The cathedral glass laboratory is underway for the Ara Starck exhibition

The production workshop of Made in Cloister next exhibition begins. This time the artist Ara Starck during her residency has decided to work with the artisans and dialogue with the city.

Seak peek: one of the main artworks included in the show will be in stain glass, an ancient tradition of which very few master craftsmen remain. The enhancement of craftsmanship, part of the Made in Cloister mission, passes, above all, through the sharing of values and techniques with young people.

Therefore the workshop will be in collaboration with the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, and Fondazione Cologni will also support the activities, as it has been involved in the promotion of Italian craftsmanship for almost 30 years.

During the production workshops will be held in which the artist and the craftsmen involved will show the students of the Academy the technique and working of cathedral glass.

Soon many more news about the exhibition...

WALLWATER

by Enzo Distinto

LAB.oratorio space

“Wall Water”, the exhibition by Enzo Distinto, curated by Valentina Apicerni, at the Lab.Oratorio space, the project space of the Made in Cloister Foundation dedicated to research, experimentation and exposure of the contemporary art scene.

“Wall Water” is the trace of two rivers that intersect, the Sebeto, the secret river of Naples which, springing from Monte Somma, crossed the city and poured into the Mediterranean, and the Nile. The rivers are represented as two walls of water that rise upwards, constituting a liquid surface with gradual colors that turn from green to yellow, symbolizing the encounter between different civilizations, unified by a common element that marks the utopian disappearance of political borders between countries and allows you to visualize the Earth as a single large continent, freely traversable by all.

Enzo Distinto's artistic research starts from cartography, from the study of geographical and hydrographic maps on which he works with clippings and sculptural compositions, giving new configurations to cities and borders. This overlapping of real —existing territories— and imaginary —possible territories— is also reflected in the stratification of the reading planes: they are mental and non-geographical spaces.

His traces of the Sebeto and the Nile merge history and legend, places and non-places, geopolitical and sacred dimensions, memory and current events. Because they are the symbolic traces of two river gods and two continents, of the ancient intercultural dialogue between peoples and of their mobility across the Mediterranean: here the barriers are just a wall of water.

“Enzo incorporates all these aspects in a very rich poor art installation, made of marble scraps, steel bars and water. What was already a blocked passage is now even more blocked, so that every movement must be conscious. Everyone is obliged to have their own experience of stone waste. Everyone has to negotiate with the old walls [...] It's the kind of exhibition that makes you want to experience it in itself, and everyone is rewarded by the impossibility of doing so" Jimmie Durham

SOAP OPERA

by Nuvola Ravera

curated by Chiara Pirozzi

LAB.oratorio space

Soap Opera is an exhibition in line with the mission of the Made in Cloister reconversion project, which started with the recovery of the former abandoned cloister within the Bourbon woolen mill complex, to transform it into an exhibition and performance venue in where artists can confront the ancient traditions in a wider urban regeneration project.

Nuvola Ravera has conceived a site specific installation after a period of research on the territory and production carried out with the Neapolitan workers specialized in artisan saponification. From these premises, the artist has interpreted the exhibition space as if it were a place of archaeological finds and, at the same time, a domestic-urban carpet. Nuvola Ravera traces a series of rooms testified, at present, by the remains of a pre-existing floor, partly emerged and partly lost. Nuvola Ravera's research intertwines the idea of the common and monumental good with protection and conservation actions, observing their limits and obligations, finding in the use of a soluble material such as soap the symbolic key to a sensitive and always interpretable. If these suggestions reach the artist starting from a study of the history and everyday life of the Porta Capuana woolen mill complex, a further stimulus comes from reading the landscape of the city of Naples, from its stratifications, from the architectural weaves, from the smells, such as that of soap coming from homes, which connect the inside with the outside, tracing a perceptive geography of the urban space.

In Soap Opera the artist develops a longitudinal narration that undermines the exhibition space, drawing a path that is constantly interrupted and jagged, in disappearance, which temporally crosses physical places and layers of memory, photographing the remains of an era that has not yet passed , to be freed from the fever of custody of cultural heritage, at the same time imbued with an intimacy, private and domestic, in continuous transformation.

Nuvola Ravera's research, which often connects the biographical dimension to a psychic reading of places through the creation of ephemeral devices, combines perfectly with the experimental and mobile dimension that a space like Lab.Oratorio wants to have.

The exhibition was created thanks to the support of the MiBAC and SIAE as part of the initiative "Sillumina - Private copy for young people, for culture" and enjoys the support of SuperOtium for the artist's residence .

Nuvola Ravera was born in Genoa in 1984. She studied in the Department of Painting at the Ligustica Academy of Fine Arts - Genoa, attended a master's degree in contemporary photography at Cfp Bauer- Milan, Cinema and video at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst- Leipzig. He has supported various artists in the production of selected projects including Armin Linke in Berlin, Bouchra Khalili in Genoa and Giorgio Andreotta Calò. He lives and works in Venice where in 2016/17 he participated in the residency program of Bevilacqua La Masa and is currently completing the IUAV university in the department of Visual Arts. He has exhibited and collaborated with various institutions including: Museum of Contemporary Art Villa Croce, Genoa; Castel Sant'Elmo, Naples; Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation; Museum of Aveiro; Atelierhaus Salzamt, Linz; Steam Factory, Milan; Pistoletto Foundation, Biella; Venice Biennial. She has appeared in publications: Lady Dior, as seen by a new generation of Italian artists, Mousse Publishing; Genoa Ventimiglia Genoa, Humboldt Books. She was nominated by Artribune magazine as the best young Italian artist for 2017.