Summer School as School 2023
The Public Program
August 17, 2023, 20:00

Of Moths and Muybridge's Scale
Presentation by Yann Annicchiarico

Venue: Boxing Club, Mark Isaku 8, 10000 Prishtina, Republic of Kosovo

Abstract

An Ancient Roman cistern. The evening before the opening. A moth finds its way into a sculpture. Moments before it was a platonic solid of the highest degree. But one of it’s twelve faces is missing, opening a breach into this perfect dimension. A lightbulb shining trough the little dots in the soot veil must have attracted the nocturnal insect. Looking for another world in another place. But this visitor of the night has left traces in the sculpture changing it entirely. What does such a passing do to our idea of esthetics?

The gardens of the Greek Royal Palace just after the first World War. The young puppet king gets bitten trying to separate his dog Fritz fighting a Barbary macaque. This bite was to cost him his life, setting forth a domino effect. In consequence countless people were displaced between the former Ottoman Empire and Greece. They tell their stories to the sounds of a Bouzouki in the suburbs of Athens. Those of feeling foreign in a land said to be theirs. We’ll follow the traces of this Barbary macaques to Gibraltar where first the Moors then Churchill introduced them into the rock. There, in the nocturnal reflection of the lights of the Gibraltar bay on the limestone surface of the rock, two other worlds meet. But what does that tell us about how we choose what’s supposedly foreign?

Berlin and it’s nightlife. A document scanner with an open lid in a park on the fringe of the city. It’s lamp moves slowly under the glass plane in the darkness. Do the results even show something? Depends on what you’re able to perceive. But every so often a nocturnal insect crawls over the surface of the glass. What relationship can be drawn between those worlds, those lives in the Berliner night?

Trough such stories of encounters between worlds, Yann Annicchiarico will introduce his work which trough light-footed entrapments and playful detours brings one closer to the stranger within.

Biography

The work of Yann Annicchiarico addresses our perceptions and confronts our human nature with worlds that are inaccessible to them. Inseparable from the still or moving bodies exploring a space, the act of seeing in Annicchiarico’s work prompts an awareness of the limits of our own understanding and the possibility of transcending these limits. A shift from intelligibility to sensibility occurs when we grasp the impenetrability of dimensions that are foreign, yet close. Interacting with their environment through an interplay of different scales and temporalities, Yann Annicchiarico’s installations allow one to experience the physical sensation of being on a threshold, of finding oneself in an in-between.

Yann Annicchiarico (b. 1983) has held solo exhibitions at KIT – Kunst im Tunnel in Düsseldorf (2020); Nosbaum Reding Projects, Luxembourg (2019); Centre des Arts Pluriels, Ettelbruck (2018) and has participated in group exhibitions in MUDAM - musée d'art moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (2021); Museo Archeologico del Chianti Senese, Castellina in Chianti, Italy (2019). He is an artist-researcher with ACTH (Contemporary Art and Historical Time) since 2011. He has participated in residency programmes at Fonderie Darling, Montreal (2019) and at Villa Médicis, Académie de France, Rome (2015). He was awarded the Bourse Francis-André in 2020 for his first solo exhibition in a public institution at KIT – Kunst im Tunnel à Düsseldorf (2020).