by Pia Diamandis & Elena Tortelli. Cover image: © Monogrid, 2022.
INFORMATION
Everywhere, Here, Nowhere is glad to welcome you in its in-between space, physically by invitation only at Museo Marino Marini Firenze at 9 pm CET or online with the live stream at 9.30 pm CET on Instagram or Facebook.
ART & FASHION: IN-BETWEEN EVERYWHERE AND NOWHERE
Being the Fashion & Art show for the graduating class of 2022, Everywhere, Here, Nowhere is the first time the two events take place together, exploring the space between digital and physical that connects art and fashion, a way to enhance the synergy between the artworks and the fashion collections of the School’s best upcoming artists and designers.
The interdisciplinary approach of Istituto Marangoni Firenze, the School of Fashion & Art, takes the attendants on a spatial journey from here to there and nowhere, through an art and a fashion show happening at the same time.
The hosting venue, Museo Marino Marini, embodies the event’s concept of liminality, with Everywhere, Here, Nowhere being a space that transitions between borders and boundaries. Museo Marino Marini was initially a Renaissance church, later converted into an art museum that hosts an event including art and fashion, spatially between virtual and physical reality.
The event is also a journey through the different floors of the museum, with the art show occupying the museum’s basement and the catwalk on the floor above it.
INDEX
You can use the following index to go directly to the preferred section of the event guide:
ART SHOW
THE ARTWORKS
FASHION SHOW
THE COLLECTIONS
ART SHOW
The art exhibition features a lineup of works by the year’s Best students graduating in Multimedia Arts. The show uses animation to discuss current issues that range from personal to societal discourses, everything from a sense of wonder, to queer identities, to being neurodivergent, and a reflection of our post-truth society.
The artworks emphasise the role of animated digital art, which, as visual culture researchers Esther Leslie and Joel McKim claim, has become “the dominant contemporary media”1.
Animation as a medium today brings machine mediation to a new level, having its own agency in influencing our creative freedom – think AI generated artworks or 3D graphics with distinct and easily recognisable volition. Society’s familiarity couples this ongoing proliferation of computerised graphics with machine-mediated visual culture, problematising the relationship between humans and machines as we experience reality through our smartphones, tablets, and more.
The featured works also call attention to our increasing acceptance of animation as a documentation of our reality that is not only physical but also virtual and the in-between, the phy-gital. The exhibition reflects how, during a three-year programme, the students have learned to use different phy-gital tools to translate their realities, whether virtual or not, onto a medium that is equally Everywhere, Here, Nowhere, at the same time.
Displayed in the crypt of Museo Marino Marini, the atmosphere of the physical space plays an essential role in the experience of Everywhere, Here, Nowhere. Low natural illumination and the event’s evening schedule brings out the resulting digital spaces, an immersive reality parallel to our own, one that is dark yet intimate.
THE ARTWORKS
All the artworks in Everywhere, Here, Nowhere are strictly tied to our use of technology and invite the audience to reflect on our relationship with it in different digital, physical, and phy-vital spaces, the cosmos, our bedroom, our mind, and our body.
01. NOEMI MESSINA, Spectacle, 2022. 3D video animation, original sound, 1’05’’ loop, beach chairs.
Particles dancing in the void, take viewers on a wondrous journey to the night of San Lorenzo. An Italian celebration of a night of shooting stars occurs on August 10, where people gather together in open-air spaces to sit back, celebrate life, and wish upon the stars. A spectacle of reality as a perpetual machine wheel that keeps turning without stopping.
02. MARCELLA OLIVIERI, The Keeper of Secrets, 2022. 3D video animation, 4’49”.
Guided by a figure named ‘The Keeper of Secrets’, we move through neatly kept secrets in a bedroom, an idealised safe space where you could take a breath. The film is a metaphoric animation of the ‘coming out’ moment, a decision that queer people make when they openly declare their sexuality to the world. The animation transforms the metaphor into a digital space, exposing the deepest secrets of someone still discovering their own identity while keeping it from a cold, unaccepting world.
03. MARCELLA OLIVIERI, Like The Lesbian Monkeys, 2022. Illustrated book, 21 x 29,7 cm, 50 pages.
Like the Lesbian Monkeys is an illustrated book with twenty coming out stories from queer people. The title alludes to how natural queer sexuality is, as other species such as monkeys, penguins, deers, and many more are also in queer relationships. The book resembles a children’s storybook without intending to be read by children, exploring the contrasts between sexuality discourse and being palatable for society.
The book features illustrations by Amane Aoyama, Ana Paz, Andrea Lainez, Carla Gomez, Daniela Cerna, Marcela Escalona, Sarah Valladares, and Marcella Olivieri herself.
04. AMANE AOYAMA, The Brightest Colour, 2022. VR 3D animation,1’47” loop.
The Brightest Colour, is a VR translation of the synesthesia that the artist, a person with an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), experiences when listening to Claude Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1. The work invites audiences to step in the shoes of a person within the Spectrum by wearing the VR headpiece to share the sublime moments.
05. AMANE AOYAMA, Samsa, 2022. 3D animation on video footage, 2’45”.
Aoyama’s second piece expresses a person with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)’s struggles with masking through 3D animation on real video footage. Represented as a chameleon on video, masking is a defence mechanism for neurodivergent individuals where they mimic neurotypical behaviour to avert conflict. The work provokes an uncomfortable feeling in its viewers to simulate what ASD patients feel when masking away the constant disturbances they encounter from seemingly mundane things such as riding the train or grocery shopping.
