Art Club #9 Bois d'amour

“The plants and animals that inhabit the Bosquet at Villa Medici are many and varied, changing the setting and its nature with the seasons. (…) In this way too, artists today interact with the Villa (…).

Le pensionnaire absent (2016) is the performance through which Driand Zeneli (Shkoder, 1983; lives and works in Milan) wishes to ‘discuss how we can challenge the historical perspective that allows the participants of a specific historical narrative to express themselves. By exploiting an absence [the action ‘tends to transform the sense of collective responsibility towards individuals who have contributed to and participated in the history of a place’.

In the Music Room, Martin Soto Climent (Mexico City, 1977; lives and works in Mexico City) exhibits a number of Caramel Huysmans (2015) in natural leather and wood, and The Pleasure of the Seed (2014) in fabric and various materials, reinterpreting the human vicissitudes, emotional and sensual, that have animated the daily life of the Academy for centuries.

Joseph Griffiths (Melbourne, 1984; lives and works in Melbourne) brings to life Communicating Vessels (2016), composed of a number of geometrically placed water containers beneath Cleopatra’s Loggia. The artist thus symbolically revives the hydraulic dynamics of the Villa, paying homage to the complex history of this architecture and its Roman origins.

Adrien Missika (Paris, 1981; lives and works in Berlin) places his work Untitled (2016), an empty, open birdcage, in the Studiolo. A ‘gesture’ that allows him to ideally liberate the animals and plants that decorate the ceiling of the room (…), whose image he multiplies by means of a mirror placed at the base of the small installation (…). A hymn to freedom and respect for all existing forms of life. A hymn that reappears in Video works in Gipsoteca (2004-16) by Denis Savary (Granges Marnand, 1981; lives and works in Geneva), where a series of televisions, placed among the plasterwork of the Gypsotheque, project visions and natural corners, bringing the surrounding landscape into the room in idealized, limited form (…)”.

Pier Paolo Pancotto, Bois d’amour, November 2016