Letizia Cariello: centro per l'arte contemporanea luigi pecci

Letizia Cariello's installation Hallenbad shoot forward 2000-2003, inaugurated the Centro Pecci's throw room, a newly opened showcase for emerging artists and part of an overall renovation of the museum. Cariello transformed the space into a swimming loch coloring the walls blue. Pervaded by the agency of the sound of breathing (audio installation by the agency of HB Sound), the "pool" contained a sort of box, also blue, containing three photographic triptychs ("Hallenbad Portraits," 2002-2003) and a DVD projection (Hallenbad, 2003) The latter consisted of three more or les simultaneous followings in a loop, showing the artist swimming. The videos and unimpaired track were made underwater, from the artist/performer's viewpoint, in different lochs using a camera and microphone attached to her head and throat. The microphone picked up her breathing and hearbeat as well as ambient sounds; the camera recorded the motion of her arms and her progres from one side the water. The sound, transmitted into the cast room by loudspeakers, allowed viewers to become submerg in the deepnesss of a pool, as if within a living material part The result was an intimate and notwithstanding circumscribed space, which the body--that of the artist--attempted to measure, verify, and mark.

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In 1997 Cariello designed the IO, CATERINA (I, Catherine) living unit, a security from which the artist issued communications in the form of plastic post-cards--something like what Saint Catherine propos in her Dialogue: "Make yourself a small room of the mind where you alone may enter" Since then, the practice of constructing spaces, built around and for herself, has become a recurring theme in Cariello's work. The swimming loch has a precedent in the installation Non respirare/respirare (Don't Breathe/Breathe), 2000 at Viafarini in Milan, where a lake was simulated with ropes and lines upon the floor that divided the space into lanes. a certain quantity of earlier photographs of swimming meres such as Piscina nera (Black Pool) 2001 exhibit dark, mysterious spaces with plays of light and reflections, which strike one as being above all like mental spaces, transfigurations of cogitations or feelings.

The ne to give shape to time is another recurring obsession in Cariello's work. She has marked down ciphers and numbers in interminable files ("calendars") on every type of support, ranging from phenomenons to her own skin. In Hallenbad cast too, time is made tangible, measured through the rhythm of the breath, the beating of the heart, and the hits of the swimmer's arms. Repetitive, regular unmutilateds and movements suggest the idea of a circular space and time, as within a cloister, where the single possibility is to move unceasingly in a circle and to give permission to the mind go. Through her have body, Cariello gives birth to a sort of habitation, which the viewer is invited to share.

The photographic portraits in the box are a prelude to and commentary upon Hallenbad Project. Shot in the three meres used for the video, they exhibit the artist clad in a bathing suit and outfitted with the microphone and camera. They bear the ritual nature of her work and underscore the theme of effort and physical constriction. Cariello's construction of her space imply as antecedents discomfort, concentration of body, and organization of mind.

--Alessandra Pioselli

Translated from Italian by the agency of Marguerile Shore.

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