Cordts Art Foundation and Untitled Association are pleased to present Her ship was so small, by artist Alice Pedroletti, on view from April 27th to May 30th, at nogallery in Berlin.
What do the topos of the island represent in contemporary society? And which tools have been employed to bring closer to our imagination the remoteness of these fragmented lands? These are among the many questions Alice Pedroletti has invested in preparing her solo show Her ship was so small.
In this frame, layering different times and localities of the artist's research, the boat - precisely the folding boat - becomes a formal exercise and an architectural device for crossing geographies and imagining urban and speculative constellations of interconnectedness.
Pedroletti employs canonical and experimental media, like Artificial Intelligence. The AI is an assistant to the artist and trained with an archive of boat design plans collected during her research. The dataset is emotionally and perceptively rearranged to create an intimate visual language to communicate with the machine. The artist’s obsession with archives and vessels, both ideological and embodied, leads to the repetition of a gesture comparable to the one of the machine, aimed to resignify the historically connotated destiny of boats: from a tool of displacement and extraction into that of a boat (body) archive.
In the video, Her ship was so small (the boatbuilder), 2022, the boat becomes a fluid and organic exercise, an exoskeleton that protects and stores traces of resistance and affection. The same affection nourishes the dialogue between Pedroletti’s boat-related datasets and her artificial intelligence resulting in a wallpaper [Death of a folding boat on dry land, 2022] where thousands of abstract and primitive signs create an orderly archipelago of vessels.
The work layers the walls of the gallery along with a new series of drawings [Her ship was so small (the designer), 2023] and environmental photographs [Study for an Archipelago, 2022 - ongoing]. Playing with scales of information and archives, the artist guides the visitor through an emotional cartography in which urban and natural islands are related. What’s the fabric that brings together all these elements? Pedroletti invites the audience to find their navigational tools.
In conjunction with the show's opening, the publication The city, the island. ATRII/Berlin, published by ZK/U Press, will be presented with a round table discussion with artist Alice Pedroletti, Alessandra Saviotti, cultural activist and researcher, and artist Derek MF Di Fabio. Dalia Maini moderates the conversation leading some of the book topics Toward the Archipelago: reflections on how the proximity of cultural and environmental resources influences urban infrastructures and collective art practices.
The conceptual principle of the exhibition was first developed during the Women Artists in Residence on the island of Schwanenwerder in Berlin, sponsored by the Cordts Art Foundation. nogallery in Berlin-Wilmersdorf is the new space the Foundation made available to scholarship holders.
From April 1st to May 30th, the artist works in the space transforming it into a living studio archive, performing exercises to increase the physical dataset, and adding or subtracting artworks.
The show Her ship was so small follows Islands never cry (2021) and Death of a folding boat on dry land (2022), previous chapters of Pedroletti's research. The artist has been supported by the Italian Council (9th Edition, 2020), a program to promote Italian contemporary art in the world by the Directorate-General for Contemporary-Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
Pedroletti's project is realised in collaboration with artist Isaac Schaal, graphic designer Ilaria Pittassi, and curator Alessandra Saviotti and supported by the Italian design wallpaper company Jannelli&Volpi using CO.DE. Contemporary Design Technology.
Opening 27.04.2023 | h 16-20
h 17 conversation Toward the Archipelago
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Image Caption:
Alice Pedroletti, Study for an Archipelago, 2023
Courtesy of the artist.
