Claudia Losi. How do I imagine being there?

“All living beings perceive of the world only in terms of what is necessary to their action”  (C. Losi)
 
 What language should be used to describe a place? This is the starting point and the core question of Claudia Losi's project.
The way we perceive places also shows how we develop our thinking: the pondering hinted at and evoked by the works on exhibit springs from individual and collective imagination; we feel, we store experiences and later we “bring them back into the world” in different and subjective constellations.
Claudia Losi's is a peculiar travel chronicle turning into consciousness of the journey itself. It springs out of a real “crossing” of St. Kilda islands in 2012 to later shift into the realm of the mind, to move onto the construction of new maps.
Experiences of physically relating with a territory, of emotions, and feelings, become mnemonic traces generating new visions, artefacts that the artist creates after a period of sedimentation.
 
A project dedicated to memory, its functioning mechanisms transforming a real experience where the journey and the surrounding landscape – becoming both the incipit, the starting point, and the final destination – are capable of triggering synaesthetic explorations, visual associations, pathways at time leading to unforeseeable and unexpected  destination even for the artist. At the same time, however, the project focusses on a possible future, on the idea of bravely moving beyond towards new destinations which from being real places turn into places of the mind. 

From that also emerges the inescapable need to reflect on the possible models of interpretation of the same landscape, the “possible observational systems of the world surrounding us” (in the artist's own words) which in their turn do not offer definite answers, but create new landing places for the “archipelago-world”.
 
The exhibition consists in an itinerary across a topography of real, material artefacts which lead us inside an “archipelago of thoughts”– as a sort of cabinet opening its doors to our gazes.
The token-stones brought back from visited places mix with portolan charts and books of islands drawn by the artist in pencil and watercolours on the walls of the exhibition rooms. The photographs documenting the journey to St. Kilda islands blend in with objects, glasses, collages and bronze castings of micro fossil landscapes. A large embroidery of the North Pole, drawn from the imaginary representation by Athanasius Kircher, strikes a conversation with a notebook housing paper cut-outs of hands/birds made by the artist. Partially crushed and misshapen everyday objects, taken over by plant forms – recalling domestic life, of which however they have lost all memory – seem to gaze at the fossil findings from the archaeological and ethnographic collection of the town's Spallanzani Museum.
 
Writings and images move in parallel in Claudia Losi's project. The book with the same title, accompanying the exhibition, and published by Humboldt in collaboration with Collezione Maramotti, brings together views and contributions of the artist, together with Matteo Meschiari, Christopher Collins, Fabio Pupin, Giorgio Vallortigara, Carlo Maiolini, Michele Guerra, Paolo Ossola, Isabella Pezzini, Marco Ciriello, Hamish Fulton.

Private view by invitation: 7 May 2016, at 6.00pm. The artist will be present.

On the occasion of the private view, at 5.00pm, a conversation with the title of La Terra immaginata will take place, with Claudia Losi and Matteo Meschiari, associate professor of Geography at Palermo University.
Two vantage points, two research paths that have long established an exchange on the Earth's imagery. The invention of Earth is not a recent cultural process, going back to our ancestral path when, way before Homo Sapiens, our ancestors explored, studied and imagined their living ecosystems. Lands and animals, migrations and strategies of survival: a backward journey in humans' landscaping mind.
Admission is free on a first-served basis, reservation is strongly recommended.

After her diploma at the Fine Arts Academy of Bologna and the university degree in Languages at Bologna University, Claudia Losi participated in many exhibitions in Italy and abroad. Among her recent shows: Livorno In Contemporanea; Tenuta dello Scompiglio, Vorno-Lucca, Italy (2015); La Maréchalerie_énsa V, Versailles; Studio Orta Les Moulins, Boissy-le-Châtel; MAMbo, Bologna (2013); MAXXI, Roma (2012 and 2010); Via Farini-DOCVA, Milano (2011); MAGASIN, Grenoble; Royal Academy, London (2010).
After spending a few years abroad (France and Scotland) she was invited as resident artist by Studio Orta Les Moulins  (Paris), to JCVA in Israel and Art Omi International in Ghent (NY).
Nature and science are her source of inspiration together with historical and anthropological aspects of the environment.
In view of her many interests in several disciplines (natural sciences, ethnology, geology, cartography, poetry and literature), her artistic research has focussed on the relationship between the human and nature, travel and exploration as knowledge-based experiences.
Since 1998 has taken part in many projects based on participation and relationship: Losi in fact explores the concept of narration through art and writing by often using her work to link together and create new communities of human relations.
Losi works with a variety of media, from site- specific installations to sculpture, videos, works on fabric and paper.