Lottozero

Like Lottozero, the research centre for art, design and textile culture set up in Prato by Arianna and Tessa Moroder, both of whom originally come from Bolzano. The Studio House will host three of their site-specific projects in 2019, curated by Alessandra Tempesti. These three projects, although considerably different from each other, have the recurring use of textile elements in common and all invite a reflection on the role of the textile factor in contemporary art, a medium with multiple technical, material and conceptual potential.

Black balls wrapped in clumps of synthetic hair make up the installation by Anna M. Rose at the Studio House. The different sized balls are mobile – the public can touch and move them and become part of a playful experience. The invitation, however, is not just to play a childish game but to make contact with the material around the ball. Shapeless and filamentous synthetic hair, displaced and hypertrophic, generates an uncanny effect, which borders on repulsion.

By highlighting the ambiguity of gestures and materials extrapolated from their original contexts, Homo Bulla reverses the image of hair usually attributed to femininity, beauty and vanity. At the same time, the artist stages a reflection on time and human life. The title of the exhibition, Homo Bulla, states that human life is a bubble, fragile and fleeting, and makes reference to the philosopher, Erasmo da Rotterdam (1467-1536).

The imaginary, which the artist evokes is, therefore, linked to soap bubbles – a re-occurring element in antique paintings and Vanitas representations, still lifes like allegory of the transience and elusiveness of life. The installation by Anna M. Rose is completed by a new series of videos by the artist. In these works, the camera has isolated a particular piece taken from the world lexicon of games (ball, rope and stick), which is obsessively reiterated until it finally dissolves the pleasure of fun in a dangerously threatening sense.