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'Unfolding thoughts - Requiem of a phoenix', Book - the Lafkan project, 2021-22

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​Art Installation with recycled books by Black Box Genesis team for Book - the Lafkan project

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After the closure of the historic Lafkan antiques shop in Vasa, Art in Malakta rf got the opportunity to collect the books, offering the artists of the house the possibility to use them for artistic practices.

Black Box Genesis team included them not only as material in the installation, but decided to dedicate the project to this topic, examining its conceptual essence and technical peculiarities. The artist duo realized the art piece 'Unfolding thoughts - Requiem of a phoenix' as a tribute to the shop founded 1971, but also to the printed book: in a physical and symbolical way, and the social aspects related to it.

 

​The artwork consists of two paper ‘steles’ suspended above a 'pool' filled with black wax.

Between the weave of the paper and the folds that also mould human features, threads emerge from the bottom of the two subjects, immersing themselves in the wax. The threads connect the two entities, as information, words, ink, flowing between the two parts.
The wax, which looks like deep black water, is important for its property of being malleable and melting/crystallising very quickly. Like the ideas, thoughts and knowledge that the book helps to fill and shape, which can only be enriched (not to mention the indirect skills that reading brings).


Book like a full vessel, which empties itself and at the same time fills the reader in a communicative flow... transmitting information.
The choice of the number of ‘steles’ is in relation to the exclusive relationship that the person has with the book. Their experience will be guided by subjectivity and the personal sphere. An intimacy that in this work becomes almost solemn.


The art piece also focuses on the technological part of the book: recycling the paper and using it to create the more physical and main part of the installation, which will also offer abstractions and precious details.

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Funded by Svenska Kulturfonden, Vaasa City Cultural Services & Bröderna Gröndahls Stiftelse | Partner & Collaborators: Malakta Art Factory/Art in Malakta rf, Susanne Marins & Vaasa City Cultural Services | Thank you to Platform, Margherita Labbe & Reza Effati.

 

Vasabladet 7.6.2022​​

'Dialogue not just chromatic - Decentralization', pictorial installation 2022

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In the pictorial installation, two descriptive levels intertwine, which together create an evocative and surreal composition. A vibrant dialogue, balanced between figuration and abstraction, between meaning and symbolism. The power of color is the protagonist. Between the black and white, dense and vibrant, the chromatic spectrum unrolls, taking shape and movement in the material folds that unravell from the compositional fulcrum. These reliefs, seen as ripples of the psyche, extend into reverberations of light that lead to the illustrative part of the work. Expressive images, clearly represent two zoomorphic characters who embody, silhouetted against a mental landscape, psychic instances. An absorbed and sleeping Ego almost mirrors an alert Unconscious, in a play of reflections, similarities, and contrasts. The shadows of one, are the lights in the other. Now the invisible is even sharper, that impalpable part of us has found the figurative dimension, wanting to bring out possible representations that can be traced back to our interiority

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The art piece has been conceived and realised for the group exhibition at Pasila Art Center - Helsinki Urban Art, in Helsinki, open to the public in March and April 2022.

'L'occhio del nibbio', video, 2019-20

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'L'occhio del nibbio' is the first video experience for the Black Box Genesis artists. The team wanted to experiment this medium for Terminal (a contemporary reflection inspired by Leonardo da Vinci) exhibition cycle, curated by Stefano Monti & Giulia Morichi Python, in 2019.

A cycle of exhibitions centred on the figure of the itinerant creative, which proposed, through the eyes of young contemporary artists, to analyse the theme of the necessary and progressive removal from places of origin to new realities, in a world that is becoming ever smaller and more familiar. The video traces, through universal symbologies such as the gaze, spring, the tree and roots, Finnish landscapes that are not yet entirely familiar to the artists, but to which they are now connected. The narration, also through sound, is tense and induces in the observer this sensation of waiting, of absence, but also of recall. A call of an inescapable truth.

Taking the name from one of the most famous inventions of the Master, Valentina Gelain and Bekim Hasaj used the bird as a metaphor for change, for the need to move, sometimes, to survive. Move as many artists do in order to give hope to their vocation, having to follow the right current flying towards their destiny... a destiny that only the death can conclude. 

 

Video trailer / Terminal exhibition, Crema, Italy - video

Performance 'Deep Smoke' for Burning Art Festival 29 September 2018, Art Factory Malakta

 

'Wax flowing down to a surface that runs upward.

Smoke tracing signs on paper forming arabesques of a lost memory.

Seal on the sepulcher where the unconscious glows.

Pyramid from which an eye peers from the darkness.

Fire flames, while time burns.'

 
Live performance during which we interact with the space and the viewer, using an installation and also our body. Candles will be used as a basic object to dialogue with the paper surface that will allow us to give body to the work that will complete its 'being' with the encounter of human corporeity.

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