FROM THE HOME TO THE PLANET

FROM THE HOME TO THE PLANET. as Dialogue between Elena Cologni and Mother Art Collective

curated with Raffaella Perna at MLAC Museum (Sapienza Universita’ di Roma), 2025

In collaboration with the Getty Research Institute (LA), the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Mathias Botanical Gardens, and the Cambridge School of Art (ARU)

From the press release

“The exhibition arises from a dialogue between artist and researcher Elena Cologni and the artists of the California-based collective Mother Art Collective (MAC – Laura Silagi, Deborah Krall, and Suzanne Siegel) and from their shared focus on the concept of care, understood as an aesthetic, social, and political practice. The exhibition explores the connections between care experienced in the domestic sphere and care conceived as a public and ecological commitment. Through a selection of works from the 1970s to the present—installations, sculptures, videos, photographs, archival materials, and participatory practices developed specifically for this occasion —the exhibition questions the relationship between personal experience, motherhood, emotional relationships, and collective action, viewing care as a relational activity and a transformative action.

The exhibition project is part of the research ‘Towards a Feminist Care Aesthetics’ , for which Cologni was awarded a Getty Research Institute grant (2023), and a Quality Research and Innovation Fund and Impact grant, Faculty of Arts Humanities Education and Social Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University (ARU, 2024). The research is based on the analysis of the Mother Art Collective archives, on the study of their artistic history and on shared artistic and theoretical work, conducted between Europe and the United States.

press release_FROM THE HOME TO THE PLANET

Research for the collaborative new work

Cologni and Mother Art Collective , with Dr Anthony Baniaga at the UCLA Mathias Botanical Gardens (US)

images of the ongoing collaborative work From the Home to the Planet. Trajectories of migrations

Historical projects in the exhibition

The exhibition included a number of artworks and documents by Mother Art Collective from the Getty Archive as well as from their own archive. These were paired with projects by Cologni relevant to the notion that domestic care extends out to public and social action

Mother Cleans the Banks series, 1978, Mother Art Collective

Laundry works series, Mother Art Collective, 1978, various places , Los Angeles (presented as a showreel in the show)

Homeless Women, 1985, Mother Art Collective (one of 4)

Seeds of Attachment (untiled, prop and collages), 2026/17, Elena Cologni more on this can be found here .. and encounter

Mettere ogni significato sotto-sopra, dietro-davanti, alto-basso 2026, Elena Cologni, more can be found here

The Body of/at Work, premiered at the Venice Biennale, 2021, Elena Cologni, dialogic sculptures at rest

Care notes, 2018, Elena Cologni, on loan from Homerton College, University of Cambridge

Events

Per un’estetica della cura Riflessioni sull’opera di Mother Art Collective ed Elena Cologni.

On October 21, 2025, a study afternoon was dedicated to the exhibition’s themes, with the participation of Mother Art Collective and Elena Cologni. Such incredible atmosphere with contributions by Raffaella Perna, Caterina Iaquinta, Gabi Scardi, Elisabetta Garletti e Ashley McNelis.

IMG_6648

Workshops

By Elena Cologni with students and the public on 5 November 2026, guided by the notion of interdependence

So many new research questions arose from getting to know that important time in history through Mother Art Collective’s practice, and through our shared approaches in artmaking. Experimenting with cocreation with them and contributions to our collaborative new work in the show. The potential of these ways of working to reach many more contexts and people and really impact the conversations and policies around planetary health

Publications

Please find out more in the article Cologni, E. (2024). Mother(ings): From the home to the planet. A dialogue between Mother Art Collective and Elena Cologni. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 25(si1.6). http://doi.org/10.26209/ijea25si1.6

The project is also mentioned in this more recent article by Davis, Lexington. “Cleaning Up in Public: Mother Art’s Domestic Labor Performances, 1973–78.” Getty Research Journal, vol. 21, 2026, p. 110-133. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/999962.

Contribute!

From the Home to the Planet. Trajectories of migrations

Is a collaborative project developed by Mother Art Collective and Elena Cologni. The work points to uncover how climate change deeply affects human and plant migration. This in turn alters local biosystems and impacts change in local climates around the world

Please continue to contribute by responding with your stories to these questions:

Do you have any personal stories about how climate change has affected you?

If you had to leave you home, what plant(s) would you take with you?

you add the stories

here

—

image credits: Heteromeles arbutifolia (Lindl.) M. Romer. USA: California: Butte County: resprout from fire

39.61831°, -121.43952° Elevation: 417 meters
Occurrence remarks: roadside

TOYON OF THE CALIFORNIA CONSERVATION GENOMICS PROJECT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES (LA) ROSACEAE. UCLA Herbarium – LA LA00650144 Herbarium LA University of California Los Angeles.

Picture taken by Elena Cologni, 27 April 2025

The Places of Memory

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416_SR1938 ©Elena Cologni (2022), Artist impression in situ, as officially announced by Universita’ di Pisa in March 2023 here

416_SR1938 ©Elena Cologni (12 July 2023) installation view

DEVELOPMENT

I conceived the artwork 416_SR1939 (concept, design and activation) as part of the wider ongoing Places of Memory, in response to an invite by Prof Paolo Mancarella and this has evolved with the support of Prof Riccardo Zucchi, Rector of Università di Pisa. It contributes to the Memory Pole, SR1938 building designed by Heliopolis 21 Associate Architects (whom Alessandro Melis, former Curator of Padiglione Italia, 17a mostra di Architettura, la Biennale di Venezia, is founder and Ilaria Fruzzetti is Associate) together with Diener & Diener Architeknen. SR1938 is included in the census for Italian architecture since 1945 to today, promoted by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity – Italian Ministry of Culture.

The name “Memory Pole San Rossore 1938” was chosen by Prof Mancarella to recall the collective memory to the “Ceremony of the memory and apologies” celebrated in 2018 on the occasion of the 80^th of the signature at San Rossore of the Racial Laws in Italy (1938).

In the resulting memorial the shadows move with the changing of the light during the day to become prominent at times, just like it happens in history. Maurizio Gabrielli (12/07/2023) said:

“the memorial is very much alive […] you have given life back to these 416 people“.

416_SR1938 ©Elena Cologni (12 July 2023) installation detail

PUBLICATIONS

Cologni, E. (2024) ‘416_SR1938. The presence of memory in the perceptual experience’. In Melis, A., Vavetsi, R., & Finotti, F. The Architecture of Exhibitions: Experiential Design (1^st ed). Routledge.

Cologni E. (2021) Invisible pillars. The role of Jewish women in women’s emancipation history in Italy – ARRO – Anglia Ruskin Research Online;

Cologni (2021) Figura/Sfondo. Un dialogo | Foreground/Background. A dialogue.

https://www.pisauniversitypress.it/scheda-ebook/autori-vari/universita-di-pisa-obiettivo-cinque-9788833396132-575988.html

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Commissioned by the University of Pisa and curated by Alessandro Melis and Ilaria Fruzzetti – partners of the HELIOPOLIS 21 ARCHITETTI ASSOCIATI – and Gabi Scardi, my intervention was developed in collaboration with the Jewish community of Pisa (president Dr Maurizio Gabrielli, and Federico Prosperi), Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Ebraici “Michele Luzzati” (CISE) Universita’ di Pisa (Prof Fabrizio Franceschini and Prof Alessandra Veronese), Centro, Bibliografico “Tullia Zevi”, Roma, Fondazione per i Beni Culturali Ebraici in Italia, and many members of the local and international community.

The project’s design and conceptualisation phase was funded by the DYCP program Arts Council England (GB), and further support for impact comes from the Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University, through the Quality Research and Innovation Fund Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (ARU).

TO HANDLE DETACHMENT (in action and at rest)

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TO HANDLE DETACHMENT (in action and at rest)’ – GESTIRE IL DISTACCO (in azione e a riposo)

is a site-specific commission for the exhibition “Here. Between Not-yet and No-more”, Galleria Milano (9 May-30 June 2022)

in collaboration with Bianca Trevisan, Tomi Merola, Nicola Pellegrini

– Site specific 2.5 x 5.3 x 1.3 m (marmo, piombo | marble, lead)

– gallery piece 12 x 300 x 90 cm (piombo, feltro, tessuti riciclati, vernice, dialoghi | lead, felt, varnish, recycled materials, dialogues)

– action of detachment by Elena and Nicola

THE THRESHOLD: between private and public, between home and work, between domesticated and not, between inside and outside, between woman and man, between curved and straight; the threshold moves continuously, it becomes invisible. THE AFFORDANCES of place. Attachment to place and forced detachment. THE WEIGHT, heavy as lead, anni di piombo, then as well as now, in private and public. HANDLE; to handle, or manage – manus (notes for a dialogue, Elena Cologni)

The gallery as a place where public and private coincide, a domestic place overlaps with that of work – of caring and the care of things and people. Attachment to place is “a set of feelings that refer to a geographical place, which emotionally bind a person to this place according to their role or as an experiential setting” (Rubstein 1992).

The work is to be understood as an exercise shared with Nicola, Bianca and Toni, at the same time becoming a tool for articulating and sharing the moment of detachment from the place itself to open up to new possible physical and conceptual perspectives.

The thickness of the steps of the external staircase are covered with strips of lead. One of these is moved inside the gallery in a shared action.

Detachment Strategies, 2022, Elena Cologni (graphite on paper, 35×50 cms)

LA SOGLIA: tra privato e il pubblico, tra casa e lavoro, tra addomesticato e non, tra dentro e fuori, tra donna e uomo, tra curvo e retto; la soglia si sposta continuamente, si rende invisibile. L’AFFORDANZA del luogo. L’attaccamento al luogo e il forzato distacco. IL PESO, pesante come il piombo, anni di piombo, allora cosi’ come adesso, nel privato e nel pubblico. HANDLE; to handle, come maniglia o gestire (appunti per un dialogo, Elena Cologni)

La galleria come luogo in cui pubblico e privato coincidono, luogo domestico che si sovrappone a quello di lavoro – della cura e dell’accudimento di cose e persone. L’attaccamento al luogo è “un insieme di sentimenti che si riferiscono a un luogo geografico, i quali legano emotivamente una persona a questo luogo in funzione del suo ruolo o come setting esperienziale” (Rubstein 1992).

L’opera e’ da intendere come esercizio condiviso con Nicola, Bianca e Toni, facendosi al tempo stesso strumento di articolazione e condivisione del momento di distacco dal luogo stesso per aprirsi alle nuove prospettive fisiche e concettuali possibili.

Gli spessori dei gradini della scalinata esterna sono ricoperti da strisce di piombo, una delle quali viene spostata all’interno della galleria in un’azione condivisa.

Il contesto

La mostra Here. Between not-yet and no-more, intende omaggiare lo spazio con interventi di circa quaranta artisti che sono stati invitati a dialogare con gli ambienti e il contesto della Galleria, nell’oggi, ma anche in virtù della memoria di ciò che è stato: tra il non ancora e il non più è l’adesso, l’istante nel mezzo, il momento sempre presente, precario e fragile perché in costante trasformazione, il qui da cui possiamo godere di uno sguardo privilegiato sul passato e il futuro che verrà. Le volte affrescate, il rumore dei passi sulle assi del pavimento, le maniglie, i dettagli liberty, i cornicioni, le sale, i due spazi di lavoro e i tanti dettagli dello spazio vengono rielaborati dallo sguardo attento e affettivo degli artisti, così come la memoria viva di ciò che è stato, il ricordo di Carla e l’odore persistente di sigaretta.

Era il 1973 quando Carla Pellegrini, insieme al marito Baldo, decideva di trasferire la Galleria Milano da via della Spiga all’attuale sede con doppio ingresso su via Manin e su via Turati. Se ora in via Turati le sedi delle case di moda fanno a gara per aggiudicarsi uno spazio, allora il contesto era ben diverso. C’erano i palazzi con le facciate in bugnato, gli uffici, le banche, i centri direttivi delle multinazionali, ma era anche un quartiere vivo, dove le persone erano parte di un tessuto sociale variegato ma dalle maglie salde.

The context:

The exhibition Here. Between not-yet and no-more, intends to pay homage to the space with interventions by about forty artists who have been invited to dialogue with the environments and the context of the Gallery, today, but also by virtue of the memory of what it has been: between the not yet and the no longer is the now, the instant in the middle, the ever-present moment, precarious and fragile because in constant transformation, the here from which we can enjoy a privileged look at the past and the future to come. The frescoed vaults, the sound of footsteps on the floorboards, the handles, the liberty details, the cornices, the rooms, the two work spaces and the many details of the space are reworked by the attentive and affective gaze of the artists, as well as the memory alive of what has been, the memory of Carla and the persistent smell of cigarettes. It was 1973 when Carla Pellegrini, together with her husband Baldo, decided to transfer the Galleria Milano from via della Spiga to its current location with double entrances on via Manin and via Turati. If now in via Turati the headquarters of the fashion houses are competing to win a space, then the context was quite different. There were buildings with rusticated facades, offices, banks, management centers of multinationals, but it was also a lively neighborhood, where people were part of a varied but solidly woven social fabric.

Artists::
Alterazioni Video, Riccardo Arena, Marina Ballo Charmet, Gianfranco Baruchello, Alexander Brodsky, Silvia Cini, Elena Cologni, Daniela Comani, Manuela Cirino, Pierluigi Fresia, Gianni Gangai, Eugenio Giliberti, Alice Guareschi, Marianne Heier, Silvia Hell, Paolo Inverni, Salvatore Licitra, Elio Marchesini, Roberto Marossi, Amedeo Martegani, Ferdinando Mazzitelli, Ottonella Mocellin, Margherita Morgantin, Giancarlo Norese, Giovanni Oberti, Antonella Ortelli, Francesco Pedrini, Diego Randazzo, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Marco Vaglieri, Grazia Varisco, Serena Vestrucci, Cesare Viel, Luca Vitone, Francesco Voltolina, Warburghiana (Aurelio Andrighetto, Gianluca Codeghini, Dario Bellini, Elio Grazioli).

more info here

Galleria Milano, Via Manin 13, Via Turati 14, MILANO – Tuesday | martedì – Saturday | sabato 10.00 – 13.30 / 15.00 – 19.00

ph: +39 02 29000352 E-MAIL: info@galleriamilano.com www.galleriamilano.com

Pratiche di cure, o del cur(v)are

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Elena Cologni. Pratiche di cura, o del cur(v)are. curator Gabi Scardi

May 17 – July 4, 2021, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Palazzetto Tito, Venice

in collaboration with resilient communities, the Italian Pavilion, Biennale of Architecture, La Biennale di Venezia.