06. ADAN, A Tall White Fountain Plays, 2022. 3D animation, film footage, 4K colour, and sound video, 8’00”.
A Tall White Fountain Plays is a short film that intertwines a documentary on black holes with the recording of a podcast on misinformation. Featuring original 3D animation works, the piece touches on the overwhelming polarisation of information, and the uncertainty felt when intaking information on current events in a post-truth digital age, where believability holds key over the truth.
07. ADAN, Look Mom I Can Fly, 2022. 3D animation, 4K colour, and sound video on loop, 3’15”.
The immersive video captures the architectural beauty of the human body, focusing only on his back. Inspired by a back accident suffered by the artist, the piece uses 3D software to create an MRI-like effect that invites the viewer to look at the back as separate from the body and focus on its aesthetic composition. The piece’s colour palette and sound design further alienate the subject from its usual context.
FASHION SHOW
The fashion show starts at 9:30 pm CET, on the first floor of Museo Marino Marini while streaming live on Instagram or Facebook.
The fashion show showcases collections by the best students graduating in Fashion Design in 2022, chosen by an international jury: Urtè Ilginyté, XingXing Su, Montserrat Macias Cervello, Lydia Schneider, Ahjin Shim, Sana Krishna, Laetitia Wen, Nicola De Piano, Lucrezia Veltroni and Alejandra Martine De Castro.
The brand new creations are shown amidst Marino Marini’s sculptures and a series of AI-generated projections created by Monogrid mapping the walls of the museum. There, nature and art images reassembled through machine learning interact with the room and the attendees, highlighting the technological mediation we perceive in today’s visual culture.
Finally, this phy-gital enviroment features sound design by Emiliano Zelada, artist and Tutor at Istituto Marangoni Firenze. His work emulates AI, translating inputs and stimuli into sound sequences.
THE COLLECTIONS
Here, in their own words, you can find the designers’ statements and descriptions of their own collections, following the running order of the fashion show.
Urtè Ilignitè, THE WIND WILL CARRY US, 2021-2022
Kite surfing is like flying – a feeling of freedom, lightness, and calmness. Like therapy or meditation, it is a way to distance oneself from reality. Being in nature, seeing water, sand, sun and becoming part of it.
Xingxing Su, LE GIVRE, 2021-2022
The collection is a connection between me, the artist Katharine Morning and her pottery. The simplicity, the white monochromia, the flowers, the dew, and the magic world of Nature give us a unique and impacting visual party.
Montserrat Macias Cervello, REALISTIC MANIFESTO, 2021-2022
Recalibration towards the exploration of different constructions. Expecting more expression of personal identity, and establishing it in the role of Art. Realization of our perception of the world in the forms of space, time, color, dimension, and thought.
Lydia Schneider, GRÜNALGE, 2021-2022
Incorporating shapes, structures, materials, and light from Medieval armors, the collection desires to evoke contrasts echoing the appearance of insects’ sharp bodies. Colors and volumes are manipulated to create a different silhouette volume.
Ahjin Shin, FREE DIV’IN, 2021-2022
Attracting things is often harmful. Toxic things are addictive. Bad habits are just learned. Nature is addicted by us, we are harmful.
Sana Krishna, THE DICHOTOMY OF WRINKLES, 2021-2022
Several years ago on a flight, I looked out of the window, and I saw a beautiful sight. The beauty of the mountains and their shapes, the perfection and imperfection, the symmetry, and the asymmetrical details… It defined for me what true perfection is, it has to be imperfect.
Laetitia Wen, FLAIR IS FOUL, 2021-2022
It’s a paradox, a mirage, a contradictory moral conundrum between appearance and reality. Things aren’t always what they seem. Appearances are often deceptive.
Nicola De Piano, ECHOES, 2021-2022
It is an indefinite form, a multiplicity of deformations, the building of an emotion, a feeling, a relationship, an experience. It is the shape of a non-shape. By layering volumes an idea is built: the softness becomes stiffness, and the armor creates a link between your ego and the outside world. It is an idea, the ability to consolidate deformation.
Lucrezia Veltroni, MERCURIAL, 2021-2022
The DNA of the collection reflect a social inadequacy and, at the same time, the need for self-expression. Life is a game, and we have to try to win. This can happen only if you feel the freedom to express yourself.
Alejandra Martine De Castro, JUXTAPOSITION, 2021-2022
The concept of Juxtaposition has always been a constant throughout my life. It is a bridge between sculptures and fashion, shapes, and silhouettes to provide a definition of wearable art.
ADAN, Amane Aoyama, Noemi Messina and Marcella Olivieri are undergraduate students in Multimedia Arts at Istituto Marangoni Firenze.
Pia Diamandis and Elena Tortelli are undergraduate students in Arts Curating at Istituto Marangoni Firenze.
Laetitia Wen, Lucrezia Veltroni, Nicola De Piano, XingXing Su, Urtè Ilginyté, Alejandra Martine De Castro, Sana Kirshna, Montserrat Macias Cervello, Lydia Schneider and Ahjin Shim are undergraduate students in Fashion Design & Accessories at Istituto Marangoni Firenze.
1. Leslie, E., McKim, J. (2017) “Life Remade: Critical Animation in the Digital Age”, in animation: an interdisciplianary journal, vol. 12(3), pp. 207-213.
