Adelaide Cioni

Marea 25

Marea 25 is the fith edition of the research program with the artist Adelaide Cioni

(She)

Adelaide Cioni

Bologna , 1976

The work of Adelaide Cioni moves at the intersection of textile, painting, and performance. The constant elements at the core of her practice are drawing, an absence of narration, and a feminist approach.

Her research focuses on the concept of recognition, investigating abstract decorative patterns throughout centuries and geographical areas, which she connects to our memory of plants. Over the past years she has been opening the work to music and dance, in a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach, in large spatial installations which let the viewer in.

Recent projects include True Form, The Approach, London, UK, Touch Song, St. James Church, Piccadilly, London, UK
, Drawings for Myself, P420, Bologna, IT
, Il mondo, Centro Pecci, Prato, IT, Italian Painting Today, Triennale Milano, IT, Ab ovo / On Patterns, Mimosa House, London, UK, Io dico io (I say I), Galleria Nazionale, Roma, IT. She is represented by P420, Bologna, and The Approach, London.

Project

During her residency on the Amalfi Coast, Adelaide Cioni will work on new costumes to create a performance related to the sea, taking inspiration from elements connected to the mythology and archaeology of the area.

«For some years, I have studied the recurrence of abstract decorative motifs and elementary geometric shapes throughout millennia and in different geographical areas. For at least forty thousand years, we have been drawing grids, circles, triangles, or simple dots, repeating them one next to the other, from the bones in the Aurignac cave to the Kapa culture of Hawaii, from Etruscan tombs in Tuscany to Ethiopian objects from the 13th century and Ikea pillowcases from the 21st century, to name but a few examples.

All this makes me think of a common vocabulary, a set of images shared by all of humanity and linked to our tendency towards abstraction. For a former translator like me, these are exciting aspects because they suggest a sense of belonging between human beings beyond political borders or language barriers, a sense of belonging that resides in simple abstractions and derives from the body and our connection to nature.

Cioni, moreover, during her stay in Praiano, will work on the sea as a place of the real and the mind, as an elusive power capable of generating a terrifying sense of «losing oneself in the watery immensity and amniotic peace, and in front of which we are inadequate and vulnerable, but which at the same time leads us far away, to non-human dimensions».

«The territory of the Amalfi Coast is studded with sites and mythologies that will extend the range of my research. The residency with Marea will be an opportunity to explore these two sides and collect materials such as sounds, textiles, stories, glances, and drawings. And then there is iodine».