ExhibitionGuideCologniBLM-FINAL

selected exhibition shots

Affordances, invito all’uso, installation (2021, 150x400x200 cm)
Affordances, invito all’uso, drawing series (2018, 30×40 cm each )*
Mother Hooks, sculptures series (2020/various sizes)

Untitled (Prop), (2016, 100x100x5 cm / 200×300×2.5 cm)
Untitled (Prop), maket series), (2016, 25x25x3 cm ciascuno / each)
Intraplaces (recording forms), (2017, collage 80×100 cm ciascuno / each)
Untitled (Studies), (2016, 80×100 cm)
339282.580645 Barleycorns Away… (2017, installazione / installation)

Gropius’ Offcuts, sculptural composition (2015, wood+textile. 18 modules: 120 cm, variable hight and width)
Gropius’ Offcuts, (2015, 3 C-Type prints on allumynium, 35 x50 cm)

‘From the Orchard to the Home’, 1930, EAFA Cat. 589, East Anglian Film Archive, University of East Anglia

the images above are by Giorgio Bombieri, Settore Cultura, Comune di Venezia

Lo scarto (touch), (2015, from the series, porcelain)

Courtesy Comune di Venezia, Settore Cultura – Biblioteca civica VEZ, Fondo Archivio Giacomelli;

from the press release

The exhibition offers a journey through the artistic practice of Cologni starting from series of works – drawings, sculptures, installations and performative choreographies – relating to different moments of her previous research, and to her most recent project specifically created in relation to the Venetian context.

The exhibition project is articulated around a concept dear to the artist: the elaboration of the space of separation; an “intraplace” that unites and separates, which is distance, but also common ground; which is woven with bonds and can be bridged through healing practices.

In fact, Elena Cologni’s work is linked to a marked spatial sensitivity, to the idea of an emotional and social bond, to the awareness of the interdependence between the individual, the community and the environment. More specifically, the artist focuses on the theme of care understood both as a personal relational commitment and in its territorial, historical-social, anthropological and gender dimensions.

Her interventions include an exploration of public and private space starting from historical investigations that in many cases touch on the themes of women’s emancipation in relation to the social and cultural heritage of the past, in this case places for laundry washing. The tendency to carry out participatory actions and to insert works in the public space are expressions of the value that Cologni attributes to collective requests. At the same time, however, the forms of his works, although rooted in physical and social reality, go through a process of reduction, in many cases to the point of abstraction. The recourse to a curved trend, frequent in drawings, sculptures, installations and choreographies of gestures in public space, suggests the need to escape linearity by bringing thought back to the idea of the circle, metaphorically associated with ideas of equity, of participation , of continuity.

The exhibition Elena Cologni. Practices of care. On finding the cur(v)e is alive with different references. On the one hand it is rooted in the history of twentieth century art: there is a direct reference to Barbara Hepworth, who in 1950 took part in the British Pavilion of the Biennale d’Arte and who leaves observations of people in Piazza San Marco, which Cologni sees an antecedent of her choreographed exercises. On the other hand, the artist connects to the Venetian social context of which she investigates traditional crafts in danger of extinction and everyday work environments in order to understand the relationship between domestic space and work space.

The exhibition serves as a reference point for a series of events in Italy and abroad planned during the opening months, as detailed here The Body of/at Work

In Venice:

5 June: The Body of/at Work, experiential exercises part of resilient communities Padiglione Italia, 17th Biennale di Architettura 2021, La Biennale di Venezia
18 May – 3 July: The Body of/at Work experiential exercises with dialogic sculptures in the city

In London:

24 June: Care(less). On invisibility; 25 June: Care(less). On forgetting; 26 June: Care(less). On discarding, are part of the London Festival of Architecture

Live streaming and updates available at https://www.facebook.com/thebodyofatwork/

Collaborations: Padiglione Italia, Biennale Architettura, La Biennale di Venezia; London Festival of Architecture; Laboratorio PRIDE, IR.IDE, Università Iuav di Venezia; Comune di Venezia, Settore Cultura – Biblioteca civica VEZ, Fondo Archivio Giacomelli; Comune di Venezia, Direzione Sviluppo del Territorio e Città Sostenibile AFU – Archivio Fotografico di Urbanistica; Associazione Crespi d’Adda, Comune di Capriate San Gervasio Municipalita’ di Casteverano; The Hepworth Collection, UK; Moleskine Foundation Collection; Homerton College, University of Cambridge; East Anglian Film Archive; Luigi Bevilacqua Tessiture; Anemotech theBreath.

The project is funded by: Artist International Development Fund, British Council; Emergency Fund 2020, Arts Council England; A-N Artist Bursary; Faculty of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Anglia Ruskin University. And with the support of Wysing Arts Center.

* Affordances, invito all’uso, drawing series (2018, 30×40 cm each ) was shown in PARALLEL LINES: Drawing and Sculpture, group show curators Jo Baring and Caroline Worthington (The Ingram Collection + Royal Society of Sculptors), 22 June – 25 August 2019, The Lightbox, Woking (UK)

CARE: from periphery to centre

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The project ‘CARE: from periphery to centre’, combining commissioned, site specific art and material from the College Archive, was exhibited at Homerton College of the University of Cambridge between 15 and 28 October 2018. Part of the project remains permanently installed in the college, part is looked after in the college archive, and part is in the Moleskine Foundation Art Collection here .

It was discussed in an interview from 2019 with Ayla Van Der Boor in the context of the University of Utrecht’s managed Care Ethics Consortium (available here). Part of this is published in a limited edition catalogue CARE: from periphery to centre. Elena Cologni, with texts by historian of science Melanie Keene, educationalist Peter Cunningham, curator Gabi Scardi and care ethicist Virginia Held (here is the digital version of the catalogue)

The project highlighted Maud Cloudesley Brereton (formerly Maud Horobin, lecturer and Acting Principal, 1903), and Leah Manning (student 1906-08) as figures of international importance representing Homerton’s historic concern with and contributions to health, well-being, and education. A display of relevant items gave a snapshot of early 20th-century life in the College, while focusing on practices of care in society and in students’ learning, through subjects such as domestic studies, medicine, health, and physical education. These themes underpin my sculptural installation designed in response to the 1914 Ibberson Gymnasium (now the Combination Room), and echoed in the Queen’s Wing glass corridor and lawn.

During the exhibition the public was be able to attend the following accompanying events as part of Homerton 250 and the Cambridge Festival of Ideas:

Monday, 15 October: Tour and public opening of the installation, with artist Elena Cologni.

Wednesday, 17 October, 5.30-7.30PM: Workshop with artist Elena Cologni – CARE: Connecting Experiences

Friday, 19 October: Talk and workshop at Gibberd Art Gallery, Harlow

Sunday, 21 October, 2.00-5.30PM: Symposium – CARE: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

This event featured two panels on CARE in the early 20th century and CARE today. The first welcomed Peter Cunningham (Homerton College), Francesca Moore (Homerotn College), and Jessica Meyer (Leeds), and was chaired by Melanie Keene (Homerton College). The second was chaired by Philip Stephenson (Homerton College), and featured Elena Cologni, Gabi Scardi (Università Cattolica di Milano), and Peggy Watson (Homerton College).

Saturday, 27 October: Homerton 250 Festival, including a tour of the installation with artist Elena Cologni, and an opportunity to meet Archivist Svetlana Paterson.

RELATIONS OF CARE, ELENA COLOGNI (2018, PAIR OF MOBILE SCULPTURES, STEEL RODS, JUTE ROPES, 2.5 X 2.5 X 2 METRES EACH). Photographs courtesy of ARTUK.org. These are now on display on a permanent basis.

Care Proximities, Elena Cologni, installation view in front of the Ibberson Building, Homerton College, University of Cambridge (2018, installation including two sculptures and drawing on college lawn: wood + lawn marking paint, 20x100x0.5 meters)

Care Support, Elena Cologni, installation view in the Queen’s Wing veranda housing the new gym, Homerton College, University of Cambridge (2018/19, installation including three sculptures and frames: steel, 2.40×0.5×20 meters)

Documentation of the project, and presentation at Gibberd Gallery, Harlow (2018).

Mother’s Tools, (2018, compositions of 4: wood, steel, custom-made fabric labels, printing tools from the artists’ mother’s embroidery kit, 20 x 20 x 4 cm each). The labels read: CARE AS SUPPORT, RESPONSIVENESS TO NEED, PERSONS ARE RELATIONAL, UBUNTU.

Care Notes (motherhood), 2018, detail, graphite prints, pencil, laser print on paper on Moleskine Japanese album, with inserts of fabric. designs from the Architectural Review magazine, June 1939, 21cmX 120 cm).

Care Notes (architecture), 2018, detail, graphite prints, pencil, laser print on paper on Moleskine Japanese album, with inserts of fabric. designs from the Architectural Review magazine, June 1939, 21cmX 120 cm). Courtesy of Moleskin Art Collection.

Care Is Relational, and Care Instructions, (2018, 2 from series of woven labels, the first of which is inspired by Virginia Held’s writings, and the latter by Maud Brereton’s revolutionary position at the time, that domestic labour should be paid)

The above were produced in the project CARE: from periphery to centre, 2018

in collaboration with:

Virginia Held (philosopher, New York City University)

Gabi Scardi (Curator and Author, Milan Italy)

THE 250 ARCHIVE WORKING GROUP

Peter Cunningham (educationalist and social historian) Melanie Keene (historian of science) Svetlana Paterson (archivist)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

University College London Library; Cambridge University Library; The Harlow Art Trust: Gibberd Gallery, Harlow. The project is part of Cambridge Festival of Ideas, was commissioned by Homerton College, and is kindly supported by the Moleskine Foundation.

Un-Spatializing. A Geography of Difference Through Caring

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Un-Spatializing. A Geography of Difference Through Caring

(sound + tracing paper + graph paper + graphite), CAA Chicago, US (2020)

Un-Spatializing. A Geography of Difference Through Caring. Elena Cologni performing (ph. by Basia Sliwinska)

Un-Spatializing. A Geography of Difference Through Caring, graphite, tracing paper, graph paper (21×28 cm)

The performance was presented as part of ‘Ecologies of Care: Feminist Activism’, curated by Basia Sliwinska, CAA Chicago, US (2020). This also included the papaers: ‘From Self-Help Mirrors to the Surveilled Self: Feminist Video and Healthcare Activism in the 1970s, by Helena Shaskevich (Graduate Center, CUNY); ‘Reclaiming Lost Histories in Lyrical Form’ by Carron P. Little (School of the Art Institute of Chicago); ‘Honey Pot Performance’s Black Feminist Praxis: Embodiments of Collaboration & Collectivity’ by Meida Teresa McNeal (Honey Pot Performance).

The performance also addresses a constant in my work and research investigating our relationship with place(s). Related presentations and publications include:

Cologni, E. (2022). Curare (con) nello spazio pubblico, in Sofferenze Urbane, L’abitare in tempo di crisi. Ed Menichini, D., Medas, B. Edizioni ETS, Pisa, Italy

Cologni, E. (2020). ‘Prendersi cura (con) e distanziamento fisico’. In Scali Urbani conference, Livorno, Italy

Cologni, E., (2019) ‘Intraplaces: Ecofeminism, Care, and Spatialized Art’, in Spatial Dialogues in Feminism panel with Guillen, Melinda, and Villarroel, Fernanda Isobel. 107TH CAA Annual Conference, New York

Cologni, E., On Care, and Finding the Cur(v)e. A Geometry of Difference Through Caring, two-part workshop in The Paradox European Fine Art biennial forum Art Future / Future Signs The future of contemporary fine art research and education 2019 in Riga, Latvia (programme)

Cologni, E., Practices of care in the city as ecofeminist and spatialized art, Critical Practice in an Age of Complexity – An Interdisciplinary Critique of the Built Environment. The University of Arizona, USA.

The Body of/at Work

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The Body of/at Work

The Body of/at Work, Elena Cologni, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 2021

The Body of/at Work series of situated interventions was premiered at resilient communities, Italian Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, on 5th June 2021 in conjunction with the exhibition Elena Cologni. Pratiche di cura, o del cur(v)are, curator Gabi Scardi May 17 – July 4, 2021, at Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Palazzetto Tito, Venice

This is part of an ongoing project including a series of public interventions (and relevant publications). These take place in different locations referring to the social history of places and architecture of women labour in relation to cloth, mostly in preindustrial times, when the body was central to labour. These places include laundries and washhouses, and factories, but also public spaces where some of these works took place. The project looks at including: the concept of the threshold between public and private; the relationship with places of labour; the body as a measuring instrument.

The details of which can be found here https://elenacologni.com/projects/the-body-of-at-work/

Morning Toilette

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Morning Toilette, at Tate Modern, London (2001)

Morning Toilette, Elena Cologni, 2001 (Video Live Installation, sills from installation view , left, from pre-recorded video, right),Tate Modern, London

Morning Toilette, Elena Cologni, 2002 (5 monitor video installation), Lethaby Gallery, London

Morning Toilette was first presented in a format that I defined as Video Live Installation, at Tate Modern, in the context of a ‘Fine Art Research Network’ (FARN) event: ‘Experience of Space’ on 19th March 2001.

From my PhD thesis:

In this work, the action of washing the face applying make-up, a ritual in a woman’s daily routine. I documented the action on five mornings and, although I have not timed myself, the shots are similar in length, between 12 and 14 minutes. I then started to look at the recordings and noticed the little differences in the same pattern of the acts constituting my quotidian morning toilette. The first set of acts a rewashing the face, applying tonic lotion and moisturising cream, brushing teeth; the second set of acts are applying make-up on the skin and the mouth. Focusing on such ordinary actions repeated everyday in front of the mirror – here replaced by the camera- made me consider the relationship between myself and the image of myself that I see mirrored while applying the mask and also what to repete an action means.

…

Performance to me is a symbolic and cathartic action which can be read at different levels, but the result of which depends on its genuinety…

The repetition of a performance so far has always been a different experience for me who was interacting with a different environment or audience, but while performing I was also detaching myself from the environment and getting in touch with my inner side. As a consequence, the performance worked to me because I felt that it had an effect on myself and therefore the audience […]’

Cologni, E (PhD thesis, 2004) The artist’s performative practice within the anti-ocularcentric discourse

University of the Arts London

ISNI: 0000 0001 3560 8938

https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.413242

…AND ENCOUNTER

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…AND ENCOUNTER

by Elena Cologni

curator Eliza Gluckman, assistants Maria Azcoitia and Seana Wilson

Women’s Art Collection (then New Hall Art Collection) at Murray Edwards College of the University of Cambridge

20 October 2017- 7th of January 2018

This was one of the outcomes of the project Seeds of Attachment developed in collaboration with Prof Susan Golombok, then Director of the Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge, and Dr Robbie Duschinsky Head of the Applied Social Science Group, University of Cambridge.

Exhibition view

45C5F671-AC0F-4301-A11D-4139F7F842C8

Margaret Lowenfeld Mosaic Test
Box (1938) book and record forms (1954)
Courtesy Margaret Lowenfeld Library, Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge

22552709_10154947174096367_2470143010054261783_n

339282.580645 Barleycorns Away…
Installation: collages on paper, wooded shelves and fabric

Untitled (Prop) , Plywood and fabric, 100 x 100 x 2 cm closed / 200×300 cm open

During a residency at the Margaret Lowenfeld Library, Centre for Family Research University of Cambridge, to devise a strategy for engagement, artist Elena Cologni developed a nomadic and dialogic sculpture inspired by the Margaret Lowenfeld’s Mosaic Test box and related book (1954). The prop was used in a series of encounters in the city over the period of a year under the umbrella project Seeds of Attachment.

