Kerstin Brätsch and the collective Kaya are guests of the Memmo Foundation in Rome, until 11 November 2018, in the double exhibition “_Ruine” and “_Kovo”.
From the dialogue with the curator, Francesco Stocchi, it emerged how this exhibition has a precise meaning in the dynamics of artistic production in Rome. In fact, it falls within the sphere of the residences promoted by the Foundation, which through its commitment to contemporary art, intends to contribute to the cultural growth of the city, favoring the meeting between foreign artists and highly qualified workers from the territory. In this perspective, the concept of residence takes a broad breath, without exhausting itself in the realization of the exhibition project, conceived as a possibility for the artist to deepen his work in contact with the city of Rome. In this context the exposition, articulated in the “_Ruine” and the Stalla for “_Kovo” section, redefines the spaces of the foundation, giving life to different realities, two different worlds, within the same universe.
The personal project, which Brätsch presents in “_Ruine”, transports the visitor into a magical and ancient dimension. A kaleidoscope of shapes and colors, in which the works appear as fragments, custodians of an ancestral shamanic energy, the same that emanates from both the marbling paintings, made with the master of marbling Dirk Lange, and the work in stucco marble, the result of collaboration with the Roman craftsman Walter Cipriani. The curator Stocchi dwelt on the importance that in the work had the propensity for collaboration in artistic practice, by the authors. Collaboration that leads to the conception of an exhibition whose construction involves a long time, modulated on the exchange between artist and craftsman.
The sense of elusive liquidity that transpires in the marbles, seems to contrast with the solid firmness of the slabs that imitate the marble, made by taking up the ancient technique of stucco. However, the artist comes to compose the different elements in a unitary narration, which seems to arrive at the origin of matter, at that primordial magma, which in the works lives as a trace and fragment.
Stocchi observes that the type of cooperation between the artist and the artisans has given the exhibition the character of a continuous discovery. The curator also underlined how the investigation, carried out by Bratsch on the different typologies presented by the pictorial medium, led her, in this case, to create a painting that could be defined as “solidified”.
Leaving the space of the House, illuminated by the colorful vivacity of the “_Ruine” fragments, one enters the archaic atmosphere of “_Kovo”, where the collective Kaya collaborates with the sound artist and musician Nicolas An Xedro, based in Naples.
In this case, the artists were invited to create a work on site, in the Stalla space, where they recreate what could be the habitat of a den, a cave of cavern, dark and hidden. A den precisely, in which a tribal energy vibrates The skins, lamps and paintings presented by Kaya, involve the user in a place inhabited by anthropomorphic and spectral identities, which have to do with our primitiveness. Stocchi highlighted the idea of continuous flow that characterizes the collective approach to work. The same that in “_Kovo”, led them to intervene on works from previous exhibitions. In this, as in other works by Kaya, the encounter between Brätsch’s painting and Eilers’s sculpture is resolved in what the curator describes as a “collision between painting and sculpture”.
Analyzing the relationship between “_Ruine” and “Kovo”, the curator pointed out how, in them, the artists reason on shared elements, which are for example the concept of catacombs and that of ruin, giving a non-romantic reading, always in relationship with the future. The entire exhibition, therefore, contains two seemingly distant realities, but united by attention to a primitive past, by the ambiguous and disturbing traits. A distant time, which continues to pulsate in our present, projecting itself into a hypothetical tomorrow.

Delia Pizzuti

Info:
Kerstin Bratsch _Ruine
Kaya_Kovo
curated by Francesco Stocchi
May 4 – November 11, 2018
Fondazione Memmo
Via di Fontanella Borghese, 56b Roma
Opening hours: Thursday – Sunday , 11.00-18.00