The farm owner's appreciation of art and culture is coupled with a deeply-held belief that, in order to be accessible to all, artwork should have a place outside of the traditional confines of museums and galleries. This vision has inspired the development of small artistic/cultural projects at La Bellotta, in addition to the purchase of numerous works by young contemporary artists.
The Artist
Born in Athens, lives and works in Italy. She studied at the School of Fine Arts in Athens (1994-2000) and continued her postgraduate studies in Fine Arts (2001-2003) at the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (GB). Mary Zygouri, stages video-Performances in extreme spaces, following a more relational strategy. Thus creating situations, where the real experience and the limited control over the outcome of the performance (the behavior of the public or animals involved is unpredictable) generates an authentic reaction, characterized by theatricality and documented with a cinematographic approach.
Video-Performance Symbiosis
Location: Bellotta, Biological Poultry Farm , 10.000 chickens, (IT)Turin.
Regia: Wiliam Farnesi
Autori: Mary Zygouri, Pavlos Polizos
Production: 2007
In the video-performance “Symbiosis”(2007), Mary Zygouri stages as Valentina ,an imaginary secretary - inspired by the homonymous 1946 typewriter Olivetti model shown in the video -an authoritative figure inside a herd full of 10.000 chickens. This work was inspired by Jorges Borges against the Argentinean politician Juan Peron in 1946, which resulted in the author losing his job as a public librarian and being resigned to work as poultry inspector. Directly referring to the typology of crowds as purported by Elias Canetti, the work refers to the bidirectional relationship of authoritative language that governs and according to Michel Foucault produces the victimizer and the victim. Bonds of power and the way in which subjects are ideologically accused by power.
The Artist
Artist and poet, Ivan was born in Milan in 1981. Since 2003 he decides to soon assault the road to poetry blows, painting and posting up for the various ways of Milan between its compositions, collecting the interest and the attention of many. In the October of the same year it exposes for the first time its poetries and, thanks to a distance of contamination with various from Milan emergent artists, it decides to converge its poetic towards the visual limbs and the modern digital technologies. Today ivan is considered the “young father” of the new Street Poetry’s movement.
Throw seeds to the wind to make the sky bloom
This verse encapsulates the will and power that lies at the core of Ivan's art. A will made of freedom, irony and the awareness of a grey and disarming present, prompting him to leave the earth to those who still believe that seeds thrown to the wind are wasted seeds and who fail to realise that flowers are no longer picked by lowering one's gaze, but are made to blossom by raising one's eyes.