The exhibition … And Encounter marks the conclusion of the project in the UK, and includes the sculpture, together with traces of the process in the form of drawings, collages, and constructions.

Cologni’s artistic research and interdisciplinary approach explored the bond between parent and child, in relation to the experience of place attachment.

While Cologni set out to investigate the emotional, psycho-geographical condition of motherhood, the work also highlighted the crucial role of non-linguistic forms of dialogue at the core of processes of identity construction, and in relation to place.

The exhibition includes traces of the process adopted by the artist and the nomadic dialogic sculpture inspired by the Margaret Lowenfeld’s Mosaic Test box and book (1954), also on view, courtesy of the Lowenfeld Library, Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge. The prop was used in a series of encounters in the city over the period of a year under the umbrella project ‘Seeds of Attachment‘.

Also New Hall Collection Curator Eliza Gluckman oversaw Assistant Curators Maria Azcoitia and Seana Wilson selecting works from the collection, specifically to contextualise Cologni’s project into ecofeminism. Looking to ideas of ecology, the mother, place and identity, on display are pieces by Monica Sjoo, Judith Tucker, Mary Cassatt, Celia Paul.

Further material: video essay by Cologni on research background here and 8 minutes interview with Phil Sansom here

Exhibition events include

Nomadic and Dialogic: Art and Ecofeminism, New Hall Collection at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge

20 October 2017

The round table, part of the Festival of Ideas in Cambridge , was chaired by New Hall Curator Eliza Gluckman, with artist Elena Cologni, author Susan Buckingham and Murray Edwards’ fellow Jenny Bavidge. It positions motherhood in relation to ecofeminism, ‘deep’ environmentalism, the caring role devalued in neo-liberal societies, to discuss the space between us, inter-corporeal space, micropolitics and haptic communication. (Edited video recording available here)

Attachment & Intraplaces: Discussing a Nomadic and Dialogic Approach in Spatialized Art Practice, Freud Museum, London

Artist Talk by Elena Cologni introduced by Curator Jamie Reurs on 21 January, 2018

Plate No. 11, Elena Cologni (2017/18), from the series Intraplaces

On the research background of Cologni’s artistic project Seeds of Attachment, which looks into the attachment between parent and child (Ainsworth, 1973; Bowlby, 1969; Freud, A.,1967) as crucial to place attachment (Seamon, D., 2013). We get attached to a place through our attachment to our family (Gordon Jack, 2010), but how troubling can it be to be detached from a place and our loved ones (Bowlby, 1998)?

Cologni attempts to investigate this through the adoption of a nomadic (Braidotti) and dialogic sculpture though a non-verbal approach, she designed based on the principles of the Margaret Lowenfeld Mosaic Box (1954). Aspects of this process were exhibited at New Hall Art Collection at Murray Edwards College of the University of Cambridge, for which she developed the series ‘Intraplaces’.

Intraplaces: Dialogues without words, Freud Museum, London

Elena Cologni facilitates an active engagement, followed by a discussion with ecofeminist geographer Susan Buckingham, 15 September 2018

Cologni has previously discussed at the Freud Museum the research background of her artistic project ‘Seeds of Attachment’ (2016/18), looking into the attachment between parent and child (Freud, A.,1967; Ainsworth, 1973; Bowlby, 1969) as crucial to place attachment (Seamon, D., 2013). Cologni brings the dialogic sculpture into the museums gardens to facilitate its activation with participants and to discuss its possible implications with Buckingham. This is done by considering issues of ecology, feminism and place, ad to ground the definition of ‘Intraplaces’.

The active engagement at the Freud Museum concludes a series of encounters in London’s public spaces, the implications of which are then discussed with author Susan Buckingham, whose research and publications address gender and environmental issues.

Museum Curator Jamie Reurs wrote:

Seeds of Attachment is timely because it transcends the difficulties and bypasses issues of misunderstanding. The artwork seems to acknowledge the gendered nature of language by accenting a different way of bonding. We are not bound to the rules of language, we are not limited by culture or geography. Language can be linked to a geographical place or a certain culture and, as we have seen, it is limited by the gendered social order. This detail of Seeds of Attachment, seemingly minute is representative of major themes in the work.

Seeds of Attachment, humble in its make-up, is a sophisticated example of the visual arts transcending the confines of language. It possesses a universality that transgresses the social order and the gender bias of this discourse. It is capable of evoking more than what is said, written, emailed or texted. Instead, you feel it, you experience it, and it is liberating.

Relevant background

Cologni’s in(ter)disciplinary research approach with a consistent interest in artist/audience/participant relational and perceptual dynamics has been centered around memory in the present for sometime, and in collaboration with academics (psychology, philosophy, cognitive science). Relevant projects include Present Memory and Liveness in Delivery and Reception of Video Documentation During Perfornance Art Events (AHRC funded 2004/06) in collaboration with Thomas Suddendorf, on ideas of mirror self-recognition using video delays; based on same issues, RE-MOVED, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (ACE funded 2008); GEOMEMOS, Yorkshire Scukpture Park (ACE 2009); rockfluid in collaboration with Prof Lisa Saksida, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, when a more specific interest in place in relation to memory is addressed, including the live installation Spa(e)cious (Wysing Arts Centre, MK Gallery, Bergamo Scienza) related to James Williams’ concept of Specious Present (various Arts Council England grants 2011/); more recently Lived Dialectics, Movement and Rest at MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, was developed in dialogue with David Seamon and on place attachment (discussed at the Leonardo Laser series of talks in London).

prizes

The ROYAL SOCIETY FOR PUBLIC HEALTH (RSPH) in collaboration with the Royal Society of Sculptors awards Elena Cologni with the first prize of ‘The Shape of the Public’s Health’ (2019) for the sculpture untitled (prop) in Seeds of Attachment !!!, details in the link

Dr Ranjita Dhital, Committee member of the RSPH Arts, Health and Wellbeing Special Interest Group states:

‘Elena Cologni’s award winning sculpture Prop, seeds of attachment expresses the importance of space in public health. Particularly spaces which promotes meaningful communication about both the physical and emotional aspects of health. The vibrant purple and its soft sheen fabric are inviting and draws you into its positive energy.’

and also the Centre for Family Research (University of Cambridge) stated:

‘We were delighted to learn that Elena Cologni’s sculpture, in Seeds of Attachment,
inspired by the Centre’s Margaret Lowenfeld Library while she was an artist-in-residence
with us in 2016, won first prize in the joint Royal Society of Sculptors/Society for Public
Health competition. The Centre is currently making further forays into the art world. We are
especially excited by our collaboration with the Fitzwilliam Museum on an exhibition on the
family, scheduled to open in October 2022’

https://www.cfr.cam.ac.uk/files/centre_for_family_research_annual_report_2018-2019.pdf (p.10)

exhibitions

Project statements section show in PARALLEL VIENNA Sept. 24th–29th curated by Gulsen Bal and Walter Seidl Open Space, Vienna

‘The Shape of the Public’s Health’ prize show at ROYAL SOCIETY FOR PUBLIC HEALTH with the other shortlisted artists including Steve Hines and Lucy Glenndining, details in the link

PARALLEL LINES: Drawing and Sculpture, group show curators Jo Baring and Caroline Worthington (The Ingram Collection + Royal Society of Sculptors), 22 June – 25 August 2019, The Lightbox, Woking.

conferences/presentations/workshops

On Care, And Finding The Cur(V)E. A Geography of Difference Through Caring, performance, in Ecologies of Care: Feminist Activism panel curator Basia Sliwinskal, 108TH CAA ANNUAL CONFERENCE, Chicago, February 12–15, 2020

On Care, and Finding the Cur(v)e. A Geometry of Difference Through Caring, two-part workshop in The Paradox European Fine Art Biennial forum Art Future / Future Signs 2019 in Riga, Latvia, program

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Prof Susan Golombok Director Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge, and Dr Robbie Duschinsky Head of the Applied Social Science Group, University of Cambridge, who supported and advised on the scientific aspect of the project. Thanks to New Hall Collection Curator Eliza Gluckman for her incredible support, Maria and Seanna, and the participants for having entrusted the artist with their invaluable input.

‘Seeds of Attachment’ is funded by Grants for the Arts, Arts Council England.

It was supported by Art Language Location, Anglia Ruskin University; Lowenfeld Library, Centre for Family Research University of Cambridge; New Hall Collection at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge; Eleanor Glanville Research Centre, University of Lincoln; Freud Museum London.

images courtesy of New Hall Collection at Murray Edwards College of the University of Cambridge, and the Margaret Lowenfeld Library, Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge

STRUCTURing SUPPORT

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STRUCTURing SUPPORT

Visions at The Nunnery, London

STRUCTURing SUPPORT, instructions drawing (2016) Elena Cologni, graphite on Moleskin paper

Documentation Images by Orlando

This is to be intended as a work in progress where the performers/facilitators would feedback on their physical and psychological experience proposed.

This piece evolved from a previous work, and is on an ongoing interest in place attachment, an issue I have been working on for sometime. Within this the way we move through space while navigating it to produce meaning and ‘place’, to know it from a phenomenological viewpoint, and in relation to others is what interests me.

Instructions for facilitators:
On Thursday evening you will be given simple props. You will adopt a simple modular movement, in order to move from one end of the dedicated space in a group of 4 performers per every one structure – there are two available for the performance on Thursday. The two structures can be experienced one after the other, eg. when 4 performers with structure n°1 start from one end of the space and move towards the other end, the other 4 will start with structure n°2 to follow the same journey, slowly.

The structure is a 3part folded light object, 180 cm which opens to become 540 cm. The movement in three positions include: close, 45° open, 90° open, see sketch above.

The performers are positioned at the ends of the sections of the structure and support the structure itself with their abdomen, and applying pressure towards the other performers, while moving.

The performers devise a system to navigate the space while applying enough pressure to keep the prop up. Devising good group dynamics is central, and I cannot indicate how that might happen: its up to you!! The performance requires concentration and physical strength.

Please wear black stuff, I shall also provide black padded fabric belts you can wear around your waist

It’s a durational piece about 2 hrs (with pauses )

FEEDBACK

”The performance was easy enough in my experience.
I would have liked if there would have been another 4 performers so that it could have been more complex and interesting to evolve within the space when moving 2 structures. I also think it could have more of a visual presence. It worked for 4 however. Perhaps a belt that would allow for a better fixing to the body could help performers to focus on the movements and possibilities that arise more than we did. Sometimes we would work together, sometimes we created more difficulty for ourselves or one individual amongst us, other times we would attempt to help one another or the group to help one. We started to find a sort of balance in a sideway walk that developed by itself as we repeated and experimented various steps and areas within the space. I became very much interested in our level of connection, direct and indirect ones; sometimes being affected by the smallest move of one or more of us and sometimes not at all by any moves except one’s own.
I could also see and feel gender related relations being evoked and put in various arrangements although the main one was that women were one side and men the other, each of the 2 groups coming very near or very apart its specific members as we moved”. (Ludovic )

“I felt the spatial dynamics of the implications and of site and gender and their overt and subtle power shifts came to mind, especially being of balanced gender and the site of the Nunnery dark alleyway. It would be interesting to re-perform this with different gender groups in different locations/spaces and see if audiences pick up on this. The most difficult part was not letting the structure fall from our fronts – the balancing act between our stomachs, the black belts and the wood wasn’t the easiest, however I feel you wouldn’t want to make the wood integrated with the belts, but the tensions and dynamics are disrupted when the structure falls – but this all feels part of it(?) There were interesting moments when two of the performers on one side would come to support the other in tight spots or pass the structure over to the other if the balancing act was likely to fall.” (Sebastian)

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

Programme 3 Launch Event of the Visions at The Nunnery 2016

Date: Thursday, December 1, 2016
Address: The Nunnery, 181 Bow Road, London E3 2SJ
Time: 6-9pm
The final Visions programme will launch on the last First Thursday of 2016 with five live performances, including an exclusively new and live performance from Richard Layzell that will start at 6:30pm, as well as Elena Cologni, Marina Moreno and Tony White and Raluca Croitoru and Mikio Saito from the Unnoticed Art Festival, with a new installation Hey You! by Tessa Garland, a film about control and the power of information. Whose watching who now?

Programme 3 will explore digital worlds, utopias and dystopias, with artists including Adriana Amodei, Sandra Araújo, Ulu Braun, Carla Chan, Milo Creese, Sandra Crisp, Raluca Croitoru, Dennis & Debbie Club, Nina Danino, DMK (Davies, Monaghan, Klein), Valentina Ferrandes, Tessa Garland, Heidi Kilpeläinen, Lawrence Lek, Allie Litherland, Jonathon Monaghan, Marina Moreno, Chris Paul Daniels, Mikio Saito, Mauricio Sanhueza, PolakVanBekkum, Schellekens, Zeljko Vidovic and Tony White.

Curated by Cinzia Cremona and Tessa Garland, Visions 2016 showcases over 100 international artists’ work through an innovative six-part programme, including artists Marina Abramović, Ori Gersht, Susan Hiller, Mikhail Karikis, Richard Layzell and Uriel Orlow. 12 events punctuate the programme, featuring live performances in the gallery, Carmelite Café and Bow Arts’ unique Victorian enclosed courtyard. View the full programme here

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Cinzia, Tessa, Ludovic, Sebastian, Lynn, Orlando

LIVED DIALECTICS, MOVEMENT AND REST

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LIVED DIALECTICS, MOVEMENT AND REST (1 & 2)

Eidotipo a, 2016, site responsive drawing (indian ink and graphite on tracing paper)

#1, dialogic site responsive action: MuseumsQuartier, Vienna courtyard 7, in front of AZW (2 facilitators + elastic band, variable duration)

#2, dialogic site responsive action: to walk from MuseumsQuartier, Vienna courtyard 7 (in front of AZW) to Burgtor/ Heldenplatz (2 facilitators + wooden strauctures + balloons, variable duration)

Curated by Gülsen Bal and Walter Seidl

Performance: 27 July 2016
Venue: stroll from MuseumsQuartier, Vienna courtyard 7 (in front of AZW) to Burgtor/ Heldenplatz

“…a pre-reflexive corporeal awareness manifested through everyday’s gestures and behaviors and typically in synch with the spatial and physical environment in which the action unfolds….bodily routines as contributing to the lived dimensions of place, including attachment grounded in habitual regularity… the simple act of walking with its movement and rest patterns….” Webcast available here

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

The work was developed during a residency at Q21, Museums Quartier, Vienna and produced by Q21 and Frei_Raum, Architekturzentrum Wienand MuseumsQuartier Wien, Austria.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Q21 director Elisabeth Hajek and to the support team: Lisa Ribar, Suchart Wannaset, Kai Trausenegger, score interpreted by facilitators: Daliah Breit and Kaan Ertaylan, filming: Suchard Wannaset.

