OTHER WORLDS

Name: OTHER WORLDS
Start: 2023-05-07 00:00:00
End: 2023-06-25 00:00:00
Location: Foundation 107

Foundation 107

Turin, Piedmont, Italy

The show

Fondazione 107 presents "Other Worlds", a place where 3 artists meet, Seni Awa Camara, Paola Mattioli and Marcovinicio each with their own techniques, sculpture, photography and painting. The "Other Worlds" of our exhibition wish to explore unknown worlds, which belong that of the soul, of the emotions, of the fantastic and of the imagination. In a society projected into virtual reality and augmented reality, we are invited to follow paths that have already been traced where our decisions can be made exclusively within tracks imagined and built by others. This path accompanies the future man right from his first steps with games for children and, as he grows up, with the transition to video games and virtual reality. The artist as a shaman has the task of inviting us to free our minds and lead us back to take alternative, unexplored paths.

This is how Seni Awa Camara, a sculptor from the Casamance region of Senegal, comes into play. His name in the international circuit emerged following the invitation of Jean-Hubert Martin in 1989 to take part in the epochal exhibition "Magiciens de la Terre" organized by the Center Pompidou in Paris.

Seni Camara's sculptures are in terracotta with burnished, ocher and reddish colors on which burns are sometimes more evident. Tradition and continuity come together in a message where the family nucleus is a fundamental part of our present and our future. They are sculptures that celebrate the social structure, fertility, the family, children, the community, they are the children that the artist did not give birth to. Sometimes the sculptures look like totemic monoliths and are populated by animals, the close interchange between nature and man is an essential condition of continuity for the species and is placed at the center of the artist's declarative intent.

Paola Mattioli in 2003 during a trip to Africa photographed Seni Camara and her sculptures. They are images that give back to us viewers the reportage of a story from a distant, ancestral world of deep origins. As Fabio Cavallucci affirms, through photography Paola Mattioli aspires to touch the depths of reality, to grasp the soul of things to overcome the superficial veil to touch the secrets of the subject. This is how Paola Mattioli wisely offers us the portrait of the sculptor immersed in her daily environment. The "Signares" will also be on display, portraits bearing witness to a world that no longer exists, perpetuated through tradition in the city of Saint Louis, the ancient capital of Senegal. The Signares were women of great beauty, at the time of French colonialism they dressed in European-style clothes, married with a local rite, took on the status of wives of French officials and when their husbands left, they kept their social position, houses, luxurious clothes and the jewelry.