‘Chapter 3 (Winter)’, a Group Show Curated by Edoardo Manzoni and Giada Olivotto at Residenza La Fornace

Residenza La Fornace is an artistic documentation project in which groups of artists are invited to enter into dialogue with an ancient Italian farmhouse in a specific season of the year. La Fornace is the name of this ancient farmhouse with agritourism and farm still active. In its anatomy it maintains all the main characteristics that distinguish these ancient architectural complexes intended for agricultural activity, the dwelling of people and the shelter of animals. This farmhouse is just one of many, which we can define, in the most radical sense of the term, as “monuments” of the Italian landscape, whose strong symbolic and evocative meaning that they possess and know how to communicate is able to get even outside the agricultural world. 

The farmhouse represents a reality of aggregation and social architectural collaboration still under construction, it was therefore fundamental for us to work through a community approach with the elaboration of a collective project. Within this context, the idea of involving artists in a residence, which will take place four times a year, following the passing of the seasons, was born. Summer, autumn, winter and spring will divide the time and duration of the experiments. Each period will see the participation of different artists who can freely enter into relationship with the context. 

The collected material will be presented through an online platform that will act as a witness. The deterritorialization of the exhibition, visible in its entirety only online, allows the farmhouse to free itself from it’s geographical-peripheral situation and find new identities through the careful photographic documentation of artistic interventions that gradually bring out the characteristics of the place and its changing along with time and climate. 

Now that daily life is no longer regulated by the rhythm of the seasons, but by the rhythm of images, the Residenza La Fornace project does not want to be an appeal for a return to rural life, but a reflection through the contemporary language of what remains of it. 

The project was born from the idea of Edoardo Manzoni, a visual artist who decided to open the farmhouse where he grew up and where he still carries out his artistic research, inviting other personalities to come into contact with his daily reality. 

Edoardo Manzoni is flanked by Giada Olivotto, independent curator and co-director of the artist- run space Sonnenstube in Lugano, Switzerland.