Asia Neri · 7 September 2022
With Il Respiro dei sogni, MAD Murate Art District opens the doors to the collective unconscious through Jacopo Baboni Schilingi’s generative, interactive work. Co-curated by Valentina Gensini and Renata Summo O’Connell, the exhibition opens on Thursday 8 September in the Terzo Giardino, moving the following day to MAD’s spaces in Piazza delle Murate, Florence, where it continues until 15 October.
Exhibitions: MAD places dreams and Florence’s younger generations at the centre
Il Respiro dei sogni has had a long gestation, actively involving local places and residents in a complex audiovisual installation.
According to Jacopo Baboni Schilingi, artistic and dream production are means of resisting analysis, the attempt to decipher codes and parade their explanation. The inexplicable is a necessary dimension for the artist, to be protected and preserved because it releases us from every kind of judgement. “There is no right or wrong in a dream; everything is possible, and in that condition we are all equal. I was looking for something that could belong to every individual. Hence dreams: an unconscious activity without age,” Baboni explains, introducing his lengthy work for MAD.
The long residency allowed the artist to inhabit the city and establish a strong rapport with younger generations. Through collaboration with Florence’s Academy of Fine Arts, students gained access to lessons and masterclasses, supporting the artist through the planning, creative and production stages.
The institutions also strongly welcomed and supported this opportunity. Alessia Bettini, Florence’s deputy mayor and councillor for culture, stressed its crucial value: “the transfer of a heritage of experience and a strong connection with the cultural ecosystem to local artists”.
Il Respiro dei sogni also involved the Florentine community through an open call last May, allowing the artist to collect and archive participants’ dreams. To preserve anonymity, the final expression of this unconscious flow is interpreted by the voices of Cristina Abati and Riccardo Rombi. Sometimes presented coolly, sometimes experienced intensely, residents’ whispers, confessions and dream visions become part of the complex audiovisual body inhabiting MAD’s various spaces and beyond.
Two regenerated spaces in Florence: from the Terzo Giardino to MAD
Interaction with the Terzo Giardino is another particularly interesting feature of the project and Baboni Schilingi’s research. The green area along Lungarno Serristori, beside the Arno, represents for the artist a perfect balance between natura naturata and natura naturans: an environment where human intervention in the landscape is both a protective presence and an absence of excessive interference.
The Terzo Giardino and Murate Art District share their origins in urban-regeneration projects. The first was formerly an uncultivated, abandoned urban void; the second is a former monastery later used as a prison, now a municipal contemporary-art production centre managed by MUS.E. Both have been virtuously renewed, receive daily care, and belong to the cultural and natural heritage that must be protected.
The route conceived by Jacopo Baboni Schilingi for Il Respiro dei sogni is progressive. Entry beneath the portico introduces attentive, sensitive listening. The journey from the first cell to the third builds intensity: in the voices, initially cool and then emotional; in the archive of collective visions, which begins with hopes, proceeds through utopias and ends with remote, almost monstrous dreams; and in the visual content, moving from low to high technology.
The Anna Banti room concludes this layering process with a generative, interactive installation. Entering it means stepping into another world. A sensor in the centre lets visitors shape the audiovisual projection created by the artist according to his personal representation of dreaming. Each person becomes a participant, a presence decisive to the work’s very life, the conductor of a composition restoring the enigmatic, inexplicable character to which the artist is devoted.
Florence exhibitions: MAD’s artist in residence
Jacopo Baboni Schilingi comes from so-called “art” music, combining notation and interactivity. International press describes him as one of the most representative composers of his generation. His visual and musical productions are invited to multidisciplinary-art venues combining images, video, architecture and audience interaction: Sanlitun Village in Beijing, UniCredit Pavilion in Milan, the Grand Palais in Paris, Nexus Hall in Tokyo, the Streaming Museum in New York and others.
In 2015 he participated twice in the Venice Biennale, creating the music for the Turkish Pavilion’s Respiro della voce and the closing-day concert in the Sala delle Armi. He has composed for major sponsors including Hermès and Samsung. From 2015 to 2018 the Paris house Camille Fournet sponsored his ARGO installation, exhibited at the Grand Palais in Artists & Robots. From 2018 to 2020 Chanel supported a series of residencies, a concert devoted to his work and a solo exhibition in Tokyo.
Opening and possible programme changes
Il Respiro dei sogni opens on 8 September at 7 p.m. in the Terzo Giardino and can be visited from the following day at MAD Murate Art District, Piazza delle Murate, Florence. In bad weather, the opening will take place at MAD on 8 September at 6 p.m.; the Terzo Giardino event will move to the following day.
The project, curated by MAD artistic director Valentina Gensini and Artegiro president Renata Summo O’Connell, is funded by ANCI and the Presidency of the Council of Ministers’ Department for Youth Policies and Universal Civil Service within LUMEN–Progetto RIVA. Conceived and produced by MAD, it involves Artegiro Contemporary Art, the Institut français, Florence’s Academy of Fine Arts, the Luigi Cherubini Conservatoire and EMI–Ensemble de Musique Interactive, with support from Fondazione CR Firenze.