Alice Cattaneo

2009-2010: Fall

Alice Cattaneo’s spatial interventions carry an idea of vulnerability through meticulous gestures that play out in a dimension between stasis and chaos. As in these unbalanced architectures in her videos, her actions put in motion chains of micro-moments that simultaneously defy gravity and explore areas of structural instability. The images she creates are, in their bare simplicity, fragments that explore complexity through specific actions. Both in the video and in the architectural interventions the logic is that of the stage machine. In the theatre, the machine should vanish behind the stage, but here it shows itself openly. 

Cattaneo studied at the Glasgow School of Art and at the San Francisco Art Institute. Recent solo exhibitions include: Galleria Suzy Shammah, Milan (2008); MADRE Museum, Naples (2008); Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2007); and Analix Forever, Geneva (2006). Recent group exhibitions include Italics, Italian Art between Tradition and Revolution, 1968-2008, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, and MOCA, Chicago (2009) and Fragile, Terres d’Empathie, Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne (2009). 

During the residency in New York, Cattaneo’s research will investigate two different experiences of urban reality: The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, a philosophical vision of the 19th Century in Paris, and the Russian Utopia Museum, a virtual archive containing 480 unbuilt architectural prospects. Identifying New York as a polymorphic context where it is possible to relocate connections between experienced and imagined situations, she will focus on the idea of the fragment and the urban landscape as visions of an imaginary space suspended between reality and the theater.