Artist: Laura Mergoni
Works at: Seoul Art Space_GeumCheon
Stays in: 2011
Profile:
Education
DNSEP, second university cycle degree, National School of Arts, Cergy-Paris (France)
DNAP, first university cycle degree, Decorative Art School, Strasbourg (France)
CEAP, Fine Art School of Marseille (France)
DNSEP, second university cycle degree, National School of Arts, Cergy-Paris (France)
DNAP, first university cycle degree, Decorative Art School, Strasbourg (France)
CEAP, Fine Art School of Marseille (France)
Solo exhibition
Solo show at Foligno, Fuori Orario event, Italy 2012
Solo show at the « Fondazione della Cassa di risparmio di La Spezia », curator Enrico Formica, Italy 2008
Solo show at Foligno, Fuori Orario event, Italy 2012
Solo show at the « Fondazione della Cassa di risparmio di La Spezia », curator Enrico Formica, Italy 2008
Group exhibition
Group Show Autour de la Baie, Manufacture des Tabacs, Morlaix, France 2012
Group show Verticalità, Palazzo Ducale, Genova 2012 and Camec La Spezia 2013, Italy
15th European Young Artists Biennale Thessaloniki, Greece 2011
II Moscow International Biennale for Young Art , Art Play Centre, Moscow, Russia 2010
In Sonora, Sonic Art Exhibition, Espacio Cruce, Madrid, Spain 2010
Bac! Festival, Barcelona Contemporary Art Festival, at CCCB, Barcelona, Spain 2009
Group show Movimentazioni, Palazzo Ducale, Genova Italy 2009
Group show at Sarajevo Winter Festival, Turkish Cultur Center, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina 2009
Group show Arteingenua Atto Secondo, Galleria Guido Iemmi Studio d’Arte, Milan 2008
Group show Chapitre IV and V, Contemporary Art Centre « Abbaye Maubuisson », France 2008 and 2009
Group show De Industria in the Museum of Architecture in Fermignano Italy 2009
Group show Menotrenta, Olmo Museum in Savigliano, curator Tiziana Conti Italy 2007
Group Show Autour de la Baie, Manufacture des Tabacs, Morlaix, France 2012
Group show Verticalità, Palazzo Ducale, Genova 2012 and Camec La Spezia 2013, Italy
15th European Young Artists Biennale Thessaloniki, Greece 2011
II Moscow International Biennale for Young Art , Art Play Centre, Moscow, Russia 2010
In Sonora, Sonic Art Exhibition, Espacio Cruce, Madrid, Spain 2010
Bac! Festival, Barcelona Contemporary Art Festival, at CCCB, Barcelona, Spain 2009
Group show Movimentazioni, Palazzo Ducale, Genova Italy 2009
Group show at Sarajevo Winter Festival, Turkish Cultur Center, Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina 2009
Group show Arteingenua Atto Secondo, Galleria Guido Iemmi Studio d’Arte, Milan 2008
Group show Chapitre IV and V, Contemporary Art Centre « Abbaye Maubuisson », France 2008 and 2009
Group show De Industria in the Museum of Architecture in Fermignano Italy 2009
Group show Menotrenta, Olmo Museum in Savigliano, curator Tiziana Conti Italy 2007
Award
Special Mention, Festival Visioni Italiane, Bologna Cineteca, Italy 2011
First award Renaissance Arts Prize, Italian Cultural Institute, London 2010
Mention, LauraFilmFestival, Levanto, Italy 2010
Mention, Corto Dams Festival Montà d’Alba (Cuneo), Italy 2010
Mention, Group show De Industria in the Museum of Architecture in Fermignano, Italy 2009
Second award: Festival Strange Screen, Experimental and Creative Documentary –
MMCA : Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece 2008
First award: group show Artentot, Quadrelle Italy 2008
Special Mention, Festival Visioni Italiane, Bologna Cineteca, Italy 2011
First award Renaissance Arts Prize, Italian Cultural Institute, London 2010
Mention, LauraFilmFestival, Levanto, Italy 2010
Mention, Corto Dams Festival Montà d’Alba (Cuneo), Italy 2010
Mention, Group show De Industria in the Museum of Architecture in Fermignano, Italy 2009
Second award: Festival Strange Screen, Experimental and Creative Documentary –
MMCA : Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece 2008
First award: group show Artentot, Quadrelle Italy 2008
Residency
Festival Visioni Italiane, Bologna Cineteca, Italy 2011 and 2012
GFF Genova Film Festival, « The Space » Cinema Italy 2011
Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Reina Sofia National Museum of Art in Madrid, Spain 2011
FranceDoc Festival, Cinema La Clef, Paris and University Paris 8 Saint Denis, France
Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin 2011
Festival Visioni Italiane, Bologna Cineteca, Italy 2011 and 2012
GFF Genova Film Festival, « The Space » Cinema Italy 2011
Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Reina Sofia National Museum of Art in Madrid, Spain 2011
FranceDoc Festival, Cinema La Clef, Paris and University Paris 8 Saint Denis, France
Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin 2011
Festival
Festival Visioni Italiane, Bologna Cineteca, Italy 2011 and 2012
GFF Genova Film Festival, « The Space » Cinema Italy 2011
Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Reina Sofia National Museum of Art in Madrid, Spain 2011
FranceDoc Festival, Cinema La Clef, Paris and University Paris 8 Saint Denis, France
Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin 2011
Festival Visioni Italiane, Bologna Cineteca, Italy 2011 and 2012
GFF Genova Film Festival, « The Space » Cinema Italy 2011
Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Reina Sofia National Museum of Art in Madrid, Spain 2011
FranceDoc Festival, Cinema La Clef, Paris and University Paris 8 Saint Denis, France
Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt, Berlin 2011
Works:
Laura Mergoni
Through drawing, video, sculpture and installation, my artwork tends to focus on the questioning about everyday life. Each project often consists of multiple works, in a range of different media. During research and production new areas of interest arise and lead to the next body of work.
