RICCARDO ARENA
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PRESENTATION

My work explores the relationship between territory, culture, psyche and landscape through a creative practice that consists on the investigation, study and collation of heterogeneous materials belonging to different research fields.

These materials, in the process of association, come to reveal accidental and unforeseen potentialities that turn into active agents in themselves, participating in the creation of an artwork that evolves independently of the first inspirational impulse. The work is conceived as a poetic formalization of the research.

The collected material becomes a living entity, containing the forms and movements of its development. Within the interaction of intuitions and constructions, my effort is to trace and contemplate their inner bonds in order to unveil the hidden forces and the occult architecture that interlacing them.
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Moved by these objectives, over the years, I have dedicated myself to developing long-term projects in different countries of the world: in China with "Four Times a Tree" (2006/2008), in Argentina with "Dual death Ellero and visual ecosystem" (2009/2012), in Russia with "Vavilon" (2013/2017) and Iran, Armenia and Ethiopia with “LuDD! - The Topography of Light”(2017/2020).

The scheduled time for completion and the contents of these projects were defined through a series of accidental events that came about in the course of my travels and research.

The constant flitting between travelling experience, gathering of study materials and their internal and intuitive reconfiguration, is condensed into complex structures that create the fundamental principle of the work: collages, films, drawings, archive objects, essays, novels and installations; all of these are all orchestrated into a visual constellation in mutual dialogue, becoming a vehicle for multiple references and interpretations.

Each project aims to encompass several lines of investigation relating to science, metaphysics, cultural and natural landscapes, poetry, religion and to a whole series of founded and unfounded theories. These theories escape their contours and transcend any kind of cultural background. In response to the plethora of themes that have nourished the visual and narrative work, the projects have resulted into a number of lectures, workshops and talks held by scholars and researchers. These events are intended as compositional pictures of visions and analysis, of theoretical and descriptive overviews.
WORKSHOPS
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  • FILATURA DELL’ALBEDO  Vol. I I >>> 
    Workshop teorico pratico di Filosofia delle Immagini per lo sviluppo di un Libro d’Artista.
    ​Riccardo Arena / Giulia Brivio ( Studio Boîte )
  • 20 ANNI DEL DIPARTIMENTO EDUCATIVO 
    Laboratorio di Video Arte, Museo di arte Moderna e Contemporanea MAGA, Gallarate
  • ANATOMIA DI UNA VISIONE - P.I.A. 
    Laboratorio teorico pratico di Arti Visive, PIA Persistence is All, Lecce
  • IMAGES AS A LABYRINTH - AAU
    Laboratorio teorico pratico di Arti Visive, Università di Belle Arti e di Design di Addis Ababa
  • IL LABIRINTO DELLE IMMAGINI - MAGA
    Programma di didattica del  Museo di arte Moderna e Contemporanea MAGA, Gallarate
  • TOPOGRAPHY OF A VISION - TUMO
    Laboratorio teorico pratico di Arti Visive,TUMO- Center For Creative Technologies, Yerevan
  • THE ARTIST AS RESEARCHER - VIAFARINI - MILANO
    Laboratorio teorico pratico di Arti Visive per il personale  scientifico del MiBACT, ViaFarini, Milano


​​VIDEO WORKS    >>>

​ESSAY, INTERVIEWS & TALKS ​
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  • I PRIMI  A CROLLARE    -    Short Essay ,cheFare, Italiano​
  • ON CULTURE AND SILENCE   -   Talk, Matera "Invisible Pavillions", Audio, English 
  • DIALOGHI DI ESTETICA    -   in coversation with Davide Dal Sasso, Artribune, Italiano
  • FATTI DI CULTURA   -   Interview, Betram Niessen, cheFare, Italiano​

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL DOWNLOAD
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  • PORTFOLIO - Download:   ENG
     
  • CV- Download:    ENG 

  • LuDD! -  THE TOPOGRAPHY OF LIGHT
    Project D - Iran, Armenia, Ethiopia,  Download:    ENG + ITA

  • VAVILON
    Project C - Solovki Islands,   Download:  ENG - ITA

  • ​DUPLICE MORTE ELLERO ED ECOSISTEMA VISIVO
    Project B - Argentina,  Download:      ENG    -   ITA 

  • ​FOUR TIMES A TREE
    ​Project A - China, ​  Download: ENG - ITA




                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           .

THE COLLAPSE OF TRANSPARENCY
HYPOGAEUM  WATER-CISTERNS OF VICECONTE PALACE,  Matera Capital of Culture 2019, Italy

The Collapse of Transparency is a site-specific sound installation composed for one of the seven hypogeal cisterns of Palazzo Viceconte in Matera. The sound architecture created within the underground space explores the concept of limit, intended as contact with what is inaccessible, an ultimate boundary that unites, relates and at the same time isolates and separates. 

The work idea is developed from a narrative passage of "LuDD! - The Topography of Light”, a metaphysical poem divided into 21 chapters written by the artist in 2019 and inspired by a series of researches performed among Iran, Armenia, and Ethiopia, whose contents intends to investigate the forces hidden in the phenomena of vision through the concepts of origin, simulacrum, sacrifice, weaving and creational act.

