open up different frames through which view reality, reinforcing it, and making it known again.

Visitors are invited to enter the performance at any time within office hours and witness for as long as they wish.

A publication with texts by Dina Akmadheeva, Federico Campagna and Giulia Civardi, as well as images and drawings by the artist will be launched on the same day as the event and will expand on ideas explored in the work.

Ambiente X and the publication are kindly supported by Q-International, La Quadriennale di Roma and patrons Diego Bergamaschi, Massimo De Palma, Oliviero Falconi, Marco Martini, and Paolo Mauri Brusa.

Sound composition: Vito Gatto
Costume design: Timna Weber

 


Benni Bosetto (b. 1987 in Milan, Italy) works in sculpture, drawing and performance. She graduated from Brera Academy in Milan and studied at the Universitat der Kunst in Berlin and Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam. Bosetto had solo exhibitions at Villa il Cerretino, Prato (2019), Fonderia Artistica Battaglia, Milan (2018), ADA, Rome (2018), FuturDome, Milan (2017), Tile Project Space (2016), Milan. She is the recipient of Fondazione Fiera Milano Prize (2019) and 61st Premio Termoli (2018). Her work has appeared in group exhibitions at Villa Medici, Rome, Artissima Special Projects, Turin, OGR, Turin, MAMbo, Bologna, Fondazione Baruchello, Rome, DeAppel Art Center, Amsterdam, DAMA Turin, Marselleria, Milan among others. Forthcoming solo exhibitions will take place at Almanac in Turin and ADA in Rome, Italy.

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