Frei_Raum, Architekturzentrum Wien and MuseumsQuartier Wien, Austria

RELATED TALKS

– Indisciplined, London LASER program of talks at University of the Arts London on the in(ter)disciplinary approach in my work, on 23 October 2016; London LASER is hosted by University of the Arts London (Central Saint Martins MA Art and Science) and University of Westminster (Imaging Art and Science programmes) and supported by LENS Community of Practice at UAL and CREAM at Westminster. LASER is a project of Leonardo® /ISAST (the International Society for Art, Science and Technology). London LASER is organised by Heather Barnett and co-chaired with John R A Smith. Webcast available here l

– Locating oneself. lived dialectics, movement and rest through Art, part of the The New and History – art*science 2017 Conference in Bologna , to contextualise my artistic research, also encompassing phenomenology and environmental psychology, and now The New and History – art*science 2017/Leonardo 50 Proceedings book is out. This, published by Noema Media & Publishing, collects the proceedings of art*science 2017/Leonardo 50 conference.

GROPIUS’ OFF-CUTS

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GROPIUS’ OFF-CUTS

in the exhibition ‘A Modernity Which Forgets’ with Curator Cristina Bogdan’s Education between Modernist Walls, part of the Festival of Ideas, Cambridge 2015, and outcome of the project Gropius’ Impington.

Most of the research for the exhibition focused on the historical moment of the Chivers’ family farm and jam business funding the Gropius’ project by donating the land and paying for part of its design by the Bauhaus Architect, with the condition that the education programme would be open to its workers. In particular by looking for more information about who they might have been, it became apparent how such an important business in the interwar period attracted people from around the region, country as well as overseas. In a journal published by the Chivers’ business a series of anecdots form a picture of a community created around the business, the identity of each person defined by their position within it. The war was also inevitably cause of growth for the local population as evacuees from London and Europe found their home in Impington, some 7000 children were sent to leave London a portion of whom came to find a new home in the coutryside, and study in Impington. But a lot of the information about their identities is missing, from the historical archives, like mnemonic lacunae.

During the Cambridge Festival of Ideas (2015) the program Cologni devised Gropius’ Impington, modernism and power, art and the rural opens up a debate on the importance of the connection between people and places, and the construction of memory, cultural (monuments) and communicative memory (live interaction, Assman). According to Paul Connerton (2009) this connection may be institutionalised, as in the case of the memorial monuments, such as architecture, but it is in often apparently anonymous places, experienced through the individual’s and everyday’s bodily actions that the individual’s memory’s grid is founded. Through the memories that these places evoke the individual can domesticate the surrounding world. However, Modernity has imposed a frantic pace to the transformation of human environments. The result is that memorials and architecture last, but the common, anonymous places that are the individual’s loci of memory (Connerton 2009) are often altered beyond recognition. In particular, with the continuous process of urbanisation of the countryside, an abstract ideal of the rural is often nurtured by our memories of how familiar places used to be.

‘The paradox of a culture which manifests so many symptoms of hypermnesia and which yet at the same time is post-mnemonic is a paradox that is resolvable once we see the causal relationship between these two features. Our world is hypermnesic in many of its cultural manifestations, and post-mnenonic in the structures of the political economy. The cultural symptoms of hypermnesia are caused by a political-economic system which systemically generates a post-mnemonic culture – a Modernity which forgets.’

Gropius’ Offcuts, the sculptures as architecture off-cuts of unused spaces between the bay windows at the front of the Gropius building, occupy the space of a crouched body, and are moved around the site, as from her drawings.

Cologni’s response is symbolically in memory of all people whose nomadic way of living inevitably shows paradoxes like cherishing their memories, while also erasing part of them to make room for new ones in the encounter of a new place.

more here

Acknowledgements. This residency and project is being supported by: Impington Village College, The East Anglian Film Archive, Cambridge Central Library Special Collections, Chivers’ Pensioners Association Histon and Impington Viallage Association, CIAN University of Cambridge, Cambridge Festival of Ideas, funded through the Arts Council of England Grants for the Arts scheme.

Bauhaus and moral purpose: the very model of modern community schools article on the Guardian

THINKING THROUGH…at De La Warr Pavillion, Bexhill On Sea East Sussex

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/events/2019/sep/thinking-through-design-between-urban-and-rural

THINKING THROUGH…

IL SOFFIO (AT THE BACK OF MIND)

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IL SOFFIO (AT THE BACK OF MIND)

Tournai Cathedral, Belgium, Triennale of Fextile and Contemporary Art (2008)

Video live installation (280 mts of fabric, 4 books, graphite, 4 projectors, cctv system)

When I was approached by Catherine and Christian to propose a piece for the Cathedral and went to see it, it was overwhelming. I kept my eyes on the pattern of the floor tiles, as safety net. Just like we do in life: we need something to hang onto. A lot of the times it is a constructed philosophical architecture, like religion, other times we adopt a recipe for a do-it-yourself sort of reference structure. I was told to do maths when I get anxious. Either ways, there is a common element, a meeting point: the obsession expressed in repetition, modularity … which is ritual.

Action

I roll in the red fabric repeating:

nero, nero, bianco (black black white)

through the 67 mts long transept while a camera films my movement from my forehead. The live films is projected back onto the fabric. The end of the fabric is attached at the opposite side from where I start. When I arrive at the other side I take the fabric back with me by rolling my body in it. I stop when there is no more fabric, in the middle of the transept, I stand and spin to free my body from the fabric. I go back to where I started. I roll again till I come to the centre of the Transept and take the fabric around my body again, back to where I started. A pile of the red material has formed at the bottom of the structure where the whole composition starts. Ready for the next performance.

I drew the floor tiles pattern (two black and one white) in 4 books which were positioned on the first floor corridor of the Norman nave. The audience walking through were followed by video shadows projected onto the fabric in the opposite corridor

CONTEXT

Triennale Internationale des Arts du Tissus et de la Tapisserie, Tournai, Belgium.

http://www.notele.be/list13-le-jt-a-la-carte-media2330-vernissage-triennale-2008-aux-beaux-arts-et-cathedrale-14-06-08.html

http://www.notele.be/list95-transart-media2432-puls-24-06-08.html

Traces of the project were exhibited at Wysing Arts Centre in the exhibition Performed (17 May — 28 June 2009), artists: Elena Cologni, Simon Davenport, RJ Hinrichsen, Andy Holden, Katherine Hymers, Olga Jurgenson, CJ Mahony, Rob Smith, Townley and Bradby, Mark Wilsher.

A one day symposium on performance and contemporary art practice (30 May), accompanied the exhibition. This was chaired by Dr. Gavin Butt of uGoldsmith College, with invited speakers artists Mel Brimfield & Elena Cologni, Dr Amelia Jones, then Professor in Art History, Manchester University Kathy Noble, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My warm thank you to Vianney, Maxime, Vivien , Philippe, Sylvain, Eric, all the hands, minds and hearts involved, and to Christian, Catherine and Dominique for not saying no…

LO SCARTO

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LO SCARTO

‘We tend to go through places without inhabiting them. The project tries to offer people the opportunity to understand that the space between us, as well as that around us, and its history belong to us, even if we inhabit them only for a short amount of time. The awareness of one’s own identity in relation to one’s own place must be cherished and nurtured’ .

Elena

40 sculptures for hands (7 x 12/15 cm) + 10 drawings (28 x 35 cm) + 10 wooden studs (240 x 6 x 4 cm) + workshops

more details here

related publication

Cologni, E., ‘Reciprocal Maieutics: An Approach For The Artist As Interface In Intercultural Society’ (2015), in International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research, London, New York, Routledge Publishing

Acknowledgements. Funded by Unesco and European funding through IArt, supported by: CLAC, Museo Civico Selinuntino and Comune of Castelvetrano Selinunte, CRESM, Belice Epicentro della Memoria Viva Gibellina, la Rete Museale e Naturale Belicina, Liceo Classico Giovanni Pantaleo and the ‘Akkademia del Teatro Selinus, as well as all people who gave their time, passion, dedication, culture and experience thus activating the exchange vital for the realization of the project

NAVIGATION DIAGRAMS

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NAVIGATION DIAGRAMS

2013, site specific performative outdoor installation (100×100 cm x variable, 14 sculptures, plywood, caster wheels, solid wood)

MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, curator Simon Wright

THE PIECE

The public is provided with a set of parameters and props to navigate the space opposite the gallery. One word on each platform from the sentence:

is city a place for trust is trust a place in the city

Navigation Diagrams, is city a place for trust is trust a place in the city, (19×21 cm, graphite and ink on paper + inkjet print)

Trust is also a central issue in participatory projects based on dialogic approaches. The public is provided with 14 unbalanced platforms to navigate the space opposite the gallery. Their action in space and interaction with each other create meanings within the context. The exercise creates the physical and psychological conditions to enhance an awareness of the perception the body in space and interaction of the participants with each other to create meanings within the given context. Cologni was here introduced by Caterina Albano.

see the related documentation on vimeo

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

This is the final outcome or a series after a period of interaction with the people of Milton Keynes within the umbrella production project rockfluid. In the project (from a residency at the) Faculty of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge University, memory is considered in its ‘fluid’ and ‘solid’ states, as Dr Lisa Saksida suggests referring to the recollection of events. Memory in its archival state would be solid, and, when in the process of resurfacing would be fluid.

In this sense this transitional quality of memory can be a metaphor of Cologni’s way of working, as she considers art in a similar way, neither only matter related, nor only ephemeral: its manifestations can vary and feed into each other.

In RockFluid the artistic activities aim at looking at how places influence the way we remember and who we are. This includes a series of interconnected tours, map drawings, urban interventions, in different places in and outside the UK. Dealing with the relationship among perception, personal and social memory, and various ways of understanding place, it has involved the public throughout in the making and delivering of its outcomes.

RELATED PUBLICATIONS:

Calvi, L. (2013) A Performance-based Approach For Interactions In Public Spaces, volume 10, issue 2, November, Participation, Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, NHTV University of Applied Sciences, Breda, The Netherlands.

MK Calling, Catalogue, MK gallery, 2013

mkgallery.org/events/2013_07_04/scratch_night/

https://mkgallery.org/event/mk-calling-2013/

rockfluid.com/navigation-diagrams

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Supported by MK Gallery, AA2A at the University of Hertfordshire, School of Art, funded by Grants for the Art, Arts Council England, produced by rockfluid, documentation credits: MK Gallery and Charlotte Nichol

U VERRUZZE’ (BALANCING)

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U VERRUZZE’ (BALANCING)

DOPPELGAENGER 7/27 March 2014

including drawings, sculptures and a textile installation

From the press release

Balancing is the second phase of a site specific project developed in the context Radio Materiality, curated by cultural association Vessel in Bari in the summer of 2013. For the latter, the artist engaged through dialogues with mums living and working in the city, instrumental for an investigation into the sociological aspect of the notion of trust. The dialogues, translated in a collection of sound documents, have been presented at the Athens Biennale in 2013. The second phase, brings various elements of the project together as a performative installation. The artist has realized ten custom made wooded spin tops with a graphite finished point. The spintop – in the local jargon ‘Virruzzo’ – better than any other object represents a tension towards an alterable balance, never still, just like the one between a mother and her own child. The public will be able to participate in the performance as a game, allowing the spintops to draw their journey down a fabric made slide Cologni will construct on the two flights of the staircase in the Gallery. The project Balancing is manifestation of, and search for, equilibrium at the same time. It points at a social realm in constant evolution, where that very balance becomes unstable and precarious. Within this context mothers act as axes of rotation for taking history forward in new terms

CONTEXT

Balancing is based on a series of dialogues between Elena Cologni and mothers based in Bari. The project’s research was part of Vessel’s curatorial and artistic process of investigation Radio Materiality, started in 2012. At the heart of this is the European Mediterranean area, with the geopolitical and social dynamics. The Apulia region, more specifically Bari, is the starting point for a dialogue expanding on notions of sameness, proximity, conflicts and distances. A project opening up through narratives and alternative self referential stories, other’s voices at times discordant with the dominating discourse: voices of women, mothers, migrants, and from diverse sexual orientation too. All of these define a multi-centric and fragmentary landscape. The radio thus becomes a metaphor for a collective of diverse voices from individuals. This happens within a process of re-appropriation of the discourse and the ‘word’ therein, the very concept of expressing oneself

PUBLICATIONS

Balancing (Catalogue), Doppelgaenger Gallery, 2014

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.

The project was supported by Arts Council of England, and VESSEL, Bari. The exhibition has been sponsored by Carvico SPA (www.carvico.com)

SPA(E)CIOUS

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SPA(E)CIOUS

2012, at Wysing Arts Centre, curated by Elionor Morgan with participants (here Becky, Elionor, Elisabeth and others) event of exhibition Wysing Arts Contemporary: Recollect

Helena Blaker in coversation with Elena Cologni at Wysing Arts Centre

2012, MK Gallery, Curator Simon Wright

2013, Bergamo Scienza, Italy, in conversation with Caterina Albano

THE PIECE

This event is based on the multidisciplinary approach of Elena Cologni’s project Rockfluid (Cambridge University, Faculty of Experimental Psychology, funded by Arts Council England 2011/13) where site specific art practice is underpinned by aspects of geography, cognitive psychology and philosophy.

To walk through places involves kinaesthesia, memory and our awareness of where we are in any given present moment. SPA(E)CIOUS is a form of collaborative peripatetic practice, where produced and shared knowledge informs the artist’s creative process. For participants, it creates the physical and psychological conditions to enhance an awareness of the perception – and illusion – of time and space in the present. Cologni inserts a variable element of interference in our experience, which varies every time Spa(e)cious takes place (e.g. an unstable platform). As the series develops from this, a dialogue with art critic and film maker Helena Blaker also shapes the contextualisation of the outcomes.

Consciousness Literature and the Arts Conference, University of Lincoln, 2013

The project was also presented at Draw to Perform 3 (2016), curated by Ram Ramocha https://drawtoperform.com/draw-to-perform-page/draw-to-perform3/

THE CONTEXT

First presented at, How Performance Thinks Conference in 2012 (PSi Performance and Philosophy working group and Kingston University Practice Research Group), as a practical investigation of overlapping aspects of Philosophy and Psychology with Art, it was then presented in Art Museums and Gallery as well as a hybrid format.

SPA(E)CIOUS, is one of the outcomes of the project ROCKFLUID. This develops from a residency at the Faculty of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge (since March 2011), with a collaboration with scientist Lisa Saksida, with whom Elena shared a research interest in the relationship between memory and

perception. The dialogue evolved and is highlighted by open events in front of an audience (e.g. Science Festival 2011, Science Festival 2012 chaired by Caterina Albano), to inform the artist’s creative process

PUBLICATIONS

Cologni, E., SPA(E)CIOUS PRESENT, Dynamics of collective and individual experiences of space and duration within specious present, adopting technologies for enhancing audience engagement, while producing forms of documentation, in ed. Julia Minors, How Perfomance Thinks conference-performance-thinks-proceedings

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Arts Council England

University of Cambridge

Rockfluid

Idrodepur

MNEMONIC PRESENT, UN-FOLDING

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Mnemonic Present, Un-Folding #3, 2005, video live installation (3 projectors + 1 live video feed+ 2 video delay video feed + 3 screens + paper + 2 trestles) Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy

This is one of the two versions of the piece presented in 9 venues, and part of the project PRESENT MEMORY AND LIVENESS IN DELIVERY AND RECEPTION OF VIDEO DOCUMENTATION DURING PERFORMANCE ART EVENTS, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and conducted as post doctoral Research Fellow at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London.

