“Sotto al letto di mia nonna”

Sotto al letto di mia nonna. Artist Serena Boccanegra, curator Marianna Accerboni.

Opening Saturday 6th May 2017, h 6.30pm
Bottega d’arte Gibigiana Dorsoduro 1487 Fondamenta delle Zattere 30123 Venezia

On Saturday 6th May, at 6.30pm, Bottega d’arte Gibigiana presents the exhibition “Sotto al letto di mia nonna” [Under my grandmother’s bed] by the artist Serena Boccanegra, curator Marianna Accerboni.
The exposition – the curator says – is a totally site specific installation: by the thread of a loving memory, symbolized by a varied series of objects and micro-cosmos dreamed by the artist, emerges the cathartic importance of Serena’s relationship with her family background.

Central figure of the composition – Accerboni writes – is the grandmother Rina Nono, strong personality illuminated by intense green eyes. She represents a kind of protective light, as she firmly maintained her original family’s memory over times, by preserving various objects belonging to her. Serena implements these memories with other material testaments like photos, objects, fabrics, laces, letters and little shoes, also belonging to her father’s family, the Boccanegras. All symbols of a love chain, that the artist – as cinema and theatre set designer, following a personal artistic research – connects and develops. As if the story, told by images dedicated to her grandma and her son Orlando, would represent the tree of Life.

“I felt the need to meet my ancestors, collect them together and pacify them, letting them meeting each other again, – Serena explains – that’s a little psycho-magic act to speak with them, like a meeting between the quick and the dead”.
As artist and able artisan, Boccanegra hosts every object and composition into an equally symbolic drawer: it organizes and also frames them into a kind of proscenium, perhaps because they belongs to the theatre of life. Inside every container there is a whole world that opens and connects to another world, like the chinese boxes. A work in progress: “This is just the beginning of this path, in the course of time I will add one by one more drawers – Serena says – “.

Very often Serena uses the beeswax to elaborate and fix the objects on a support, that’s natural as all the materials of the exhibition – wood, paper, fabric, gypsum and leather – because she loves its smell, and because “covering the objects with beeswax means to stop them, the wax is a sculpture material, it can symbolize the concept of “stop the moment”.

This exhibition – Accerboni concludes – appears as a symbolic fascination, that plays – almost unconsciously – on a thread of intimate surreal inspiration with Duchamp’s object trouvé. It implements the emotion that raises through the same sensitivity that makes a stage so vivid and human, and makes the cinema fiction so involving.

Serena’s universe eases down – softly – and talks in an expositive contest that is mirror, expansion and counterpoint of the exhibition itself, and opens to the contamination of other two artists. In fact Bottega Gibigiana is an art forge where workshop and exhibition live together, as a meeting point of artists and furniture designers, with their handmade works created from poor and neglected objects. And they create settings with interesting connotations. The name Gibigiana alludes to the rhythmic and sinuous reflections created by the sunlight glare when it meets a stretch of water, and makes everything vibrate. This phenomenon well represents the common intention of the involved artists. In this circumstance, next to Sotto al letto di mia nonna, we will bump into the works of Mirko Donati, supporting soul of Bottega, and Anna Scovacricchi, illustrator artist now in residence here, who will exhibit brand-new creatures. Every room will symbolize an element: water, fire, earth, this is the constant leitmotiv.

Serena Boccanegra, gypsy for nature, lives and works around for many years, to come back then to her Venetian roots. Trained as painter and scenographer as theatre designer, she works in many theatrical workshops and companies as the one “Figli d’Arte Cuticchio”.She works in Teatro Massimo in Palermo, she curates the scenic spaces of many editions of “La Macchina dei Sogni”