The installation is constructed through the reading of a fragment of LuDD, which represents a key point of the narrative experience, the point where the protagonist, after being nullified by the contact with the void, is conducted in a psychic path of disintegration with his environment, leading him to cross the terminal limit that precedes oblivion. Within this sound landscape the voice evokes a sequence of mental images oscillating between consciousness and unconsciousness, decline and fall, perceivable and incomprehensible, spoken images that, during the track evolution, are gradually converted by the sound designer and composer Matteo Mariano into an abstract acoustic environment, which saturates the hypogeal architecture to merge with it contributing to the creation of a dense and organic listening space. 
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CRATER OF ETERNAL LIGHTNESS
IIC Addis Abeba, Ethiopia

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ĀSHKHĀRHĀTZŪYTZ​
Visual Chrestomathy of the Mount Analogue Inland Peak Expedition
Merkurov Museum, Giumry, Armenia

The installation is inspired by The Mount Analogue, a symbolic novel of mountaineering geographic adventures by René Daumal, left unfinished due to the premature death of the author.  Ashkharhatzuytz - Visual Chrestomathy of the Mount Analogue Inland Peak Expedition imagines, through a visual compendium inspired by passages of Daumal’s novel and its missing part, the mystical topography of the summit of the Mount Analogue, which for the same analogical reason must necessarily be quarried. Introducing inside the external specular landscape, the climb is celebrated in the descent to the abyss where the upper skies are disbanded.
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Exhibition View - STANDART 2017 - Triennial of Contemporary art in Armenia,  S. D. Merkurov’s Museum, Gyumri,  2017
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ORIENT 1
Everlasting Sea
​MAXXI , Rome

​Starting from the suggestions developed by Russian Cosmism, Orient 1 contemplates the exploration of a  “Terra incognita”, that, by mirroring the cartography of the Moon and the Earth, evokes an atlas without geography, in which distances and landscapes are nullify: a reproduction of the monument dedicated to Russian cosmonauts rises from a coal crater; a wall painting refers to Kazimir Malevič’s Suprematist Square; pictures of sailing boats drifting into obscure lunar oceans;  Boris Godunov’s musical notes by Modest Musorgskij (used as a secret code for Russian aerospace launches) brings the viewer in an unfathomable time. The multiple elements of the installation shape the millennial human tension towards the unknown, reflecting on the inscrutability of the forces that move his wanderings in a metaphysical space.
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Exhibition View - Premio MAXXI, Rome,  2016
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Photography by Luis Do Rosario 
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Exhibition View - Premio MAXXI, Rome,  2016,  Photography by Luis Do Rosario 

THE PLOUGH AND OTHER STARS
IMMA,  Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin

​This exhibition proposes some alternatives to death – space travel, time travel, reincarnation. Works by Riccardo Arena, Richard John Jones, Lara Khaldi and Yazan Khalili are brought together in the immortal domain of the museum, to explore strategies towards life extension, by artistic if not other means. The exhibition functions as both a show, for people to come and visit, and a rehearsal space for the development of a new theatrical production, in collaboration with Cow House Studios and The Centre For Dying On Stage.

Kete Strain
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Exhibition View - IMMA, Dublin, Exhibition View, 2016
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VAVILON
Project C -  Solovki Islands​

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VAVILON project develops from the studies and suggestions that arise from the research conducted on the Solovki Islands, an archipelago located in the Russian White Sea, at 160 km from the Northern Pole. Through history the archipelago became a place of worship for the ancient nomadic populations, a realm for ascesis and mysticism, an orthodox sanctuary, and more recently the site of the first Soviet forced labour camps, Gulag. The Islands are at the same time witness of the utopias and the dystopias, battlefield of ideologic wars and a place for redemption. The inputs for the artistic investigation were a travel experience on the Islands in 2013 and the study of the less renowned aspects of the russian culture. In particular the Russian Cosmism, that represents a common ground of the totalitaristic system and that characterized all the history of the Soviet spaceship program, aimed to pursue the immortality through the cosmic escape from the labyrinth of mortality.​

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Vavilon - Viafarini - Exhibition View - 2015
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Vavilon - Viafarini - Exhibition View - 2015
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Vavilon - Viafarini - Exhibition View - 2015
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GROWING ROOTS
PREMIO FURLA

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​GROWING ROOTS - PREMIO FURLA | Installation view | Palazzo Reale, Milano | 2015      

DUPLICE MORTE ELLERO ED ECOSISTEMA VISIVO
Project B - Argentina

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"Dual death Ellero and visual ecosystem", Project B, Argentina, is developed after a series of investigations between Argentina and Bolivia. This project was inspired by the first fingerprint classification techniques; through an articulated physiognomic investigation conducted by a detective in search of an imaginary face. It reflects historically and symbolically on the differences between observation and contemplation, questioning the concepts of identity, identification, indivisibility and multiplicity.

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 MAGA , 2012,  Photography by  Roberto Marossi
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 MAGA , 2012,  Photography by  Roberto Marossi
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Photography by  Roberto Marossi, MAGA , 2012
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FOUR TIMES A TREE
Project A - Shanghai ​

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“Four Times a Tree”, Project A, Shanghai, is elaborated through a series of journeys in China. The project develops from the idea of “nature reserve”, garden or park, as a microcosmic reiteration of the universe. Describing the vision of a Chinese garden created by a catastrophic event, it narrates the adventure of this human generation, whose presence is felt through the harmonization of its remains in a melancholy celebration of a mythical future. 

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1819ArtSpace | Shanghai | 2008
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Mayr3 | Milan | 2009
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