La panchina di Luis Simon, 2019, Villa Romana, Florence; photo: OKNOstudio
La panchina di Luis Simon, 2019, Villa Romana, Florence; photo: OKNOstudio
La panchina di Luis Simon, 2019, Villa Romana, Florence; photo: OKNOstudio
La panchina di Luis Simon
2019
Marble sculpture, installation, photography, making of
Leonora Bisagno’s and Bruno Baltzer’s work revolves around a reversal of existing conditions, a departure from the self-absorption that characterises contemporary society. Besides its subversive use of imagery, their approach also puts emphasis on time, on both human and planetary scale. When the two artists travelled to the marble quarry in Carrara, from which Mussolini ordered the greatest monolith of the twentieth century to be cut out and set up as a monument to his own glory in Rome in 1928 (incidentally, the obelisk is still lit at night), they were aiming for a symbolic disempowerment of the fascist monument as well as a socialization of the material. To this avail, they ordered a marble column to be cut to scale from the same quarry, which they laid out horizontally and sawed diagonally into five elements on which visitors were invited to take a seat individually (La panchina di Luis Simon, 2019, the name in the title is an anagram of Mussolini). Angelika Stepken
Leonora Bisagno / Bruno Baltzer
Bruno Baltzer and Leonora Bisagno have been working as an artist duo since 2014. They analyse the contemporary condition of representation, both official and spontaneous, through installations and interventions. Baltzer and Bisagno employ multiple forms for their projects, ranging, among other things, from tourism photography to election posters, advertising neons and television archive material.