Italy: With You with Everything

Con te con tutto (With You With Everything) by Chiara Camoni will enliven the spaces of the Italian Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture. The exhibition, curated by Cecilia Canziani, is a call to come together, an invitation to build a different way of being in the world through encountering and sharing with other lifeforms, leaving room for wonder, sentiment, dialogue, contemplation, and the flow of time that transforms everything. The exhibition is comprised of works created specifically for the exhibition and existing works, according to a combinatorial practice of reuse and re-semanticization, already used by the artist and suggested by the very nature of his works. The artist's familiar materials are joined by new ones: recycled plastics, industrial waste, found objects and steel—which are brought together here to describe the contemporary landscape, inviting us to recognise beauty even in waste. The first gallery houses a silent forest of figures: over twenty ceramic statues—slightly taller than life-size yet solemn—dot the entire gallery, which is left in semi-darkness. Modelled using the colombino technique or composed of a myriad of small terracotta elements that give shape to bodies in potential metamorphosis, they appear in the dim light as minor deities. The second room appears bathed in light, like a world under construction composed of natural elements, artefacts and recycled objects that continue and expand the artist's reflection on matter. Starting with some large reclining female figures, modelled by the artist in terracotta, which act as a link between the first and second settings, we then enter a potential architecture that seems to emerge from the ground and become a floor, a container, a wall, a seat, a palazzo, divided into rooms, corridors and gardens, the construction of which is ongoing. Starting from a consolidated practice that bears witness to Camoni's resonance and intimacy with other artists close to her in terms of sensitivity or paths of life, these domestic architectures host Dialoghi: a series of works that relate Camoni's work to other languages, figures and chronologies, conceived and designed by Fiammetta Griccioli and Lucia Aspesi, including Fausto Melotti, Alberto Martini and Marisa Merz, artefacts such as an amphora dating back to the end of the seventh century BC, objects and two previously unseen commissions: by choreographer and dancer Annamaria Ajmone, Canti fossili (Fossil Songs), and Che cosa resta? (What Remains?), produced by filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher.