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• Olympia

  The exhibition “Olympia” borrows its name from the ancient side on Greece’s Peloponnese penincula that hosted the original Olympic Games in classical times. Aldo Giannotti forces the legacy of this ancient sport site into the institution itself, enableing through his drawings not only the possibility of a phisycal engagement but a “take on” thematics that are driven out of sports such as competition, national representations and power structures on a global scale. Through his work the instituion becomes a stadium of possiblities, engagements and sarcastic comments – a look at our society from the individual up to the collective, national, global and universal.

   

  Aldo Giannotti has developed „Olympia” in the last couple of months and on site during his stay in Sofia. By using and re-contextualising materials and devices often found in sport arenas, such as podiums, running mates and sport items, it explores how human interactions with an institution for art can be staged and enacted differently, in ways that emphasise and disrupt the binaries of social behavior we are expected to demonstrate when entering a museum. Giannotti does this by making us all become active players in his Olympics, both in a physical and a conceptual manner.

   

  (Martina Yordonova)

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• the Sketch wall

  Eine temporäre Gestaltung des

  „artstripe“ im Wiener Büro von Accenture

   

  Beim artstripe handelt es sich um einen Ort des Gedankenaustausches. Jährlich werden in Wien lebende Gegenwartskünstler eingeladen, sich mit Accenture auseinanderzusetzen und einen Blick auf dieses Unternehmen zu werfen. Dahinter steht die Idee, dass Künstler als genaue Beobachter in besonderem Maße in der Lage sind auch Aspekte zu bemerken, die der Selbstwahrnehmung des Unternehmens mitunter entgehen. Mit dieser Ausstellungsserie wird ein Dialog auf Augenhöhe initiiert, der sonst kaum zustande käme, da die Sphären Kunst und Wirtschaft üblicherweise voneinander getrennt sind. Accenture setzt mit diesem Projekt die Tradition des Auftragswerkes fort mit der Besonderheit, dass den Künstlern keine einschränkenden inhaltlichen Vorgaben gemacht werden. Gleichzeitig sollen diese Impulse von Außen das „Out of the box“ Denken innerhalb des Büros fördern. Wie aber sieht so ein Denken ohne Scheuklappen aus? Beziehungsweise, wie sehen die Scheuklappen aus, die ein freies, kreatives Denken blockieren?

   

  Mit seiner Arbeit „The Sketch Wall“ beschäftigt sich der Künstler Aldo Giannotti unmittelbar mit den Denkprozessen, die er aus dem Selbstverständnis von Accenture und den Tätigkeitsbereichen des Unternehmens ableitet. Der Titel ist Programm insofern als es sich um eine genau komponierte Sammlung von Gedankensplittern handelt, die der Künstler als Serie von Skizzen auf der Fläche des artstripe arrangiert. Während die Zeichnung sein bevorzugtes Medium ist, bilden der Raum und die Architektur seine präferierten Motive um die einzelnen Gedanken zu visualisieren. Paradoxie ist ein zentrales Stilmittel seiner Kunst, wie sich an den einzelnen Zeichnungen ablesen lässt: die beiden Zeichnungen unter dem Titel „Alternative Thinking“ zeigen zwei Hochhäuser. Beim einen dreht sich die Tür und das Haus bleibt stabil, beim anderen dreht sich das ganze Haus und die Tür bleibt fixiert. Wie immer man es dreht und wendet, die dahinterstehenen Denkmechanismen bleiben gleich. Auch die Zeichnung „This Building Full Of People Without The Building“ ergibt wieder die Konturen eines Gebäudes, während sich die Skizzen zu „Place Of Work“ und „Place Of Relax“ nur graduell voneinander unterscheiden. Aldo Giannottis Beobachtungen sind ironisch aber nie belehrend und machen vor der eigenen Position nicht halt: Auch die Kunst bleibt nicht selten gefangen in Konventionen und Ideen sind nicht immer völlig neu.

   

  Mit „The Sketch Wall“ öffnet der manische Zeichner Aldo Giannotti sein Skizzenbuch und präsentiert Einfälle zum Verhältnis Gegenwart und Zukunft, Mensch und Maschine, analoger und digitaler Welt aber auch vom Ausstellungsraum artstripe zum Arbeitsraum Vienna Office als riesiger Notizblock. Auch wenn die vielzitierte „box“ letztlich immer eine viereckige Schachtel bleibt, so zeigt diese humorvolle Arbeit, dass ein Denken außerhalb von Routinen und Zwängen möglich und die Kunst ein gutes Mittel dafür ist.

