Something Out of It. Paragraph 2: Desperate Times

SOMETHING OUT OF IT. Paragraph 2: Desperate Times. LIAF - Lofoten International Art Festival preview in Venice Video installation by Tomaso De Luca Curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi 18 April 2022 – 24 April 2022. Form 10am to 6pm Casa Venezia, Calle Seconda dei Orbi, 5201 Castello, Venezia. Produced by LIAF - Lofoten International Art Festival in collaboration with CASE CHIUSE by Paola Clerico, EVA International, GIBCA - Gothenburg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Zuecca Projects, Monitor Gallery Something Out of It, the LIAF - Lofoten International Art Festival preview programme in Venice curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi breaks into a domestic environment. The courtyard of Casa Venezia, residence of two collectors, hosts a new video installation by Tomaso De Luca (Verona, Italy 1988). This has been produced in partnership with CASE CHIUSE by Paola Clerico. Winner of the 2021 MAXXI Bvlgari Prize, De Luca continues his investigation into the crisis of modernism—as the promise of a functional life for all—and processes of gentrification, linked to socio-natural phenomenons, such as the AIDS epidemic or the most recent climate change. Consisting of sculptures, photography and a video, the installation entitled Desperate Times debunks the myth of comfort, transforming the house into a treacherous place. Furniture and everyday items are transformed into potentially lethal traps —the activation of such traps being shown through a visual grammar that is both threatening and comical. De Luca’s project is freely inspired by a news story. In February 2019, in Southwest Philadelphia, a real estate developer escaped an amateur guillotine hidden in one of his properties and designed to kill him. The artist links this event to the processes of climatic gentrification that are sweeping American cities: The violent act is read as an extreme and desperate attempt to resist increasingly brutal economic dynamics. An ingenious collection of hatches, guillotines, sharp crutches, movable walls, free-falling weights, spiked floors, revolving doors, not only shows human beings in their pet-like condition/cage, but also reveals the artist as designer of a series of catastrophic events. A traumatizer. The traps thus take on the status of sculptures. The bourgeois drama of keeping things in place is set aside for a moment, to make room for a chamber-theatre of destruction. About Lofoten International Art Festival: LIAF is a biennial festival for contemporary art - the longest running event of its kind in Scandinavia - taking place in Lofoten, a cluster of islands located on the Northern Coast of Norway, just above the Arctic Circle. Since 1991, LIAF has presented works by international artists in a local and site-specific context. LIAF acknowledges the complexity of place and seeks to be a discursive, engaged and social platform for different positions creating dialogue between the local and global. Since 2009, the festival has been run by the North Norwegian Art Center (NNKS) and LIAF’s Artistic Advisory Board. LIAF and NNKS receive operational support from the Arts Council Norway, the counties of Finnmark, Troms and Nordland, and the municipality of Vågan. About the Lofoten Islands Lofoten is an archipelago and a traditional district in the county of Nordland, Norway. Though lying within the Arctic Circle, the archipelago experiences one of the world’s largest elevated temperature anomalies relative to its high latitude. Lofoten is known for its distinctive scenery with mountains and peaks, open sea and sheltered bays, beaches and untouched lands. About the Curators: Francesco Urbano Ragazzi is an Italian curatorial duo founded in Paris in 2008. The team developed The Internet Saga, a research platform and cycle of exhibitions that started with a homonymous solo show by Jonas Mekas (2015), and culminated with the exhibition Hillary: The Hillary Clinton Emails by Kenneth Goldsmith (2019), both presented in unconventional contexts on the occasion of the Venice Biennale. Francesco Urbano Ragazzi has also curated projects and exhibitions for MMCA (Seoul), Iscp (New York), Centro Ricerca Castello di Rivoli (Turin), Centre d’Art Contemporain (Gèneve), La Loge (Brussels), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Institut Français (Paris), Futura (Prague), Ruya Foundation (Baghdad), Emirates Foundation (Abu Dhabi), among others. Since 2017, the team is directing the archive of feminist artist Chiara Fumai; in this capacity they curated the first monograph of her work. In 2021 the duo co-edited FUORI 1971-1974, an anthology dedicated to the first gay liberation movement in Italy. About the Artist: Tomaso De Luca (1988) is a visual artist who lives and works in Berlin. He employs drawing, sculpture, installation, and video practices to expose what is buried in collective imagery: his works stand as defections to the modernist canon, representing active survival strategies against isolation. De Luca’s work has been exhibited in venues such as: Quadriennale di Roma (2020); Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius (2017); Parque Lage, Rio de Janeiro (2015); Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2015); among others. He was among the finalists of the 9th Furla Prize in 2013, and was awarded the title of Cy Twombly Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, in 2017. In 2021, his work A Week’s Notice won the second edition of the MAXXI Bvlgari Prize.