Dealing with the presentness of memory through recollection in relation to technology long before today’s technology forces us to do so.

List of the Performances

Mnemonic Present, Un-Folding # 1, ‘Performance Studies international # 11, Becoming Uncomfortable’, Brown University, Providence, RI (USA), 2005.

Mnemonic Present, Un-Folding # 2, ‘International Conference Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts’, Aberystwyth, Wales, UK, 2005.

Mnemonic Present, Un-Folding # 3, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAMeC), Bergamo Italy, 2005

Mnemonic Present, Un-Folding # 4, proposal per PARIP, Breton Hal Leeds University

Mnemonic Present, Un-Folding # 5, ‘Diverse Attitudini’, a cura di BOArt, Villa delle Rose, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Bologna, Italy, 2005.

Mnemonic Present, Un-Folding # 6, ‘Transversalities: crossing disciplines, cultures and identities’, Departments of Film, Theatre & Television and Fine Art, University of Reading, 2005.

Mnemonic Present, Un-Folding # 7, ‘Warmhole Saloon’, curator Joel Cahen, Whitechapel Art Gallery London, 2006.

Mnemonic Present, Un-Folding # 8, in ‘Wonderful (Ibiscus section)’, Trieste, Italy, curator Maria Campitelli, June 2006

Mnemonic Present, Un-Folding # 9, Tapra Conference, Central School of Speech and Drama, London, October 2006

THE PIECE

action: I fold the paper, stop, recollect and describe places I lived in

projections: the three projections are live feed with a progression of 8 second delay

CONTEXT

…. #3 was presented and supported by Alessandro Rabottini and presented by Giacinto di Pietrantonio, then Director of the GAMeC Museum, who stated

‘Her work, combining various techniques and artistic practices, aims at analying the relationship between memory and past not only through the use of the sense of sight, but also trying to stimulate the multiplicity of the senses of our body, referring to the totality of the human being. A human being looking for the sense of life within the places of life, places activated or re-activated through art. In this sense, she belongs to that thread of research proposed by artists like Bruce Nauman, whom, in the relationship technique-body-action-psyche, wants to understand the essence of beings within a world where there is the need to reactivate archaic energies and react to the superficial society of spectacle’

EXTRACT

Performance Transcript (translation from Italian)

The spoken text (as is all following italics) alternates with the action:

the main entrance with a glass door and steel, the yellow glass door

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

As I walk in on the right a staircase two flights

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

Walking up the stairs, on the right a door to the bedrooms, through the door on the left a bedroom, on the right another one, on the left the bathroom and in front of me a bedroom

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

With an orange carpet, two beds very low in relation to this massive white wardrobe with golden reliefs

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

That wardrobe, before going to bed at night, would get enormous and I had the impression of it being like a wideangled photograph falling over me, it isn probably just a dream, and not even so

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

My bed was next to the window, my sister’s close to the door

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

Norsi Isola D’elba

At the top of the stairs a door to the left, as I walk in on the right the living room

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

Where the was a sofabed on the right the television, a table in the middle, a small balcony in front of it, then going tot eh left a room with two ..beds, three of us used to sleep in there

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

Walking out of our room on the left there was a bathroom and ahead my parents’ room with awindow onto the balcony with a beautiful seaview

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

77th Street Upper East Side

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

A three floor townhouse, walking in there is a staircase in front going tot the first floor, on the right hand side the entrance door,

As I walk in there is a large empty space, a folding bed in the corner, in front of me a door tp a bedroom without the bed and there is a bathroom,

on the left of this room there is a bowindow connected to the upper floor from where you can look down

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

This large room have green walls and to walk up to the upper floor one has to go out and walk up stairs where there is another big room which I believe is now the living room

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

I can’t remember the walls’ colour

Entering through the main door of the upper floor in front of it there is the kitchen,

a lot of space, my own space is tiny

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

Lincoln Square

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

A very tall building, as I walk in I go straight to the elevator andto the 8th floor, out of the elevator: on the right the main door, walking in on the left the very small kitchen with things I don’t know and in front the living room with a sofabed and a table for eating

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

On the left, no on the right of the hallway there is a bedroom with roughly half a metre around the bed and on the left…. there is the bathroom with shower curtains with ehhm… the shower has got a transparent plastic shower curtains with little fish and sea waves

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

Warren Street, Warren Street

A five floor townhouse with no lift, as I walk in the staircase is… red carpeted, walking up to the fifth floor, the door on the right, very small corridor, the first door on the left is the, the first on the right is a studio and bedroom,the second on the right is my bedroom, in i ton the left there is a fitted wardrobe with no doors, but a curtain hiding what’s behind, on the right a comfortable bed, and two windows overlooking the street, very noisy, walking out there is a living room with a kitchen

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

…a little old

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

Going back to my room from the living room and on the left there is a bookcase and two stones: one is a quartz and the other has got a blur which looks like a sunflower

Action: folding the stripe of paper from either sides

The above extracts are from the following Book

Cologni, E, ed, Mnemonic Present, Shifting Meaning, Mercurio Edizioni, Vercelli, 2009, introduction by Helena Blaker, texts from Amelia Jones, Kelina Gotman, Andrea Lissoni, Giacinto DiPietrantonio, Aurelio Andrighetto, Lib Taylor

further publications

Cologni, E. (2005).Fruition: perceptual time ‘gap’ as location for knowledge – Mnemonic Present Un-folding, Perspective section of Body, Space & Technology, (05)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Arts and Humanities Research Council (Grant for Creative and Performing Arts)

VIEWS FROM ABOVE

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VIEWS FROM ABOVE

Views from above, video installation (Northumberland Telescope) + text installation (3 paper publications, Hoyle Foyer library)

CONTEXT

‘Limits of Seeing – Views from Above & Below’ @Institute of Astronomy, Sat 23rd June 2012, organised by Visualise in collaboration with the Institute of Astronomy, the Science & Technology Faculty at Anglia Ruskin and Wysing Arts Centre. Participating artists will include heath bunting, Liliane Lijn, Marina Velez and Russell Cuthbert, Elena Cologni & Susie Olczak and participating scientists will include Dr Joao Linhares, Matilda Biba and Gerry Gilmore, Professor of Experimental Psychology, Institute of Astronomy.

Curated by Bronac Ferran, Carolin Crawford and Elinor Morgan.

PUBLICATIONS

Limits of Seeing, exhibition information , extract

Cologni claims (since her PhD, 2004) that her art research is part of the critique to the ocular-centric discourse within western philosophy, with reference to Martin Jay. Yet, the fascination she has for perception and its psychology, and geometry (all linked to the primacy of vision) is a recurring aspect in her enquiry. Her critical position is manifested through overturning given assumptions therein by adopting paradoxical formats,including: juxtaposing visual perception with physical positioning in space, drawing’proto-geometric’, non-exact shapes, setting up contradictory researchhypotheses. In this context ‘views form above’ is linked to her current project ROCKFLUID,residency at the Faculty of Experimental Psychology, Cambridge University, and it is built around a need to make the viewer aware of the space proximal to the body. This in relation to a technology driven life where most of us become increasingly familiar with (and hooked into) the views form above (GPS, Google earth,NASA satellites). A way to feel in control, by locating ourselves in the world,which Cologni parallels to renaissance perspective systems, whereby the central focus perspective represents man, but also God, the eye is God. Telescopes were built applying optics and perception studies and while telescopes offer a ‘view from below’ outwards in the universe Cologni’s work creates a critical context where the above connections become apparent.

GEOMEMOS

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GEOMEMOS

is the outcome of a residency at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2009. The resulting drawings and related sculptures are based on various maps of the place, and mark the process to devise a route for the performance journey and those elements brought into the conversation, to generate an overlapping of physical and conceptual contexts. The one to one performances can therefore also be seen as the act of drawing in the landscape as artist and audience move through it. More details here.

Conversation drawings: possibilities, (graphite on paper, 35×50 cms)

stills form video documentation

Conversations (open) (series of 10, graphite on paper, 60 x 80 cms)

Conversations (open), balsa wood (series of 10, 6 x 15 cms)

Acknowledgements. Many Thanks to Oliver Brown for liaising with the participants and supporting the project throughout; to the participants: Anna, Angie, Alan, Jo, John, Jeremy, Lesley, Lewis, Libby, Sally; rickshaw: Francis.

Geomemos was awarded the Grants for the Arts and supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, the Heritage Lottery Fund, York Saint John University and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

RE-MOVED

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RE-MOVED

2008, Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow international 08, Glasgow

director Francis McKee

The installation was developed through the Creative Lab Residency (2006) and tested through open studios. Visitors were invited to engage with her through a one-to-one installation in which the audience actively participated in the construction of the work’s meaning, generating a collection of video portraits. This is a two way corridor structure for a one-to-one mediatised performative installation designed as a site specific by making sense of the history of the place and people it is presented to. The work’s meaning is constructed together with the audience’s participation in it. With the use of archival footage and video delays, it tries to capture people’s moment of self-awareness in the present, here constructed as layers of representation of time.

‘When we think of the present as what ought to be, it is no longer, and when we think of it as existing, it is already past…all perception is already memory’ (Henry Bergson, Matièr et mémoire, 166-167)

The work was based on research on the redevelopment of areas where once the Tenements Houses stood, the Gorbals area of Glasgow. They were taken down in the 80’s causing a tear in the city and collective memory. The research was carried out at the Scottish Screen Archive and Peoples Palace, were the installation was initially thought to be placed.

The final installation was presented at the Centre for Contemporary Art, part of the biannual Glasgow international 08, directed by Francis McKee

Structure and piece for CCA. The two way corridor structure shown in the pictures is for a one-to-one mediatised performative installation and is designed as a site specific by making sense of the history of the place and people it is presented to. The work’s meaning is constructed together with the audience’s participation in it. The interaction over a period of 3 days and the information recorded and played back. These will be between 12-1, 2-3, 4-5, 6-7, allowing for 4 people per hour (booking organised accordingly). The environment is an mdf/wood structure. Two small corridors of 1 x 2 mts each (2 mts high), the partition in the middle would have to raised from the floor of a couple of centimeters to allow for cabling to go through. The two corridors are: one for myself and one for a member of the public. We were sited in front of a screen connected to a camera recording and playing back our own delayed mirror image. At times this was interfered by selected footage about collapsing/rising buildings in Glasgow (National Library of Scotland and Scottish Screen Archive kindly provided video footage).

During the dialogue with a member of public I asked questions such as: what is memory? what are you looking at now? and they overlapped aspects of the past with their experience of the present.

Technical. The following equipment were used: 2 video cameras (high definition minidv), 2 monitors, 2 video delay systems, 1 dvr, 1 video switch, 1 video splitter. Microphones to record to cameras.

(installation view, stills from Scottish Screen Archive footage and video of participants)

“The recent experimentation of gaps, scotoma (in the visual field), apnea (of breathing), amnesia (gap in memory), time-gap (transmission), is introduced to allow the audience to participate in the event because, just like a spot on a blank page, we/audience fill it in with our brain/life experience/imagination. Process which, if contextualised in relation to the Baudrillian concept of punctum and the perceptual Kaniza effect (a perceptual gap is where the eye goes to compensate for a loss): it enables me to define a strategy for the creative process in which the designed perceptual lacuna asks to be filled in by audiences. These are adopted, implied and experienced in my work in relation to the condition within which they happen: in liveness as site for continuous present, where performance art and live installation interchange take place. I specifically use various digital technologies postulating that continuous present can be constructed by perceiving reality as collapsed layers of its representations and time (i.e.: memory, live documentation). In the Mnemonic Present series, Apnea and Re-Moved for example making the audience aware of the passing of time as they are experiencing it (time gap in video), by being faced with an element of past experience in the present, allowed them to participate in its construction; this also mirrors the everyday life condition of relating to the world by referring to our memory archive in the perception of reality, and ourselves, in any given moment.”

(from Cologni E, That spot in the ‘moving picture’ is you, (perception in time-based art), in Blood, Sweat & Theory: Research through Practice in Performance ed. John Freeman, Libri Publishing, London, 2010, pp. 83-107)

further documentation

http://www.gsa.ac.uk/research/contemporary-art-curating/the-glasgow-miracle-materials-towards-alternative-histories/

http://www.glasgowmiraclearchives.org/individual/elena-cologni/

About Glasgow International

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

https://1995-2015.undo.net/it/mostra/69543

POLLEN FORECAST: ANEMOFILA

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POLLEN FORECAST: ANEMOFILA

video live installation, 2006 (10 mnts, fabric + pigment + minidv + sound system, installation and performance views, and stills from live projection)

Territories of Duration, Karsi Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey 22 June – 19 July 2006
(with Cengiz Tekin, Dilek Winchester, Elena Cologni, Genco Gülan, Karl Ingar Røys, Nasan Tur, Shezad Dawood, Sophia Kosmaoglou, Turan Aksoy, curator Gulsen Bal)

THE PIECE
A long stripe of elastic cloth draws an arch in the performance space, the lowest part being kept off the floor, hanging from the opposite sides of the ceiling. In the middle of the space, on the floor beneath the white material a stripe of yellow powder. The artist abandons herself onto the canvas till this touches the floor and rolls on it, so that the canvas picks up the yellow dust as this continues. A background voice tell about recent research done on the origin of pollen on the holy shroud and its journey from Palestine, Turkey through Europe. There is no religious statement behind the work, but a conscious decision to work on traces of the roots of the artist’s culture, in an almost distant and detached way. And yet, by enacting such piece, the artist wants to find herself in the position of the person leaving a trace of a journey. Even if it’s a 15 minutes one. The technology employed allows the audience to view close ups of the action from viewpoints that the artist has selected. One of which is the artist’s own.

extract from the text in the installation:

The plants whose pollen is transported by wind are said to have “anemofila” pollination, and produce a higher quantity of pollen if compared to the species called “entomofile”, whose pollen is transported by insects. On the shroud there are better possibilities to find anemofilo pollen type than the entomofilo type. A study was conducted on the intrinsic characteristics of pollen including: dimension, shape and weight, and also the ones coming from plants of single territorial zones and their anemofilo aspect thus determining speed, direction and periodicity of winds. Once those information were collected, the next step was to compare the samples of the pollen taken form the shroud using special masking tapes. Two fundamental considerations are to be made: numerous entomofili type pollen typical from Palestine, Anatolia are present; whereas less numerous are the anemofili type pollen coming from central Europe. The results confirmed though, that the journey was from Palestine to Anatolia and Europe: Jerusalem 33, Constantinople 944, Lerey 1353, Chambery 1453, Turin 1578.

