GOLDEN AGE

Francesca Grilli

04 January 2012 till 14 February 2012

This year, all of a sudden complete flocks of birds fell from the sky all around the world. Soon, this phenomenon was connected with the approaching end of the world in 2012: the birds had supposedly lost their sense of direction now that the magnetic poles of the earth are shifting. The Italian artist Francesca Grilli became fascinated by this premonition of an approaching cosmic catastrophe and decided to make it the theme of her project The Golden Age.

With this Grilli goes back to Oro (2011), a project in which she started an exploration of the myth of King Midas and the meaning of gold. Grilli's field of research has gradually shifted to the invisible and the magical, and finally ended up in SYB with the alchemists. According to their traditions, we are now living in the last, iron era. Death and decomposition await us at the end of this era. However, the alchemists believe that this does not have to be the final conclusion. For them, a catastrophe is a moment of transformation: the end of an era offers the possibility to return to a golden age. The search of the alchemists to find a way to transform base metals into gold should be seen as a quest; a metaphor for a road to spiritual transformation.

During her stay in SYB, Grilli wants to extend the quest of the alchemist to our time. In a series of small rituals around food and drink of gold, she wants to look, together with the people of Beetsterzwaag, for the current meaning of this precious metal and our contemporary ideas of catastrophe and transformation.

Grilli invited three special guests to aid her in her investigation: Alessandra Saviotti, an independent curator who is interested in the relationship between food and contemporary art, Odette Buntenbach, an aura reader, and Maria Grazia Calo', a professional chef from Venice who specialises in menus that are in accordance with historical traditions.

Francesca Grilli, 1978 (IT), lives and works in Italy and Amsterdam. She did the XI Advanced Course in Visual Arts, Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como (IT) in 2005 and studied in 2007 and 2008 at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (Academy of Visual Arts) in Amsterdam. Francesca Grilli finds her inspiration in accidental gestures and details in informal encounters and memories from the past that strike her. Incorporated in her performances and video works, Grilli manages to give those small gestures and details a troubling feel, with which she disturbs the experience of a place and wants to bring about a new perception of time and space. Human communication and form are the driving force of her work, according to the artist.

Grilli's work could be viewed in two recent solo exhibitions in the Riccardo Crespi Gallery in Milan (2011) and the Mambo, Museum of Contemporary Art in Bologna (2010). Her performances have been staged in Frascati, Amsterdam (2010), Recontres Choregraphiques, Paris (2010) and the Tanzfabriek, Berlin (2009), amongst others. Grilli won the Terna Prize, Rome (2010), the Nuove Arti Prize, MAMBO Bologna (2009) and the International Prize for Performance in Centrale Fies/Galleria Civica di Trento (2006).


Work period:
4 January - 14 February 2012

Opening hours:
Every Saturday and Sunday from 1 pm to 5 pm.

Lecture Alessandro Saviotti 'Artist's Restaurant' and screening of the film:
Sunday 29 January, 2pm

Festive ending and 'artist talk':
Sunday 5 February, 2 pm. 



Program 29 january:

Lecture Artist's Restaurant
- History of food. An introduction.
- Food and Art.
- Artist's Restaurants. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Daniel Spoerri, Gordon Matta Clark, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Carsten Höller.

Film - Food and Traditions
- Stanley Tucci, Big Night, 1996, 107'
A failing Italian restaurant run by two brothers gambles on one special night to try to save the business.

Screening - Food and Society
- SuperFlex, Floaded Macdonalds, 2010, 21'
Flooded McDonald's is a 21 minutes film work in which a convincing life-size replica of the interior of a McDonald's burger bar, without any customers or staff present, gradually floods with water. Furniture is lifted up by the water, trays of food and drinks start to float around, electrics short circuit and eventually the space becomes completely submerged.

- Martha Rosler, Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, 6'09''
Semiotics of the Kitchen adopts the form of a parodic cooking demonstration in which, Rosler states, "An anti-Julia Child replaces the domesticated 'meaning' of tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration." In this performance-based work, a static camera is focused on a woman in a kitchen. On a counter before her are a variety of utensils, each of which she picks up, names and proceeds to demonstrate, but with gestures that depart from the normal uses of the tool. In an ironic grammatology of sound and gesture, the woman and her implements enter and transgress the familiar system of everyday kitchen meanings - the securely understood signs of domestic industry and food production erupt into anger and violence. In this alphabet of kitchen implements, states Rosler, "when the woman speaks, she names her own oppression."

- Martha Rosler, A Budding Gourmet, 1974, 17'45''
In A Budding Gourmet, Rosler explores the ideological processes through food preparation comes to be seen as "cuisine," a product of national culture. Accompanied by the strains of a violin concerto, Rosler's deadpan narrator explains her reasons for wanting to become a gourmet. Photographs from food and travel magazines alternate as Rosler's narrator discusses food as a key to refinement, breeding, and, in the case of "Eastern" cuisines, spirituality. For her, cooking is a way of accumulating and demonstrating cultural capital, whether it is the haughty elegance of a France she's never visited, or the fiery exoticism of a Brazil from which she's just returned and is now "hers" to share with her friends. Rosler illuminates how the concept of the gourmet is bound up with notions of class, as well how the kitchen, traditionally seen as the woman's sphere of power, is used to cultivate mastery over other cultures, just as surely as is the "male" sphere of politics.