Laura Mergoni
Matteo Fiorino (Art Critic)
The artist Laura Mergoni was born in 1982 in Brugnato near the seaport town of La Spezia, Liguria, in North-West Italy. She currently lives between Italy and Paris where she attended the Academy of Fine Arts.
Pass Time is a video installation composed of several videos. The video called Tombola, (a traditional game usually played in southern Italy on New Year’s Eve, a sort of Bingo) is part of this project. In the video a group of Neapolitan women play the traditional game of Tombola, performing the ancestral rite of a civilisation which seems suspended in time: they are chasing Fortune. The women play according to the images of the Neapolitan ‘Smorfia’ - La smorfia is a book that details the Neapolitan tradition of interpreting dreams by associating them with numbers and then betting those numbers in the state lottery. Traditional dream images in La smorfia include anything you can dream of. Each number is associated with an object (42: “o café”: coffee) or an action (65: “o chianto”: crying) or a character (23: “o scemo” : the dumb), or even a festivity (25: “o Natale”: Christmas). All the images come from dreams; anything dreamed is then associated with a number.
The photography is adjusted on a chromatic scale of crisp, clear colours, where red, blue and green stand out. These are the same colours which make up the essential chromatic range of Flemish Gothic painting. Towards the end of the video, as soon as the player wearing a red jumper stands up, shouting, interrupting the draw, a bright, intense red fills the screen and the woman’s face changes into a Baconian’s grimace (the equivalent of grimace in Italian being “smorfia”). The video is not a straightforward tribute to Francis Bacon’s painting, the young Italian artist rather pays tribute to the French director Robert Bresson, who achieved, in his last film <L’argent>(Money), a cinematographic purism where the story line is built around the dialogue between the details and the actors’ automatism (the so-called “non-actors”).
In Laura Mergoni’s video the shots carefully follow the hands making gestures with mechanical movements like cranes operating in a port. The cranes pick up stones as the hands pick up bright little pebbles stolen from the same sea that polished them. The little stones are then put on numbers drawn by hand. Lira coins, telephone tokens, little coloured circles cut out from cardboard, everything is handled in the same way, every woman in the group makes a display of her own aesthetic taste and of the traditional housekeeper’s features. Each number - or the image matched with it through the Smorfia - echoes within the bare room with the solemn sternness of sorcery; the sound enhanced by the husky voice of the player. She calls the numbers matching them with images, combinations come up such as “o curtiello è carùto” (the knife has fallen) (41: o curtiello: the knife) (56: a carùta: the fall), or “a puttana è scema” (78: a bella figliola: the nice girl; 23: o scemo: the dumb). Such combinations seem to conceal allegories from Tarot cards. But in the end the real protagonist is the cigarette, a sly presence during the whole running time of the video, held in the hand of every player, bestowing upon them nothing other than Patience, even doing without nicotine. The cigarettes are in fact not smoked, the shot frames the detail of embers slowly but inevitably burning, cigarettes set among the players’ fingers, hinting at – with the help of the smoke – the Vanitas (Vanity) of Gambling.
Like the films of Robert Bresson, the search for the mechanical reflexes of human beings does not devalue the humanity of the players; on the contrary it offers them the chance to exhibit (without neo-realistic reflections!) their individual personalities via traditional Neapolitan histrionics and mostly via what we associate with theatrical masks: silence.