CONTEXT

The project curator Gulsen Bal brings forward artist responses by asking where borders and in-between spaces exist in trans-local and/or trans-national boundaries in re-locating European space in order to delineate dynamic answers to static structures.

In this context Territories of Duration explores the temporary mediation systems with its practical ramifications where the new ways of being in the world are re-read to follow unfamiliar routes by questioning ‘difference of identity’ and ‘difference’ which inhibits transitional interactions, and therefore it aims to create a cross-border dialogue at existential territorial boundaries within an interdisciplinary artistic approach.

For this group exhibition, Cengiz Tekin, Dilek Winchester, Elena Cologni, Genco Gülan, Karl Ingar Roys, Nasan Tur, Shezad Dawood, Sophia Kosmaoglou and Turan Aksoy have been invited to present works addressing the questions of new European space and articulation of re-building geographies.

related article Negotiating the In-Between? Karen Edwin, 19 July 2006 on MUTE

http://www.karsi.com/sergi_detay.php?id=72

AKNOWLEDGEMENTS

AUTORITRATTO – IN ASSENZA

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performance-for-camera,
action 1out of 3(1’36”), 3 stills from DVD, 30×40 each;
London 2004.

part of the exhibition LA POLVERE NELL’ARTE,
Curator Elio Grazioli,
Assab One, Milan, Italy,
July 2004 with artists:
MARINA BALLO CHARMET, VINCENZO CABIATI, GIANLUCA CODEGHINI, ELENA COLOGNI, GIULIO LACCHINI, MARCELLO MALOBERTI, EVA MARISALDI, AMEDEO MARTEGANI, PIERPAOLO PAGANO, LUCA PANCRAZZI, LUCA MARIA PATELLA, FRANCESCO SIMETI, LUCA VITONE, ITALO ZUFFI.

weblink

PUBLIC PRIVATE PERCEPTIONS

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PUBLIC PRIVATE PERCEPTION 02

2002, video live installation (1 live feed projection, one video projection) in solo show at neon campobase, Bologna, based on a previous version took place at Toynbee Studios, London, also shown as video installation at Lethaby Gallery, Central Saint Martins College, London

THE PIECE

It was developed as a reaction to the 9/11 media frenzy and marks a direction towards the local versus the global digital technology and 24/7 access to live information imposes in us. This piece was particularly driven by the urge to explore my immediate everyday’s surroundings (in the same period I produced a series on homes). At the time I wrote the following:

I explore the environment through touch, while being blindfolded, focusing on the possible new connections between touch and absence of vision, and associate a tactile sensation to colours, thus mapping the place. On show is one projection of a prerecorded action taken place in London, opposite to one projection of a live action taking place in a separate room.

CONTEXT

The overall context investigated in the work is the relationship body-environment: how this influences my perception of myself in delivering a piece. I believe that the awareness of the bodily experience (here through touch) of the environment enables me to reposition my self within a particular place. The apprehension is subject to the changing conditions of the context; from the juxtaposition of present and past action the space/time in between seems to arise as a possible answer.

The surfaces present certain characteristics that I try to visualise with my eyes blindfolded, and by saying colours I draw a map, neurological as well as one that indicates urban places.

The audience simultaneously in two projections perceives the two dimensions a relationship between two representations of myself in different dimensions of time and space takes place.

This body of work was developed to engage with issues of synaesthesia, the relationship of touch in relation to colour in the context of exploring a ‘memory mapping’ of the environment. The first version was presented as ‘Public Private Perceptions’ a video live installation, at Toynbee Studios, London, 2001. This was subsequently followed by a developed iteration at Galleria Neon, Bologna, Italy 2002, as an exhibition. This project also led to a paper: ‘Private action becoming public, a practical investigation of the performer’s reactions to the environment’, at Performance As Research In Practice Symposium, University of Bristol 10-11 November 2001. This symposium context allowed me to further investigate the relationship and interchange between myself as performer and a live audience. Key points to emerge here were the impact of a live audience and issues around documentation of the practice. A major outcome of these joint explorations and reflections was the positioning of the performative work within the philosophical Antiocular-centric discourse referred to in my doctorate work. The experience of myself, ‘knowing’ the space whilst blind-folded through the sensory medium of touch, had to be conducted in front of an audience. This action was contextualised in relation to the documentation (pre-recorded or live) of the same action happening in a space without an audience. My thoughts and working diary were collected in a publication together with other essays, to produce a collection of fragments based upon the findings of these inter-related explorations.

PUBLICATIONS

Cologni, E., ed. Public Private Perception 02, texts by Malcolm Le Grice, Marina Wallace, Elio Grazioli, Galleria Neon, Bologna 2002

EXTRACT

IMAGES OF KNOWING

by Marina Wallace

“I came to the fields and spacious palaces of memory, where are the treasures of innumerable images, brought into it from things of all sorts perceived by the senses. There are stored up,….either by enlarging or diminishing,…those things which the sense hath come to. ”

St Augustine, Confessions (357-400AD)

In response to the body of work and related research that comprises Elena Cologni’s video/live installation, “Public Private Perceptions” (2001-2002) – (originally performed at the Toynbee Theatre in London on 21^st of October 2001, and presented by the artist at the PARIP symposium at the University of Bristol, 10-11 November 2001 as a paper entitled ‘Private action becoming public. A practical investigation on the performer’s reactions to the environment’) – I shall reflect on memory, and consider its complex relationship with the five senses, particularly vis-à-vis images and vision. The subject is vast, and much has been written on it. Here, I only propose to offer some reflections, thinking about one of the crucial advances of the last century: the use of photography in art and in life.

Our memory of the visual world is fed by a wealth of images that populate our visual field. Some of these images are projections of “live” and “real” things, of the three-dimensional “moving” objects that occupy our world; some are two-dimensional renderings of “life”, they are transcriptions of the “real world” produced in various graphic forms and by different media, such as painting, film, and photography. Our emotional and psychological responses to two-dimensional images are quite different from those we have when looking at three-dimensional images. Equally, we react differently in front of moving or still images. Post-modern writing on the history and theory of photography and film, which had its heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, epitomised by Roland Barthes and Laura Mulvey, deconstructed the two related forms of art in relation to our perceptions, using, as a point of reference, psycho-analytical theories, from Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan. Here, I should like to proceed from premises that are more connected with the neuro-sciences, with our every day experiences, and with the artist’s point of view, than with the much cited post-constructivist writings on art theory.

“CLEAR AND WELL LIGHTED PLACES”

The common vocabulary now used to describe the operations of our minds is closely related to the terminology used for film and video, and, of course, computers. We “focus” on things, life events and their objects are “viewed”- sometimes in a “distorted” way – and they are “recorded” in our minds, “stored” up in our memory, and we “access” them by “scanning” our “mental filing system”. These terms give us the impression of being fully in control of what may seem an ordered and systematic process. However, as the neuro-scientist Antonio Damasio observed, “only a fraction of what goes on mentally is really clean enough and well lit enough to be noticed, and yet it is there, not far at all, and perhaps available if only you try.”[1] This “trying” is what forms so much of our wakefulness, and it is aided by an array of visual devices.

The “trying” was different in ancient times, in a world without printing, film, television or computers, when “artificial memory” techniques were used to aid the art of rhetoric (at least since Cicero’s time), and were linked to ideals of ethics and prudence. Memory was deemed to be a natural gift, that could be assisted by the especially constructed “art of memory”, a system based on a few rules, but requiring a great deal of exercise. [2] Within the particular context of a classical world, a world without an advertising industry based on a world-wide mass production of manipulated images, words themselves were considered to be highly important social and political tools, and had to be memorised. The “art of memory” was devised for this specific purpose. Martianus Capella, a pagan orator writing around 450 AD about the benefits of this newly formed art, stated that its great advantage was that it enabled words and things to be grasped quickly and firmly. Martianus distinguished between “memory for things, and memory for words”. However important, words were not always to be memorised, as this was felt to be a demanding skill for the human mind “Unless there is plenty of time for meditation, it will be sufficient to hold the ‘things’ themselves in memory, particularly if the memory is not naturally good.”[3]

ILLUSTRATION: Day with the genius of light, Bertel Thorvaldsen, 1815, marble, Thorvaldsen Museum, Copenhagen

It is interesting to note that metaphors used in the 21^st century to describe consciousness, are not dissimilar to those used in ancient days to describe memory. Damasio talks of “clear and well lit images”[4]. Useful rules for artificial memory, in classical times, included the visualisation of “well lighted places” (locis illustribus), filled with “images of things” (species rerum) and “striking agents” (imagines agentes), such as a memorable (human) figure in an unusual pose. Cicero speaks of images as “active” and “sharply defined”, setting them within what we can visualise in our modern minds as a sort of photographic studio:

“One must employ a large number of places which must be well lighted, clearly set out in order, at moderate intervals apart, and images which are active, sharply defined, unusual, and which have the power of speedily encountering and penetrating the mind.” Cicero, De Inventione…..

Damasio, writing about the extension of “core consciousness”, to which he refers as “extended consciousness”, describes two “tricks” which aid its emergence and storage:

“The first trick requires the gradual build up of memories of many instances of a special class of objects: the ‘objects’ of the organism’s biography, of our own life experience, as they unfolded in our past, illuminated by core consciousness. Once autobiographical memories are formed, they can be called up whenever any object is being processed. Each of those autobiographical memories is then treated by the brain as an object, each becoming an inducer of core consciousness, along with the particular non-self object that is being processed. ….The second trick consists of holding active, simultaneously and for a substantial amount of time, the images whose collection defines the autobiographical self and the image which defines the object. The reiterated components of the autobiographical self and the images whose collection defines the autobiographical self and the object are bathed in the feeling that arises in core consciousness.”

MIND AND LIGHT TRICKS

Thinking of objects and images that may aid the recall of our autobiographical self, it seems that photographs can be best suited at performing the second “trick” that Damasio describes: they hold active, simultaneously, and for a substantial amount of time the images whose collection may define the autobiographical self. However photographs are not images inside our brains. On the contrary, they are two-dimensional graphic devices, external to our minds, which portray reality in a convincing and illusionary manner, giving us only the impression of viewing our past, or the past of our friends and relatives.

ILLUSTRATION: black & white photograph of two children by an old well

However, photographs re-enter our consciousness in a process of psychological displacement, common also to painting, film, and now computer-generated images. Family photographs shape our own views of events, past and present. In the process of replacing the memories of our childhood or past events, they also take the place of the “well lighted” places with orderly objects, which the ancients recommended we should create in our own minds in order to remember. Furthermore, press and other publicly used photographs shape our expectations of every day social and political events. Images and, in particular, photographic images, have a power that has been well-explored and widely recognised.

The emergence of photography as an “art” caused much debate in academic circles in the 19^th century. From its beginnings, photography shaped the standards and expectations of artists. Those training in art in Europe and the USA in the 1860s were aware of the fact that established painters made use of photography. Nevertheless, debates about the possible relationship between photography and painting raged on. Deeply rooted prejudices were set against the appeal of photography’s aesthetic qualities, and its applications in art. Questions were raised about the relationship between artistic talent or genius, and academic skill in observation, above all recollection (the memory and mental record of the seen), composition, and drawing. Thus, whilst the increasingly common use of photography by painters in the 19^th century was widely recognised, it was rarely condoned unreservedly.

The greatest trick of all in the game of visual remembering, “drawing with light”, was received with scepticism and, for a long time, it caused much controversy, as it does, paradoxically, even now through David Hockney’s famous attempts to relate the use of optical devices by artists to their creative skills and artistic production.

The relatively straight forward implications of resorting to using two-dimensional photographic or projected images for the purpose of aiding our visual memory, has been buried under mountains of theoretical and technical explanations. It would be worth taking one step back to reflect upon what the ancients were formulating and envisaging. The “well lighted places”, with ordered objects and significant figures in unusual poses, could be paralleled to many of the images which we can now print and view outside of our minds. Without falling into the trap of creating equivalent amounts of theory in a different direction, I should simply like to point out that, looking at a three-dimensional, “real”, moving section of reality (the real world), is a very different business, psychologically, from looking at a still, two-dimensional printed image. Artists who paint, draw, or make art from a projected image or from a photograph, distance themselves intentionally from the “real” world, from its many stimuli, thus reducing and selecting the stimuli for the purpose of a more focussed representation of the visual experience as it is remembered and recorded by the senses. Vision, only one of the senses, is correlated by the other four senses, and smell, touch, hearing, and taste contribute to the images we create in our minds more than we immediately realise or concede. (Homer’s exquisite poetic sensitivity was focussed not least by his proverbial lack of sight.)

The “tricks” of extended consciousness, analysed by neuro scientists, and those which the ancients devised to aid and extend memory, ensure that the complex and fundamental functions performed by our minds are retained and used again.

Elena Cologni’s “tricks” of her artistic activity include performing her relatively simple actions blind-folded, repeating her performances in different environments, switching perceptions, and alternating between private and public spaces, conceptually swapping places with the audience. Her work reflects a preoccupation with mental processes linked to cognition, vision and touch. She is interested in the contribution of all the senses to vision. Her action and project of a video installation in two parts,‘…going to the bedroom from the dining room’ (April 2001) and ‘…going to the rear garden from the side entrance’ (May 2001), represents her way of “apprehending a part of the domestic space”. She controls her perceptions and stimuli by controlling the environment in which these take place. “The background is almost silent, the visual space tightly shot. I wanted to record the tactile sensation of these places with the aim both of remembering and encountering them for the first time.”

She often performs in front of a mirror, and treats the lens literally as a reflective surface (applying her morning make-up in front of the camera lens, simultaneously recording her own image electronically and mentally). Her special interest in synaesthesia – the particular condition according to which some individuals have a multi-sensory experience as a reaction to different stimuli – derives from her autobiographical memories of her childhood (to which she refers in her work in the form of a diary). Synaesthesia, which is found to be common in babies, gives way to more specialised and exclusive sensory perceptions as the cervical cortex develops. In some individual adults, sensory perceptions continue to “blend”, and they go through life attributing smells to shapes, colours to sounds, or shapes to words. Since the art of memory relies on skills of association, often across the senses, it shares much in common with synesthetic experiences – as, for instance, when we associate a particular smell or taste with a particular sight or sound.

Cologni’s autobiographical self is defined both in relation to perceptions of a synaesthetic kind, and to the physical space that surrounds her. Her “mental maps” – her actions and video/live performances – contribute to reveal how very complex and articulated mind processes are. The surfaces the artist touches blindfolded in her attempt to recall different sensations appear to be irregular, porous, and rough. “Blind-folded, I try and visualise these surfaces. Calling out names of colours, I create a drawing which both is a neurological map, and a map which points to a physical space.”

During one of her live performances, she showed a video of herself at home. To her private image, projected in public, she added the projection of a coloured screen as a marker of perception. “Exploring the environment through the sense of touch with my hands and keeping my eyes covered, I register the information of the space which was, until then, known to me only through sight. I associate a colour to a tactile sensation, in two different situations: at home, without an audience, and in the theatre, in front of an audience.”