- Peter Greenaway, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, 1989, 124'
The wife of an oafish restaurant owner becomes bored with her husband and considers an affair with a regular patron. 



A GOLDEN LUNCH DOES WONDERS
by: Rosa Juno Streekstra
translation: Pieter de Bruyn Kops

It is a white, winter scene: the bread in Kunsthuis SYB is made of gold. The Italian artist Francesca Grilli has invited us for a remarkable lunch. As small gifts, golden bread buns have been placed between glasses of water on a long table. Subtle, and with an amount of humor, the house has also been adorned with some golden details; two bricks in the ground have been replaced with gold nuggets, and on the wall we see golden splatter. A pot of gold is nowhere to be found, but the colors of the rainbow – we find out later – are. It is busy. All of the chairs are taken, and people stand in groups talking while the gentle voice of a soprano fills the space. First we are still hesitant; can we really eat this? But then we crave it. Gold sticks to our fingers and to our mouths. The artist stays in the background, and leaves this ‘performance’ to run its course.

The lunch is a symbolic reaction to an approaching catastrophe; the end of the world in 2012. Countless birds recently fell out of the sky across the entire world, perhaps because the magnetic poles of the earth are moving. This mysterious account inspired Francesca Grilli (1978) to, as the alchemists; welcome it, not as the end, but as a transformation, so that in our iron-time a return to ‘The Golden Age’ becomes possible. Gold has become money, and has nothing to do with our spiritual health. The contemporary crisis has even generated a deep fear of it. We don’t wear gold close to our bodies, we put it in the safe. Perhaps we can feel the positive power of this metal again if we literally eat it, Grilli thought. ‘The experiment is a ritual for luck, to give Beetsterzwaag, and the guests in Kunsthuis SYB a new energy, and luck for the future’, it lauded in the invitation.

Gold is a thread in recent works of the artist. The film ‘Oro’ (2011) tells, for example, the story of king Midas who wished that everything he touched turned to gold, and so, through his greed could no longer eat. At the beginning of the short film Grilli takes the hood off of a falcon, and lets it fly along religious frescos in an Italian cloister. The mythic story is told in ‘silbo gomero’ (under titled), a wonderful whistled language that is ‘spoken’ on the Canary Island, la Gomero. Only near the end – just before the falcon can bite into a piece of meat, and Midas is perhaps freed of his last word – we see that the meditative birdsong comes from a girl that whistles through her fingers. It is this sensual communication, somewhere between the private, and the public appearance that often characterizes Grilli’s performances and videos. Her work speaks to our emotions. A deaf boy dances on vibrations, children sing in sign-language a bedtime song, a singer lets light wave on her pitch. These are examples of what Grilli calls the ‘daily wonder’; when reality suddenly gets something magical, and the unseen suddenly pops out.

The wonder of communication is also central at SYB. During her work-period, Grilli has primarily been busy getting to know the people of the village, winning their trust for the final feast. She has also invited curator Alessandra Saviotti to deliver an informative lecture about art and food one week before the closing. Saviotti made the distinction between, on the one hand, and as an example, Daniel Spoerri, who presented the leftovers of a meal as material on the wall, and on the other hand, artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija, who focus on the creation of relationships between people by cooking for them. Afterwards I come to understand that Grilli’s project is remarkable, because she has found a combination: she connects both the abstract, and the communal experience of eating, through an improbable but tangible, material form: energy. Because, besides being an enjoyable gathering, the golden lunch had a second aim.

In the antechambre the colors of the rainbow lie, spread out. They are the pictures of our aura’s that were taken by the aura reader Odette Buntenbach, with the Auracam 6000. The snapshots of our aura lie familiarly next to one another, arranged by color. When, after eating the bread, and having our pictures taken again, the question begged, if the unconscious transformation in our body, and our being, could be captured. When the light in the images of the Polaroids slowly comes forward there is amazement. Everyone exudes a golden-yellow mood. With some the magnetic field is total color. The lunch has quickly done us good. Others seem to need a little bit longer to process the gold. But that something has changed, is indisputable. Relieved, I see Grilli admire the result. The gold has worked. Or was it also the communal, artistic experience that has changed the energy, I hear her think. And I wonder curiously, how this will finally get its form, when ‘The Golden Age’ will soon be continued in the Italian exhibition-restaurant L’Ozio, in Amsterdam.

The danger of such an artistic event is that the focus changes. And that happens. We can’t contain our curiosity: what do these colors say about me? ‘How is my aura?’ someone jokes. But when we almost lose ourselves in the spiritual aspects of our own photos, a nice, unexpected interruption, and the magic of an art experience is put into words. A whisper: ‘Someone wants to say something’. It is Hanna ter Horst, a community member, and herself also an artist that Grilli has met in SYB. ‘Dear Francesca’ she begins her beautiful, and sincere speech, and everyone is quiet. Beaming at the head of the table, she tells about their encounter, about how Francesca Grilli embraces the basic principles of life in her work, and that this awareness has enriched her. A wonderful, golden moment, and then the wine comes on table, and the glasses are raised. Salute!