StraightUp @ExtraDry
ExtraDry is an exhibition of video art born from the desire to draw contemporary art out from its usual expositive spaces and onto
the walls at Dry, Via Solferino 33, and the new Dry, Viale Vittorio
Veneto 28, in Milan.
Following the ExtraDry project curated by Peep-Hole for three editions from 2013-2016, CaseChiuse arrives at Dry with a new format and presents StraightUp@ExtraDry, an award for young artists.
In step with the ideas of the founders of Dry, StraightUp@ExtraDry wants to give visibility to the creativity emerging from the extremely current research of young artists expressing themselves through video.
As well as giving visibility, the award is designed to support their future research by the assignment of three different awards and the acquisition of the winning work.
The name “Straight Up” is a blend of English slang and bar vocabulary. It implies something honest and fresh that aims for the top, just like the synergy we wish to create between the award, the artists and their future.
Dry is defined by its strong contemporary feel. It offers the very best quality while remaining accessible and informal, making it an ideal location to exhibit video art and create a new kind of synergy between the work and the public. With the launch of StraightUp@ExtraDry and its commitment to art project since 2013, Dry proves once again that the space is ideal to exhibit videos and offers a chance to show contemporary art to a wider public.
The selection committee for the StraightUp@ExtraDry award consists of Simone Bertuzzi and Simone Trabucchi, the Invernomuto duo, and Paola Clerico, creator of CaseChiuse project.
The jury consists of Ilaria Bonacossa, director of Artissima, Paolo Zani, founder of Galleria Zero, and two of Dry’s founders and art collectors Bernardo Attolico and Tiziano Vudafieri.
Coordination and curatorial assistance by Ginevra D’oria.
Each artist selected to participate will have to present at least three videos which will be projected at Dry Via Solferino and the new Dry Vittorio Veneto.
July 3rd - October 1st 2017
Jacopo Rinaldi
Jacopo Rinaldi is the first artist selected. He has been chosen for his deep archival research that emerges in his videos, especially in All The World’s Memory and in his works on the archive of the first independent curator and art historian Harald Szeemann. For StraightUp@ExtraDry we have chosen four of his videos.
This video is the result of an audio editing of the Alain Resnais’ film Toute la Memoire du Monde with clips from Google Data Centers taken from the Official YouTube Channel of the Company. Resnais’ film is a documentary made for the French Foreign Ministry about the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. A voice over explains the story of human knowledge through the journey of a printed book, from publication to storage in the bibliotheque - the Gutenberg Galaxy where knowledge was once archived. The editing of a voice over from the past and the videos from Google is sometimes an even overlapping, as if the narrator is just talking about the servers and data storage units you see in the images, sometimes it reveals the paradoxes of this revolution from printed books to digital data, from the public archive of the authors and the cultural establishment to the private storage of collective information.
In the past the archive was simply separate from the outside. Today air and water come into the archives’ cooling systems to preserve papers, documents or servers. In this video the archive has developed a real atmospheric system. A cloud passes through the files, something in between fog and smoke, maybe fire.
Szeemann’s Archive is a project I realized in Maggia, Switzerland. The work is a final documentation of the Harald Szeemann’s archive before the conversion of the building. The project consists in a photo array, a text and a laser-scan surveying of the place where the archive was kept. The entire project was collected like a flipbook in a sequence. This video is an attempt to transform an abandoned architecture in a document to archive once again.
I started this work by putting together various frontal pictures of Lee Miller, shot by Man Ray during their time together from 1929 to 1932. I was familiar with each photo on its own but by putting them side by side I came to realize they all had a certain formal severity, and a tendency to repeat gestures. I find this eccentric, especially considering what defines Surrealist photography. I see a reflection on the left corner of Lee Miller’s pupils that seems to confirm my intuition: each and every picture has the exact same reflection, which lead to the hypothesis that each has ben shot in the same place, with the same lighting. This pushed me to overlap the pictures using the aforementioned reflection as a pinpoint around which faces from each photo stand almost still, unchanged, while the body appears more dynamic, uncertain. Through this juxtaposition I tried to make perceivable the idea of a palimpsest, that becomes the way we look at the past, our posthumous view.
* This video is only presented at the new Dry, Viale Vittorio Veneto 28, Milan.
Jacopo Rinaldi was born in Rome in 1988 where he lives and works as an artist and researcher. He graduated with a master's degree in Visual Art and Curatorial Studies at Naba in Milan. His research concerns the relation between memory, oblivion and architecture in the transmission of knowledge.
He wrote his dissertation on the space of the Harald Szeemann's archive. He is part of Mnemoscape, a research platform focus on issues of memory, methodology and the archive.
