Grazia Toderi: THEATERS

Opening Friday 19 December 18.30 at the gallery on Piazza San Marco

Grazia Toderi was planning to participate at the Venice Biennale in 1999 with a video projection on Teatro La Fenice in Venice: today, after the death and resurrection of the theater, the project can finally become a reality. The creation of the video will take some time after the completion of the restoration work, and will be presented to the public only at the effective start of the opera season in 2004. For the occasion a catalogue will be published summarizing and surveying all the artist's work on the idea of the theater, extended to also cover sports stadiums and outdoor arenas.

In the meantime Grazia Toderi (Padua, 1963) presents a solo show at the space on Piazza San Marco of Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, for the first time featuring a vast overview of her work on theaters, based first of all on the vision of the films of Stanley Kubrick, certain television imagery, the view of the city from above, and everything that in our era has continued and deepened the idea of theatrical representation.

The solo show of Grazia Toderi, who since the Biennale in 1993 has participated in many international art events, opens the new programming of the Foundation; this is a moment of focus of contemporary art on the great Italian tradition of "teatro lirico", as well as a tribute to the reconstruction of Teatro La Fenice.

Already, in her first videos, Grazia Toderi created a connection with opera, then moving on to research on historical theaters, from Teatro Massimo of Palermo to Teatro Rossini of Pesaro, to other theaters hidden away in the Italian provinces. The exhibition, a co-production of the IUAV Department of Design and the Arts and Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, is also an initial step toward making the opening of the opera season a regular appointment for contemporary art as well.

Francesca Pasini is the curator of the show, which takes place in two sections. The first, opening on 19 December 2003, features the videos "Random" (Teatro Massimo of Palermo, 2001) "Audience" (Teatro Comunale of Casale Monferrato, 2000), "Eclissi" (Teatro Comunale of Ferrara, 1999) "Orchestra" (Teatro Rossini of Pesaro, 2003), "Il fiore delle mille e una notte" (Teatro Comunale of Modena, 1998) and the photographs "Arena" (Arena of Verona, 2000), "Stage" (2000), "Il mondo privato" (Teatro di Verzura of Villa Caprile, 2003). The second takes place in November 2004 with the projection of the video on Teatro La Fenice and the publication of the catalogue.

The idea is to make the video on Teatro La Fenice a focal point, inserting it in an itinerary that illustrates the concept of the theater developed by Grazia Toderi in recent years, i.e. the shift between the theatrical quality of the video language and the cultural, emotional, social representation effected by theater since its origins.

In Toderi's projections particular attention is paid to central-plan architecture, from the Arena of Verona to Castel Sant'Angelo, the Planetarium to the Stadium: places that indicate a slippage between the history of theater and that of representation, so much so that Toderi also inserts television, as in "Q" (2003), which transfigures the image of the quiz show "Rischiatutto".

For Grazia Toderi what unites these perceptions is the sign of architecture and its historical development: therefore Venice is very stimulating. Buildings, palaces, canals, squares and corners in the city bear a particular resemblance to theatrical sets. The insertion of the images of Grazia Toderi here becomes an opportunity to analyze the Italian artistic heritage today, of which the theater can be considered a symbol, both of architecture and of landscape, seen as a network of "palazzi", villas and castles that have always contained theatrical spaces of representation. The research of Grazia Toderi, directing the gaze toward this public and private "set design", restores timeliness to its present image.

Grazia Toderi
THEATERS
Kurator: Francesca Pasini