Things being as they were, I decided, like Palomar, to limit myself to look, keeping me close to what I could see and to the immediate ideas that things suggested in me. "The greater part of the soul is outside the body." (Sendivogius) Take me somewhere nice. For the finissage of the exhibition Nuovo Cinema Galleria, the 6th of March at 8 pm, Maddalena will present the performance “Take me somewhere nice”, where the body of the artist becomes an instrument of vision. Maddalena Ugolini (Florence, 1986) is a dancer, choreographer, founder and teacher of Dança Imaginal. After graduating in Clinical Psychology at the University of Florence, and practicing dance and photography in the United States, she met Deborah Lamantia in 2013 and she deepened her choreographic research, dancing in Lamantia’s company “Brick”. In 2017 she moved to Lisbon, where she founded the project “Dança Imaginal ~espaço de imaginaçao corpórea”. In 2018 she was selected for the Advanced Program of Creation in Performing Arts (PACAP) at Forum Dança curated by Sofia Dias & Vítor Roriz. In March 2018 she presented her project at Festival Cumplicidade, International Contemporary Dance Festival of Lisboa. Her last work Corpo Azul was presented in November 2019 at InShadow Festival in Lisbon. ------------------------------------------------------------- Nuovo Cinema Galleria Adrien Missika, Ana Vaz, André Komatsu, André Romão, Anna Franceschini, Carlos Garaicoa, Evy Jokhova, Grupo Dança Imaginal, Guido van der Werve, Haris Epaminonda, Joana Escoval, John Wood and Paul Harrison, Jonathas de Andrade, Laure Prouvost, Maddalena Ugolini, Michela de Mattei and Nuno da Luz Curated by Orsola Vannocci Bonsi — 3rd session: 20 February – 7 March 2020 - Polaroids (2018, 3’32’’) – Anna Franceschini - Una notte di festino e di guerra (2015, 3’45’’) – André Romão - Lick In The Past (2016, 8’25’’) – Laure Prouvost - Tarahi IV (version for a single screen) (2007, 1’27’’) – Haris Epaminonda - Tarahi V (version for a single screen) (2007, 3’11’’) – Haris Epaminonda - Tarahi VI (version for a single screen) (2007, 2’59’’) – Haris Epaminonda - Estée Lauder - Hypnosis Session (2018, 8’08’’) – Michela De Mattei 6 March, 8 pm: Performance “Take me somewhere nice” by Maddalena Ugolini — Nuovo Cinema Galleria is a pretext to transform and rethink the gallery as a screening room. It draws its title from Giuseppe Tornatore’s celebrated movie, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988), emphasizing how cinema can be understood, thus seen and lived, as a catalyst of experiences and relations, both at an individual and collective level. In Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, a small movie theatre in a remote Sicilian village becomes the fulcrum of the social and cultural life of its inhabitants. But not only that: the specific and special milieu created by the cinema invites to dream and to ponder, as well as to explore new worlds and new modes. At the same time it allows the encounter, a fundamental necessity for collectivity. And what happens when the “white-cube” gallery becomes a “black-box” cinema? Could the spectator in the contemporary art gallery escape and enter into other, diverse worlds, as in the cinema-experience, through “video art” and its experimentation? Could the gallery also become a tool for collective aggregation, exactly as Tornatore’s cinema? Nuovo Cinema Galleria intends to rethink the exhibition space of the gallery as something accessible, evidencing its capacity to be a place of discovery and magic, fascination, deliberation and wonder at the same time. It is an invitation to revisit this space in a different light, or even better, without light, without actually seeing the space, erasing the white-cube and replacing it by a comfortable and soft darkness. “The cinema’s black box (…) intentionally negates both bodily mobility and environmental perception so as to transport the viewer away from her present time and local space, into the narrative space of the cinematic world on screen” (Uroskie, 2008:5). A space for a collective experience of abandonment towards discovery and disclosure. This exhibition also addresses key questions concerning accessibility intended as the immediacy of the image, as “video art”, as the cinematographic one, puts forward ideas (instead of objects) in a more comprehensible and empathic way that can be shared with a broader public. Nuovo Cinema Galleria comprises three sessions, each one lasting about two weeks and composed by a series of videos projected in loop during the opening hours. Each of the three sessions explores a different theme, but together they generate a dialogue between works from artists represented by the gallery and others by invited artists and filmmakers, creating a continuous discourse of flowing, moving images. Furthermore, each session will be accompanied by an event, a moment of light and, but not only, live action and collective aggregation, completing it.