In a way, Cologni’s autobiographical video image is treated, by the artist, on a par with her actual presence in the performance space. Each recording, and each performance, adds to the store of images of herself and of her experience of self. Elena Cologni’s diary, which is directly related to her performance work, includes present memories of her past childhood, recent interpretations of what may have been her actual past memories. A wardrobe in the artists’ childhood bedroom is remembered as if it had been viewed through a wide-angle lens. The image becomes “stored” amidst other “archival” images of her past. However the sum of the artist’s performances and video recordings, as well as of the extracts from her personal diary, do not add up to a final and ultimate knowledge of self. As in the case of the human brain, the information is not stored for later retrieval, but what is remembered is continually changed by new learning, and new connections. The visual archive is complemented by new visual and sensory experiences. Thus memory is actively and continuously at work.

FORGET ME NOT

Themistocles is supposed to have refused to learn the art of memory by saying that he preferred “the science of forgetting” to that of remembering. His contemporaries warned him against the risk of not exercising the newly conceived “art of memory”. Once invented, this art could not be forgotten.

In a similar way, once someone has seen a photograph, and realised how it is made, they cannot forget photography. So compelling has the photograph become in our minds as a trace of a past time that our view of memory itself has been transformed. We instinctively sense that the fixing of the image is akin to an act of memory. In fact, the acts are basically dissimilar. They share a certain level of selectivity, but the photograph nowhere comes close to the extraordinary plasticity of memory as the object becomes transformed in form and meaning, both as it is laid down and as it is later recalled.

Through two-dimensional images, which are placed outside the artist’s minds, and through actions and words, performed and spoken by the artist and by her interlocutors, Elena Cologni is in a continuous process of construction and re-construction of memorable events, judiciously joining life and art, movement and stillness: “My work is the result of my instinctive interest in understanding the importance, the symbolism, and the limits of the sense of sight.”

Memory and forgetfulness, seeing and not-seeing alternate in a seamless process which moves from life to art, and back again. In this process, remember to keep the camera rolling…and do not forget to turn on the lights…

[1] Antonio Damasio, The feeling of what happens, Body, emotions, and the making of consciousness., London, 2000, p. …?

[2] Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, London, 1996

[3] ibid. p. 64

[4] Antonio Damasio, The feeling of what happens, Body, emotions, and the making of consciousness., London, 2000, p.129

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

neon campobase, Bologna

London Underground

University of the Arts, London

British Artists’ Film and Video Collection , Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London

DRAWINGS SCENTS

Posted on by ecologni@gmail.com

DRAWING SCENTS

2002, interactive installation (scented piramids + macs + projector), Lethaby Gallery, Central St.Martins, College of Art & Design, London (here with fav participant: Paola Cologni)

The installation of scents and digital responsive projected system was based on offering a picture of my favourite seaside place reconstructed through scents, and allow others to colour my memories with their responses. Below are extracts from Cologni, E. 2004 ‘The Artist’s Performative Practice within the Anti-Ocularcentric Discourse’ (PhD thesis, University the Arts London)

DRAWING SCENTS: some observations (2003)

In Drawing Scents, I investigate the association between smells with memory, and place to interrogate on presence and absence. I would like stimulate the viewers’ imagination, as they will select a colour in relation to the smells I have chosen and presented. The installation contains all elements I was hoping to be able to include in a work: narrative, interaction aiming to final creative output, this to change the contexts conditions.

It is designed in the following way: a number of sources of smell are placed along the wall. Next to each one a touch screen with a number of colours (sounds). On the wall in front of it a screen shows the update of the generated outcome depending on the audience feedback.

The work functions through stages in relation to the participant’s behaviour: fruition (perception through smelling); participant’s feedback through association with colour among a given selection; the participant’s choice is connected to a series of parameters to implement a graphic program; Those parameters take shape on the digital screen behind the perceiver in the form of a colour: The colour fills the space and will influence the next participant’s reaction.

The audience response was the averaged after the exhibition, the RGB information of the selected colours over the period of the exhibition[1] was: 140, 116, 118.

The installation could be presented to an audience in a different country where the different reactions to the same olfactory stimuli will be translated into a different colour. In this sense the reaction is never explained, its illustration becomes part of the work itself in the form of a printed monocrome photographic piece.

Background. Visual/olfactory memory and memorable emotions

Our sense of smell is something that many of us take for granted, but odours do indeed have an effect on our daily lives. Imagine what it would be like walking into a movie theatre or a bakery and not being able to smell each of their distinct odours. Or what if you couldn’t smell the flowers in the spring or the smell of a brand new book. The sense of smell adds a richness to our lives that we aren’t always conscious of, but as soon as it’s taken away it dramatically changes our quality of life.

In primitive times smell protected our primitive ancestors from predators and helped them find food, but today we still rely on it more than we think: smell affects many aspects of life such as attraction, memories, and emotions. The purpose of this text is to mention some of the implications involved in the delivery of the piece Drawing Scents; the piece poses questions regarding the sense of smell, particularly the relationship between olfactory memory and visual memory, without though aiming to find scientific answers.

It’s enough to think how easily we perceive a smell and suddenly remember an event or person forgotten for years, to understand the connection between olfaction and memory. This section will describe odour memory, which refers to both memory for odours and memories that are evoked by odours.

It is first important to understand the physiology of olfaction. Rachel Herz Ph.D., a psychologist at Brown University, illustrates that the primary olfactory cortex, in which higher-level processing of olfactory information takes place, forms a direct link with the amygdala and the hippocampus. Only two synapses separate the olfactory nerve from the amygdala, which is involved in experiencing emotion and also in emotional memory[2]. In addition, only three synapses separate the olfactory nerve from the hippocampus, which is implicated in memory, especially working memory and short-term memory. Olfaction is the sensory modality that is physically closest to the limbic system, of which the hippocampus and amygdala are a part, and which is responsible for emotions and memory. This may be why odour-evoked memories are unusually emotionally potent. It may be significant that olfactory neurons are unmyelinated, making olfaction the slowest of all the senses. It not only takes the brain longer to perceive olfactory stimuli, the sensation of an odour also persists for greater lengths of time than do sensations of vision or audition. The fact that olfactory receptors are the only sensory receptors directly exposed to the environment may also help explain the relationship between olfaction and memory.

Certainly more research has been conducted in areas of visual and auditory information whereas many traits of odour memory have yet to be defined. For example, storage and decay processes, characteristics of memory processes, are not yet understood with respect to olfaction. Neurological imaging techniques could further refine our understanding of the way odour memory works.

Recent research has supported the existence of olfactory short-term memory[3]. Although there is no evidence for olfactory primacy[4], White and Treisman’s experiment provides evidence for recency in olfaction. The researchers explained this finding by mentioning that primacy is accounted for by rehearsal, “a cognitive process that may not be available for odours”. White and Treisman posited that olfactory memory occurs because individuals assign verbal meanings to olfactory stimuli. They also claim that just as olfactory sense is a crucial sense for other animals, “there is no a priori reason why humans alone should lack an olfactory memory”.

Rabin & Cain in 1984 found that odour memory was improved by familiarity and identifiability. Olfaction has often been implicated in learning processes, specifically in research done with animals.[5] Research has also been done on odour memory in humans. It has been shown that patients of Korsakoff’s syndrome, who suffer severe memory impairment, show less of an impairment for odour memory than for other kinds of memory. This suggests that there is in fact a mechanism for odour memory separate from other kinds of memory.

Much research has found connections between the structures of the olfactory system and the structures involved in memory in the modern human species. There have also been associations made between the two systems through their evolutionary histories. According to Rachel Herz, “the limbic system literally grew out of the olfactory bulb”. This notion that the limbic system evolved from the olfactory system could be the key to any smell-memory connection. A link has also been made between the presence of stem cells in both the olfactory and memory systems.[6]

The main reason why I became interested in olfaction it’s relation with and effect on emotions. This is discussed by Rachel Herz, who refers to the event of odour-triggered memories as instances of the “Proust phenomenon.”[7] This common term was adopted from Marcel Proust’s novel Swann’s Way in which the author famously describes this kind of experience. The narrator is overwhelmed by the odour of a Madeleine biscuit dipped in linden-blossom tea. This scents causes a flood of memories concerning a long-forgotten childhood event. In Proustian memories the cue is a smell. One of the most distinctive properties of odour-evoked memories is the powerful emotion that often accompanies them. Olfaction and emotion are intimately connected by the structures of the limbic system. In fact the limbic system is believed to have evolved originally as a system for the sophisticated analysis of olfactory input.[8]The most ancient part of the brain comprises the olfactory and limbic areas, the rhinencephalon. The olfactory and limbic structures evolved from the, literally, “smell-brain.” In Herz view the ability to experience and express emotion grew directly out of the brain’s ability to process smell.

Herz has demonstrated the primacy of feeling in her scientific experiments. Along with psychologist John Schooler of the University of Pittsburgh, Herz claims to have produced the first unequivocal demonstration that naturalistic memories evoked by odours are more emotional than memories evoked by other cues. The study compared odours and visual cues for five items as cues for autobiographical memories. The results supported that Proustian memories are distinctly emotionally charged. The emotionality of odour-evoked memories may arise from the unique neural connections that exist between the olfactory areas of the central nervous system and the amygdala-hippocampal complex of the limbic system responsible for emotion.[9]

These direct connections may distinguish odour memories cues from other sensory memory cues because no other sensory system has such intense contact with the neural substrates of emotion and memory. Neuroimaging studies have also shed come insight on the significant neural pathways involved in the Proust phenomenon. Neurological studies have shown that odour assessments are processed primarily in the right hemisphere of the brain, which is also the part of the brain for the most part associated with emotion. Neuroimaging studies have also revealed that encoding and retrieval of memories occur in different parts of the brain. Memories are stored in the left dorsal prefrontal cortex but they are retrieved in the right prefrontal cortex, the hemisphere of the brain most heavily associated with odour identification and emotion.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence that olfaction, memory and emotion are intimately linked is illustrated by the loss of the sense of smell. Anosmia, a Greek term meaning “lack of smell,” can often lead to anxiety and depression.

John Harrison illustrates June Downey of the University of Wyoming studies on synaesthic relationship colour-smell/taste . She states that cases of coloured taste have been less well described in the literature, though attributes this not to the frequency with which this variant occurs, but to the failure of those with it to notice that tastes (or smells) evoke colours. Downey suggests that this is because objects that smell and/or taste are usually bound to “an object that’ naturally has” a colour which masks the synaesthesic colour. This may or may not be true, but it is our experience that those with, say, coloured smell are very aware of the colour of the odiferous object, as well as the colour percept elicited by the smell.[10]

Harrison also suggests that ‘smell function has, for the last couple of decades, been of interest to a number of researchers who investigate Parkinson’s desease, which features olfactory loss amongst its sequelae. A consequence of this interest has been the development and sale of the smell identification test (SIT), originally by Richard Doty and others at the University of Pennsylvania…’[11] The test conducted by a synaethete patient showed an accurate result of shape perception in relation to smells such as: chery: wave shape, mint: flat, but not filling like bubblegum, banana: round shape, lilac: shaped like a drill bit…

Harrison makes a useful distinction to devise typologies of synaethetic experiences: synaesthesia induced could be sensational and imaginal. Essentially the issue is whether simply tasting (or smelling) a substance that elicits colour is both necessary and sufficient to elicit the synaesthesic experience. ‘Would the synaesthete automatically ‘see’ the colour on being stimulated with the appropriate odour on each occasion that the odour was presented?’[12] If the answer is yes then the perception can be described as sensational, using Downey’s parlance. However, if it is necessary for the synaesthete to conjour up the colour in an effortful fashion, then the perception might best be described as imaginal.

Harrison suggests that a definition of terms is helpful in discussing these issues and so he proposes two different terms to be used to refer to these different scenarios. The synaesthesia that are believed to be automatic, constant, and irrepressible the term ‘correspondence’ can be used to describe the relationship between the primary sensation and the synaesthesic percept. In contrast, when referring to synaesthesia that are learnt, and therefore not automatic, constant, and irrepressible, the term ‘association’ will be used.

(Elena Cologni, 2003)

[1] here some of the results out of the four adopted macs produced in real time and then collected: gmac2avge — rgb(171, 102, 112), mac3avge rgb(115, 123, 144), gmac4avge — rgb(165, 128, 112), gmac5avge — rgb(98, 115, 105) part of the text files produced: mac2,rgb( 255, 0, 0 ) mac3,rgb( 255, 0, 170 ) mac4,rgb( 85, 0, 255 )mac5,rgb( 0, 0, 170 )mac2,rgb( 255, 170, 85 )mac3,rgb( 255, 85, 170 )mac4,rgb( 170, 85, 0 )mac5,rgb( 0, 85, 0 )mac2,rgb( 255, 170, 170 )mac3,rgb( 170, 255, 255 )mac4,rgb( 255, 255, 0 )mac2,rgb( 255, 255, 170 )mac3,rgb( 85, 0, 170 )mac4,rgb( 0, 85, 0 )mac5,rgb( 85, 255, 170 )mac2,rgb( 170, 255, 170 )mac3,rgb( 0, 85, 255 )mac4,rgb( 255, 85, 0 )mac5,rgb( 170, 85, 85 )mac3,rgb( 170, 255, 255 )mac4,rgb( 255, 170, 85 )mac5,rgb( 170, 170, 255 )mac2,rgb( 85, 0, 255 )mac3,rgb( 170, 170, 255 )mac4,rgb( 255, 170, 85 )mac3,rgb( 255, 255, 85 )mac4,rgb( 170, 85, 255 )mac5,rgb( 85, 85, 0 )mac2,rgb( 255, 170, 255 )mac2,rgb( 0, 0, 85 )mac3,rgb( 170, 255, 0 )mac4,rgb( 255, 0, 85 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)j,rgb( 170, 255, 85 )b,rgb( 170, 170, 85 )j,rgb( 85, 255, 0 )b,rgb( 85, 170, 0 )Y,rgb( 170, 0, 85 )h,rgb( 255, 255, 170 )j,rgb( 0, 255, 255 )b,rgb( 255, 170, 85 )b,rgb( 255, 255, 0 )Y,rgb( 85, 85, 0 )b,rgb( 170, 85, 255 )h,rgb( 255, 0, 0 )j,rgb( 170, 255, 0 )b,rgb( 85, 85, 85 )h,rgb( 170, 255, 85 )j,rgb( 170, 85, 255 )b,rgb( 170, 170, 0 )Y,rgb( 170, 85, 0 )

[2] Herz R.S. & Engen T.1996. Odour memory: review and analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 3: n3,pp.300-313.

[3] White T. & Treisman M. 1997. A comparison of the encoding of content and order in olfactory memory and in memory for visually presented verbal materials. British Journal of Psychology 88: n3 459-469.

