Intermezzo is a project by Allegra Hicks curated by Adriana Rispoli and produced in collaboration with Progetto Museo.
Allegra Hicks immerses herself in the Baroque recesses of the Church of Purgatorio ad Arco, a place whose sacredness transcends the boundaries and affections of the city, with the awareness that art does not exist in the abstract but in relation to space and, above all, to the public. Intermezzo, properly a condition of suspension, of waiting, is a highly symbolic installation that appeals to the spirituality of anyone who dares to descend into a meta-temporal, meta-spatial dimension, where everything contributes to the creation of a synaesthetic sensation. In this passage between a world above of devils and a world below of saints, or vice versa, the artist’s intervention is set, inhabiting this sacred place as both theatre and dream. Dominated by the imposing crochet installation on the high altar and the ancestral sound of the body and the earth, Intermezzo is an exhibition to be seen with the eyes of the mind and experienced with the body of the soul. The body is central, but it is not shown. It is the body of the artist acting under the weight of five thousand metres of cotton, transforming an everyday material into a practice of resistance and meditation. It is the body evoked in an ambiguous form: the glimmer of a foetus, a possible umbilical cord, and the image of its own skull transformed into an artistic medium. As in a ritual, private experience becomes collective, just like that of the cult of the “anime pezzentelle”, with the ancestral rite of care entrusted to the anonymous devotion of the people.
Intermezzo is a project by Allegra Hicks curated by Adriana Rispoli and produced in collaboration with Progetto Museo.
Allegra Hicks immerses herself in the Baroque recesses of the Church of Purgatorio ad Arco, a place whose sacredness transcends the boundaries and affections of the city, with the awareness that art does not exist in the abstract but in relation to space and, above all, to the public. Intermezzo, properly a condition of suspension, of waiting, is a highly symbolic installation that appeals to the spirituality of anyone who dares to descend into a meta-temporal, meta-spatial dimension, where everything contributes to the creation of a synaesthetic sensation. In this passage between a world above of devils and a world below of saints, or vice versa, the artist’s intervention is set, inhabiting this sacred place as both theatre and dream. Dominated by the imposing crochet installation on the high altar and the ancestral sound of the body and the earth, Intermezzo is an exhibition to be seen with the eyes of the mind and experienced with the body of the soul. The body is central, but it is not shown. It is the body of the artist acting under the weight of five thousand metres of cotton, transforming an everyday material into a practice of resistance and meditation. It is the body evoked in an ambiguous form: the glimmer of a foetus, a possible umbilical cord, and the image of its own skull transformed into an artistic medium. As in a ritual, private experience becomes collective, just like that of the cult of the “anime pezzentelle”, with the ancestral rite of care entrusted to the anonymous devotion of the people.