Ludovica Carbotta

The starting point for Ludovica Carbotta’s work is an analysis of the city as context, and of sculpture as medium. The urban environment is documented through video, re-imagined through drawing, briefly annotated through sketches, enacted through performance, offered up as landscape in which the spectator finds his place, reconstructed in detail through sculpture, its interrelations analyzed through an installation.

Ludovica Carbotta is also a founding member of Progetto Diogene, a group of artists whose explorations of the artist’s role are grounded in comparison as the basis of its methodology. This is not without importance: it is in connection with the group’s activity, although distinct, that we see appear in her poetics the dialectical relation between individual and space as two poles of the same social body. What the artist investigates is not an abstract space, but an urban or natural fabric both alive and relational, whose measure is the body. The process behind the production of an artwork is thus often part of its formalization: the dimension of creation is made visible through the traces it leaves behind.

In Imitazione 01 (2010), footprints in clay are used to make a cement cast. The final shape is a base, a sort of pedestal bearing the exact quantity of cement needed to make the object’s overall weight equal to the weight of the artist. The void produced in clay by the artist’s body becomes a positive volume. Similarly, the body is used as a unit of measurement in Patologia da decompressione (2009), a film that traces Ludovica Carbotta’s attempt to gauge empirically the depth of Lake Como. The film, whose length coincides with the measurement actually taken, was never developed, but is rather exhibited as sculpture, unreeled and placed vertically to replicate the artist’s height.

In Tempo imperfetto (2010), presented at Palazzo Reale, the matrix is neither the natural nor the strictly urban environment, but rather the cupola of Guarino Guarini’s Sindone Chapel.

A space of culture and of worship, the cupola is a hollow that the artist reconstructs as a solid from a photograph of its interior. Using waste materials, Ludovica Carbotta builds a painstakingly precise reproduction of Guarini’s architecture on her own scale, but working from the inside out, so that the final result, as seen from the outside, is left to chance.

Tempo imperfetto is a paradoxical copy, like Imitazione, like Patologia da decompressione, which, by eschewing mimesis, affirms the importance of the creative act as experience, the body as the measure of things, individual action as cognitive function.

Cecilia Canziani