[4] the phenomenon in which stimuli presented at the beginning of a trial is remembered best

[5] For example, in a study by Frances Darling and Burton Slotnick 1994, rats quickly learned to avoid licking at a drinking tube containing an odourant and quinine hydrochloride. Learning occurred relatively quickly: within only one or two exposures to this particular combination of odour and tastant. This study suggests, then, that the brain may be equipped with a mechanism for olfactory memory. Slotnick (1993) provides further evidence for olfactory learning in rats. He shows that rats have actually achieved errorless performance in olfactory learning tasks. In 1991 W. Thomas Tomlinson (1991. Restriction of early exploratory forays effects specific aspects of spatial processing in weanling hamsters. Developmental Psychobiology 24: n4 277-298.) showed that normally reared hamsters demonstrated spatial memory for the location of odour cues in an allocentric task. The fact that animals often employ the olfactory sense to locate stored food provides further support for the existence of an olfactory memory of sorts. Stephen B. Vander Wall (1991)[5] showed that yellow pine chipmunks found caches (stored food) using their olfactory sense. However, in the study, olfaction only helped chipmunks localise moist seeds and not dry seeds. Olfaction therefore plays a part in an integrated system for recovering caches and finding hidden food. Another way in which animals use olfaction is identifying their young. Gary F. Mc Cracken did a study of Mexican free-tailed bats which examined nursing behavior of mother-pup pairs[5]. He found that mother bats returned to areas where they had nursed previously, and hypothesized that olfactory cues were used to remember these places.

[6] . Neurons associated with the nasal epithelium and the those in the hypocammpus, a prominent memory structure, are both capable of regrowth due to the presence of stem cells in these systems.

[7] Herz, Rachel S. “Scents of Time,” The Sciences, v40 i4 (July 2000): 34.

[8] Gray, Peter, Psychology, Third Edition, New York City: Worth Publishers, 1999.

[9] Anatomy of the Olfactory System.

[11] Harrison, J., p. 170.

[12] Harrison, J., p,170

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

supported by:

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of The Arts, London
Università dell’Immagine, Milan,
Dragoco New York and Paris,
Oikos Milan

METTERE OGNI SIGNIFICATO…

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METTERE OGNI SIGNIFICATO SOTTO-SOPRA, DIETRO-DAVANTI, ALTO-BASSO

”Turn every meaning upside down, inside out, back to front.”

video live installation, 2006 (typewriter+ tracing paper+ videocamera+ 2 projectors + live delay system)

in Dissertare/Disertare, curators Associazione START, Gaia Cianfanelli & Caterina Iaquinta, at Centro Internazionale per l’Arte Contemporanea, Castello Colonna di Genazzano, Roma, June/September 2006

Artists: Elisabetta Alberti, Alessandra Andrini, Elisabeth Aro, Atrium Project, Fabrizio Basso, Sara Basta, Bianco&Valente, Annalisa Cattani, Silvia Cini, Elena Cologni, Francesca Cristellotti, Simona Di Lascio, Christine De La Garenne, Simonetta Fadda, Mariana Ferratto, Valentina Glorioso, Ulrike Gruber, Alice Guareschi, Goldiechiari, Koroo, Lorenza Lucchi Basili, Sabrina Marotta, Libera Mazzoleni, Amanda McGregor, Dessislava Mineva, Motaria, Sabrina Muzi, Sandrine Nicoletta, Valentina Noferini, Anita Timea Oravecz, Paola Paloscia, Benedetta Panisson, Laurina Paperina, Arianna Pecchia Ramacciotti, Chiara Pergola, Luana Perilli, Maria Vittoria Perrelli, Michela Pozzi, Giada Giulia Pucci, Moira Ricci, Cloti Ricciardi, Francesca Riccio, Fiorella Rizzo, Stefania Romano, Anna Rossi, Ivana Russo, Nika Rukavina, Erica Sagona, Lucrezia Salerno, Guendalina Salini, Maria Salvati, Monica Stemmer, Federica Tavian, Adriana Torregrossa, Francesca Tusa, Sophie Usurier, Marta Valenti, Marcella Vanzo, Anna Visani, Elisa Vladilo, Cristina Zamagni.

THE PIECE

Sitting down at one end of the bridge I write on a piece of paper as long at the whole bridge (about 30 meters), using a typewriter. I transcribe from my breastfeeding diary recordings, reawakening memories of the attachment to my baby back then. The live video is played back through two projections indoors: one is live and the other is delayed by 8 seconds.

I then stated ‘The piece refers to my interest the time in live documentation of performance, its reception and processes of memory construction’.

‘November 2004, 2.00. I get up, and go to his room because he is crying, he has eaten from both breasts and has fallen asleep immediately afterwards

2 30. I go back to bed to sleep. I sleep on my side, towards the edge of the bed, next to the door. So, I’ll be quick

5.50. He rumbles. He’s not crying yet. Maybe he’ll go back to sleep….

6.00. He Cries. He’s hungry. I go to his room and feed him from both breasts. He falls asleep on me. I try to put him to bed. Maybe he continues for a while. No way. I put him into his cot to fully wake him up with his things. He’s getting used to his music box and the pictures behind the bed, which he probably sees as blurry shades. Then I turn on the music box and he smiles at me. […]’

CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND

(the curators referring to the project in the book below)

PUBLICATIONS

Jill Fields (2012), Entering the Picture: Judy Chicago, The Fresno Feminist Art Program, and the Collective Visions of Women Artists, Routledge, page 303

This was also presented and an extract performed on 27 January 2023 after a long time, within my #feminist #careaesthetics input in the context of ‘Maternity and Care’ at Drew University (NY) in a colloquium for Medical Humanities and Health organised and chaired by the brilliant Merel Visse and with the amazing care ethicist Prof Inge van Nistelrooij and Melanie Miller (lactation educator).

this performance was discussed as part of the colloquium:

in Cologni, E., Towards a Feminist Care Aesthetics (in progress), in Maternity & Care
a Medical and Health Humanities colloquium with Professor Inge van Nistelrooij and Melanie Miller (MA IBCLC), lactation educator and doctoral student, chaired by Merel Visse, Medical Humanities Director, Drew University.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Soprintendenza alla Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea

more here

TRACING

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TRACING

2003, video live installation, Performance Art as Practice in Research (PARIP, Bristol University 2003), also in Border Crossing (with Ingar Roys and Gulsen Bal), Galley X Istanbul, and ‘Fra Autoritratto e Percezione di sé , neoncampobase, Bologna (with Alessandra Andrini, Luca Barzaghi, Anna Valeria Borsari, Emilio Fantin, Flavio Favelli, Maurizio Finotto, Horatio Goni, Alice Guareschi, Ulrike Gruber, Mala, Eva Marisaldi, Maurizio Mercuri, Dörte Meyer, Sabrina Mezzaqui, Lorenzo Missoni, Sandrine Nicoletta, Susanna Scarpa, Sabrina Torelli, Maurizio Vetrugno, Cesare Viel)

THE PIECE

‘Tracing’, was performed as follows:

Action – I draw the shadow that my body casts onto tracing paper, on the floor, I position each sheet from the pile in a fan shaped arrangement. 1st projection – live recording of a detail of the action: my hands drawing the shadow. 2nd projection -video with sound (also in Italian and overlapped), extract: ‘The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence. It is thus that art, techné, image, representation, convention, etc, come as supplements to nature[…] Unlike the complement, dictionaries tell us, the supplement is an “exterior addition”’.^[1] supplement, added feature, addendum, addition, additive, appendix, bell, codicil, complement […] tracing, copy, duplicate, archetype, carbon, carbon copy, cast, clone, counterfeit, counterpart, ditto, ectype, effigy, ersatz, facsimile, forgery […]

My hands were drawing the contour of the shadow my body was casting onto the paper. I was constantly re-inventing the line as the body moved following the hands’ movement. It is not possible to trace one’s own shadow, and therefore it is not possible to document the movement of one’s own body while doing it.

[1] Derrida, J., Of Grammatology, tr Gayatri Spivak, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978, pp. 144-145

CONTEXT

The intervention at PARIP was titled ‘Tracing’. It was conceived to address the impossibility of fixing a moment in time (Derrida) and referred directly to the production of documents for research purposes. Amelia Jones states (in the live event) that the self is inexorably embodied, and yet she argues that the works suggest that this does not mean that the performed body/self is ever completely legible or fixed in its effects. ‘Body art, through its very performativity and its unveiling of the body of the artist, surfaces the insufficiency and incoherence of the body/self (or the body-as-subject) and its inability to deliver itself fully (whether to the subject-in-performance herself or himself or to the one who engages with this body).’

Derrida called the problematic of ‘the trace’ what splits seemingly identical reflections. He attributed the trace to the memory of an ever-receding origin that always remains elusively outside of what it produces in the present. The temporal spacing of the trace never leads to spatial simultaneity and full visibility, but rather to interminable delay (diffèrance as deferral). [1]

PUBLICATIONS

COLOGNI, E., Documenting Performative Practice, PARIP 2003, NATIONAL CONFERENCE: 11-14 September

Cologni, E., That spot in the ‘moving picture’ is you, (perception in time-based art), ed. John Freeman. Blood, Sweat & Theory: Research through Practice in Performance Libri Publishing, London, 2010, pp. 83-107

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London, Practice as Research In Performance : 2001/2006

ANCORA CERCA

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1999, site specific mediatised performance, National Portrait Gallery, London (still from one out of eight cameras recordings)

Eight channel Installation at Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo, Brescia 2002, Curator Enrico Depascale

THE PIECE

The screen of the monitors is a meeting point for myself artist and audiences in this following work, marked by a continuous change of position from in front and behind it. In the making of the piece Ancora Cerca, I was able to experiment with cctv systems, issues of documentation and time as well as self-representation. The work was performed at National Portrait Gallery, NPG, London 12-14 March 1999 and presented as an 8-monitor video installation at the Pinacoteca Tosio Martinengo in Brescia, Italy, between the 6 and 24 April 2002. For this piece I worked with the existing video security system of the gallery. After having done some research on the ideal location for the performance within the space, I looked at the monitors to which the video-cameras would send the captured video information and made notes.

Cologni, E.,

Floor plans of the top floor of the NPG with notes for production, 1999

‘…room 17-cam.24 -coming from18-stop between sculpture and entrance-watch camera; room 19- cam25 – stop watch camera between glass case and sculpture; room21-cam26 – standing behind sculpture watching camera; room 22-cam 28- walking from 21 in the middle and out; room 18- sitting on sofa…’. This enabled me to visualise the space from the viewpoint of the cameras – the space I would physically enter while performing. The performance took place on the 12^th of March, the recording of it from the documentation on the 14^th.

12 March – performance: I would stage an encounter with the warden watching the surveillance monitors in the NPG, by walking towards it and watching the video-camera of each chosen room. As I address the camera in each room, I become a ‘picture’ in the gallery, yet the camera, fantasised as the Gaze of the Other is also, as it were, ‘pictured’ as the spectator sees me imaging what it is seeing and giving myself the things I lack and are looking for (meaning of ancora cerca).

14 March – video recording: I went back two days after (as required by the gallery for security reasons) and played back the tapes that were stored. I was surprised to find that the system reduced the footage by half, so that not all frames were kept. As a result the quality of the recording was poor. However, I placed the video camera in front of the screen to record the half an hour of the performance from each of the monitors: the recording of the action went through a number of filters. In the resulting video, the viewers see the evidence of the performance through the ‘eye’ of these surveillance cameras, that have videoed me walking from room to room barefoot, clad in a beige dress, and evoking a romantic spirit of the gallery by carrying a red rose. The spectators, at this stage positioned as the camera when watching the surveillance video or see stills from it, are pictured by myself as I look at the camera. The spectators project what I might have seen from my vantage point in the gallery space. In this gallery dedicated to the construction of identity through picturing it, this performance makes the deep structures of that identity construction emerge, so we all become aware of how much both the artist and the spectator never fully or comfortably, inhabit the illusory space of identification.

Cologni, E. That spot in the ‘moving picture’ is you, (perception in time-based art), in Blood, Sweat & Theory: Research through Practice in Performance ed. John Freeman, Libri Publishing, London, 2010, pp. 83-107

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

National Portrait Gallery, London

Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London

DIAGRAMMI

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DIAGRAMMI

1999, participatory action, live broadcast, Oreste, Venice Biennale

THE PIECE

extract from accompanying booklet:

To introduce the meaning of the today’s event, 3^rd of July 1999 as part of the Oreste program at the 48^th Venice Biennal, I will mention a few points, instruments of creativity and thinking.

“I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides” Jacques Lacan

Visual models often used in research to clarify or synthesise a particular theory, or define a method, are particularly useful in my own artistic practice.

The diagram that I refer to, comes from a drawing that I made in 1996. On images coming from memory and contexts in which I had lived.

The newly developed model for this performance, is not fixed in the past, instead refers to a continuous present time and to myself constantly changing context in which the I (=personal identity) meets the me (=other’s perspective and social identity). The passing of time effects the I as much as the me and the context itself, therefore the terms of the relation are also constantly readdressed.

The diagram is very simple to read: there is myself in the centre and has to do with my own position relating to a specific context, in and outside of Italy (my country of origin). It refers to a continuous repositioning of myself within the contexts. This dynamic generates an always new relation within the communication schema.

PREFACE

communication between people depends on codes of the context in which they meet

communication is not possible if the code is not shared by everybody

communication is possible if the barriers are removed

by creating a virtual context is possible to remove social barriers

“ …the me represents a person’s social identity, constituted in social interaction and shaped under the influence of social norms and public requirements with respect to behaviour.

The I on the other hand stands for one’s personal identity , whose origin and development cannot be explained solely on the basis of experiences in social interaction, and which is subject to the anarchic spontaneity and creativity of a single identity.”

George Herbert Mead

Audience: people I met during my lifetime.

INTENTIONS

to remove our perception of each other based on assumptions that we made when met in a particular context, according to a particular role.

to create a new context in which to exchange messages and therefore communicate to people who I met in the past in a different context.

the use of words within social and cultural codes, has to show the poietic dimension and become instrument in the operation of loss of social norms let the personal identity emerge.

Cologni, E. (1999) Diagrammi, notes. Artist book (limited edition)

CONTEXT

Oreste was not a group producing collective artworks, nor a not-for-profit organization. It was a variable set of persons, mostly Italian artists, who have been working together with the aim of creating spaces of freedom for ideas, inventions, and projects.

During the 48th Venice Biennale, from June 10th through November 7th 1999, on the occasion of an invitation by Szeeman to the exhibition dAPERTutto, Oreste set up an ongoing program of meetings, interactive performances, round table discussions, lectures, lunches and informal encounters. Almost one hundred events were organized, and more than five hundred people from the whole world took an active role in the project.

Progetto Oreste

PUBLICATIONS

Cologni, E., ‘Institutions in Great Britain: Artist as Researcher. Diagrams’, Oreste at the Venice Biennale, AAVV, Charta, Milan 2000

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Oreste collective, University of the Arts, London, Central Saint Martins Former Head of Research Malcolm LeGrice, Mariagrazia and Simon