Non siamo mai soli, 1994
Instructions
Get a white sheet of paper as large as possible larger than an A4, a black and red pencil and possibly an eraser, a ruler and a pencil sharpener or razor blade. Also get a frame or nails, drawing pins, hammer, masking tape.
Wander around the apartment observing in the various rooms all the objects that inhabit it. Start choosing the ones that attract the most attention, trying to retrace their history and understand why they receive such attention. Identify one that has a provenance from a known apartment in the past, probably the residence of a relative or personal friend or family member. Once you have chosen the object, bring it on the table or near it, it depends on its size and get ready to start drawing. Sitting at the table, focus on the apartment where the object comes from, retracing its spaces; the rooms and their function (kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom(s), corridor, balconies); the location of doors and windows; the furniture and its arrangement. Once you have made the local mind start drawing with pencil and ruler, or freehand, its plan trying to maintain the proportions between the various rooms and arrange on the sheet the dislocation of the furniture to understand the function of each room. Once the drawing is finished, think where the object was placed and once the place has been identified, draw its shape with the red pencil in proportion to the context. Finally write at the top, centered, the names of the people who lived in the apartment with the address underneath. At the base of the sheet, always centred, write the scale of the drawing, for example 1:50. Once the drawing is finished, check if you have a usable frame or make up for it with pegs or drawing pins or adhesive tape and find a place to hang it by placing the object near it at the same height as it was originally placed in the apartment of origin. If you don’t have a shelf available, you can use a piece of your furniture and use it as a base to display the chosen object with screws, plugs, drill and screwdriver. The combination of the object and the design of the apartment where it comes from constitutes the work entitled Non siamo mai soli, a small domestic monument that becomes a metaphor for living. The mass-produced object becomes a unique copy, narrator of an existence, transmitter of personal and collective memory and witness of the place, condenser of relationships between people and places.
Bibliography: Franco La Cecla, Luca Vitone, Non è cosa / Non siamo mai soli, 4th revised edition, Elèuthera, Milan, 2013
Bio
The artwork of Luca Vitone (Genoa, 1964), began in the second half of the ’80s. It focuses on the idea of the place, inviting us to recognize something we already know, defying the conventions of mutable, faded memory that characterize the present. His work explores the way places are identified through cultural production: art, cartography, music, cuisine, political associations, ethnic minorities. Vitone bridges the gap between the sense of loss of place characteristic of the postmodern and the ways in which feelings of belonging arise in the intersection of personal and collective memory. He reconstructs and invents forgotten paths to reconfigurate his own personal geography. Since 2006 he has been teaching at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. Currently collaborating with Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Köln; Galleria Pinksummer, Ge- noa; Galerie Michel Rein, Paris/Brussels.
The work of Luca Vitone has been shown in public and private space both in Italy and abroad, including Openspace, Milano, (solo show) (1998); Accademia di Francia, Villa Me- dici, Rome, OK Centrum, Linz, (solo show) (1999); PS1, New York (solo show); Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome (solo show); Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci Prato; PAC, Milan (2000); Casino Luxemburg, Luxemburg; Lenbachaus Kunstbau, München (2001); National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Moscow (2002); MAMCO, Genève; 2nd Bienal de Valencia, Valencia; 50th Venice Biennal, Venice; ARC Musée d’Arte Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (2003); Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (solo show), Prato; OK Centrum, Linz; Villa Arson, Nice (2004); Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Roma (2005); PAC, Milano; Casino Luxemburg, Luxemburg (solo show) (2006); MART, Rovereto (solo show); 8th Sharjah Biennial; OK Centrum, Linz (solo show) (2007); Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, (solo show); XIII Biennale Internazionale di Scultura di Carrara; Museion, Bolzano (2008); Nomas Foundation, Rome, (solo show); Museo Riso, Palermo; 4th Tirana Biennial (2009); MART, Rovereto; MAXXI, Rome (2010); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; MMOMA, Moscow; CAPC, Bordeaux (2011); NGBK, Berlin, Fondazione Brodbeck, Catania (solo show); Museion, Bolzano (solo show); 1st Montevi- deo Biennial; (2012) Italian Pavillon and IILA Pavillion at 55th Venice Biennal; MART, Ro- vereto (2013); BOZAR, Bruxelles; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (solo show) (2014); Triennale di Milano (2015) P.A.C., Milano (solo show) (2017); Fondazione Zimei, Montesil- vano (PE) (solo show); Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow (2018); Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Roma; Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (solo show) (2019).
