The Cripta747 space is quite big, I was really impressed when I arrived there. I had some ideas for the show but they didn’t fit in that huge place (one room on the ground floor and five in the basement). I had the idea tu use confetti (”coriandoli” in Italian) when I saw a pack in the window of a paper shop in Porta Palazzo promoted with other material for the carnival. I decided to make different experiments putting together graffiti and confetti, illegal aggression and harmless party pieces of paper. For the opening I made two interactive pieces inside the gallery. To organize the space and present the works in a proper way, I made a path with plastic fruit boxes, the gallery is situated on the square where the Porta Palazzo market happens every day and it is the biggest outdoor market in Europe. Tons of material tu re-use.
No use to say that during two weeks, the guys from Cripta747 and me had a lot of fun working on this project.
I made six experiments:
(As it is a lot of documentation, it’s better to click on the list below to see video and pictures of each one, then “back to top” to come back here)
For a couple of nights I went to do graffitis with confetti and glue in Porta Palazzo neighbourhood.
I made 16 pieces in total.
In two of the rooms in the basement of the gallery I shown a video of the street actions, the pictures of the pieces and the 5 cardboard stencils I used.
This experiment was based on the idea to do something quite innocent (playing with confetti and wind) in a very hostile environment. It was nothing easy and we had to come back five times into the tunnel to achieve the plan. We could have done it more easily anywhere else but the idea was to do it a mission, to do it illegally and observe how all those factors which made it more difficult influenced the result of the experiment.
On the wall at the entrance of the basement, I nailed 50 Kit-Coriandoli to be sure that everyone had his own bag of confetti!
In the kit we of course put confetti and a little card with a simple “Eltono” design made with double face tape and with instructions on its back.
It was a gift so some people kept the kit but yes, others put the card back on the wall after following the instructions!
The ground floor of the gallery looks just like a pretty normal gallery with a big window-shop. That’s why I decided to present a “normal looking” work on that room so it could look like the exhibition is just there and nothing else, it was quite funny when people discovered that there were five more rooms downstairs with not so “normal looking” things happening down there!
The pieces shown in the room were made at the same time we did the sign on the window-shop, using the confettis that were falling and glue. I was totally stocked by this random result!
Sure after the opening we went to dance and this is the floor of the club at the end of the night!!!!!
I actually found one confetti in my bed in Madrid yesterday morning, two weeks after the opening!!! I can imagine that the same thing is happening to all the people who came to the opening, that’s just amazing!