  Project by liquid frontiers

   

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• Domenica

  site specific drawings and interventions at the italian embassy in Vienna.
  Pitch invasion in collaboration with Pablo Chiereghin
  a project by Marcello Farabegoli

   

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• buildings on buildings

  home
  

• Spatial Dispositions : Albertina

  Inviting Aldo Giannotti to conceive an intervention means viewing its location—in this case Vienna’s Albertina and its different collections, which are complexly structured for historical reasons—from completely new perspectives on the basis of his highly imaginative drawings. The artist, who was born in Genoa, Italy in 1977 and has lived in Vienna for some years now, mostly relies upon black felt-tip pen drawings reduced to concentrated outlines on A4 paper as his primary means. The drawings are documents, feasible suggestions or fictitious instruc- tions, grounded, in his research-related working and reflection processes. They capture concepts of performative-installative as well as purely intellectual approaches in a humorous, sometimes socio- and institution-critical way. The basis for his concepts and associative and intuitive pictorial solutions are literary research and conversations with people working at the Albertina, who, because of their different fields of activity, have developed different views of their workplace. Especially for those people who have worked at the Albertina for many years, or even decades, Giannotti’s “investigations” and “interviews” have marked a pause in their everyday routine and offered an opportunity for informative self-reflection. (more…)

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• The museum as a gym

  Fitness trail at the Kunsthaus Graz

  Drawings instructions

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  The project The Museum as a Gym was developed by Aldo Giannotti to open up new socio-architectural perspectives for Kunsthaus Graz. Inspired by the idea of a museum of art as a mind gym as well as by the Latin phrase mens sana in corpore sano (“a sound mind in a sound body”), the artist has designed a gym-like environment within the museum building using only existing infrastructural features.

  In a series of drawings that serve as instructions, visitors of all ages are invited to experience the museum as a gym, not only for the mind, but also for the body. In line with the multi-purpose, open nature of Kunsthaus Graz, the project enables a dynamic and collaborative encounter with a museum of contemporary art as a space for public engagement. As one of the designers of Kunsthaus Graz put it, “like a human personality, a building can become more and more intriguing as we delve inside and get to know it” (Peter Cook). With this in mind, Giannotti invites the audience to engage with the institution and to conquer its space through a familiar, physical experience.

  Like a red thread running through Giannotti’s whole body of work, here again his main concern lies in the relationship of individuals with their surroundings. Indeed, there is a functional correlation between the way a space is arranged and the tendency to behave in a particular way within it. In accordance with the notion of Umwelt as developed by Baron von Uexküll*, Giannotti explores the museum space as a set of orientation marks which work as instructions for use and turn the physical, objective space into a system of significance or living environment. In order to turn a museum into a gym, it is necessary to alter those “bearers of significance” (Bedeutungsträger) that delimit the extent of actions within the museum space in such a way that the audience is tempted to do gym exercises in it. By doing so, the artist investigates the structure and functioning of the museum as a social space.

  By shifting from one significance system to another and crossing the border between them, the functional relationship with the environment, which guides the audience’s behaviour, is temporarily suspended and deactivated. This “being-held-in-suspense” between different semantic worlds lets those sets of rules, inherent to a museum or a gym, appear in their contingency and plasticity. Ultimately, by way of this disarming artifice, Giannotti is able to hint with ease and irony at those common marketing strategies which, with regard to the audience and membership development, link the museum to the gym.

  The Museum as a Gym can also be considered as a stress test, in which Kunsthaus Graz is examined for its functional capacity and social elasticity. Through an active exploration that doesn’t shy away from physical strain and personal commitment, the institution’s infrastructure opens up as its symbolic musculature. This musculature points in different directions of contraction and, thereby, suggests its potential extension. Measuring such extensibility by using the museum as a gym, the visitors can activate untapped possibilities of dealing with the museum environment and, at the same time, question the role, which a museum of contemporary art plays in the interaction between different social bodies.

  Giorgio Palma

  * For Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt, see the brief but accurate overview by Giorgio Agamben in The Open. Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004, pp. 39–43).

   

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• skyline

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• a disturbance that travels trough space and time

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• the medium is the message

  drawings instructions and activations for the Pomilio Bumm Prize (sky arte)

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• b27- spatial dispositions

  Site specific concepts and interventions at Viennacontemporary 2015  (booth 27 - projektraum Viktor Bucher)

   

  
  
  
  

  
  

   

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