Alice Guareschi: an action for house lights

The 16 photographs that make up Je m’appelle Olympia were shot right after the live activation of the light choreography in the theatre’s empty space

Je m’appelle Olympia by Alice Guareschi at PAC Milano

Photography and rythm, action, light and space: Je m’appelle Olympia by Alice Guareschi is a photographic series based on an action for house lights performed by the artist on just one occasion, for a select audience of guests, at the Olympia Music Hall of Paris, on April 12th, 2012. The series, made up by 16 photographs, will be exhibited at PAC Project Room from June 26 to September 15 2024, in a new site-specific installation especially conceived for the space. For the exhibition, Guareschi will also realize an unreleased action, Live à l’Olympia, a new a new pièce unique this time based on sound, scheduled for September 10^th at Cinema Beltrade in Milan.

Alice Guareschi: the presence of the invisible

Alice Guareschi is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Milan. She holds a MA in Philosophy with a thesis on experimental cinema, a recurring reference in her works.  

From writing to sculpture, site-specific installations or video, her projects reflect upon themes such as the visible and the invisible, presence and absence, distance, emptiness and the void, ‘’Insisting on their positive dimension –a dimension able to relaunch the potentiality of a place or an object, and therefore to affirm the possibility of different perspectives, of images beyond the visible’’.

The 16 photographs that make up Je m’appelle Olympia were shot right after the live activation of the light choreography in the theatre’s empty space. From behind the closed courtains of the theater stage Guareschi directed the lights, composed of the thirteen coloured lighting channels that are permanently integrated into the architecture. Orchestrating a play of on and off, the artist created a rhythmic sequence, therefor activating the space itself without a show being on stage. The intention was to highlight how the theater itself could awake and its own components could become a spectacle, away from the stage where the attention is usually placed.

The series of photographs portrays this live action, freezing the sequence of different movements of lights in the auditorium. The pictures have same size and framing, and they are all taken from a similar but not identical angle, following the precise original lighting score composed by Guareschi.

Alongside the images, the exhibition at PAC will also present the invitation to the live action and the original artist’s score, punctuated, on its staves, by the timing and movements of the lights, which replace the musical notes in a complex polyphony.

The photographic synthesis of the ‘action in play’ 

By breaking down the duration of the live action into photograms that can be viewed either separately or all together, Je m’appelle Olympia becomes a new declination of the work on itself. The photographic series is indeed a synthesis of the image-idea and intention behind the performance (to activate a theatre when no show is happening on stage, ‘’to play it live’’) but also a new piece, that is exhibited in – and engages with – a physical space instead of time. The installation at PAC will take into account the specificity of the environment, transforming it, making the series a site specific work each time it’s exhibited.

The work reflects upon two pivotal themes of Alice Guareschi’s practice: the concept of space and of time. By transposing an artwork made in a specific space into another, the work itself becomes something else, integrating within the walls of a different building, prompting questions concerning the entity of ‘space’ in both its static and dynamic terms. Moreover, the spatial aspect of a work is connected to the temporal one. Je m’appelle Olympia was taken in a specific timeframe, now disrupted and re-installed, years later. Time and space, as two sides of the same coin, interplay in this work, as well as in many other by Guareschi.

Alice Guareschi’s Giorno for Treccani Arte: the time and space relationship 

The same interest towards the concepts of space and time can be found in another set of works by Alice Guareschi, currently on view until July 19^th in a solo show titled Giorno (Day) at Spazio Treccani Arte in Rome. 

The site- specific installation revolves around two white neon works, expressively produced for the exhibition. The first reports an English word in colloquial use, hereish (“more or less here”, composed of the adverb here and the suffix -ish, which gives the first an approximation value). The second presents the palindrome sentence yet not yet (“still not yet”), where it is instead time that enters in question, in a spiraling movement capable of keeping past and future together, in the present.

Alongside the neons, two wall works. The first is a white-on-white text that unrolls all around the room, associating a series of actions related to intellectual and creative activities – such as thinking, making, learning, understanding..- all related to the verb ‘’to take time’’, thus acting like a silent metronome that invites the audience to reflect on the time required by every single action we take, whether conscious or unconscious, spontaneous or planned, private or public. The installation features also a black lettering that reads public signs daily gestures, where the personal and the political sphere are conceived as strictly interconnected. 

As for the PAC exhibition, Giorno brings the attention to the relativity of time and space: time is understood as non-linear but of labyrinthine magnitude, an intertwining of moments that focus or dilate based on subjective perception. Space, too, is questioned: Guareschi states that ‘’there are stories everywhere’’, scattered in different dimensions that are transposable and dynamic. The site specificity of many of her installations retains also the possibility of a relocation in the future, thus changeable both in time and space, as well as in medium.

Visible, invisible and the void as possibility 

For both Giorno and Je m’appelle Olympia, Alice Guareschi adopted a minimal alphabet that “subtracts by multiplying”, thanks to the dualism of action and concept, empty and full. Negative principles such as silence, the off-screen, the white and the pause are made compositional elements. In particular, the photographic series portrays an empty space that comes to live through light, without performers or sound, taking away the predominance of the on-stage spectacle and making the environment itself the protagonist.

In the series of pictures the live action of directing the lights is not denied, but transformed: if seen all together, one can recreate the sequence, therefor reproducing in a different modus the same ‘composition’. By exhibiting the series in a different institution the specificity of the space (the Olympia theater) intersect with a new dimension, and the work becomes an in between of there and here, then and now: ‘’a space of transit’’. The single work by Alice Guareschi is thus existing in front of the visitor, retaining a certain specificity, yet is also open to the possible future, allowing change to become a driving force in her general practice. 

Alice Guareschi and Experimental cinema 

Source of inspiration for Guareschi’s practice is cinema, specifically experimental cinema, intended as a mode of composing that re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative, structuralist forms. 

The absence of a narrative is a red thread in her work and allows elements such as background, fragments of speech, sound or lights to emerge. As seen in both Je m’appelle Olympia and Giorno, the void or the empty space is where the possible unfolds, it is the condition for creative experimentation. 

While talking to Guareschi about her main sources, she cited one specific work, the short film Le mains negatives by Marguerite Duras (1978). The film shows a  deserted Paris in the light of dawn, a slow uninterrupted traveling shot seen from the inside of a car that retraces its streets and squares, from Place de la Bastille to the Champs-Élysées, accompanied by the off-screen voice of a woman — the writer herself — recalling the thirty-thousand year-old impressions of hands lingering on the walls of the Magdalenian Caves along the Sub-Atlantic Europe’s coast, described as a petrified cry of love. ‘’From the first time I saw the movie, I was conquered. At any glance, her words betray her images, while at the same time seeing and listening are producing a whole other image. The photographic image is deprived of its documentary function in order to make visible something that never belonged to it, something unphotographed’’.

Artistic practice at large: Alice Guareschi and her body of work

Duras’ film manages to capture exactly what Guareschi aims to suggest with her works, that the absence of something implicates the potential and the possible, the opening to ‘’ the full space of the history’’.  

‘’Individually and together, most of my artworks — both the ones physically present in a given space and the filmic ones — are in a certain sense places of transit, elements that are in between. Objects silent as timeless ruins, sites waiting to bring to light new things, by isolating them from chaos and reaffirming them, or fragments of speech torn from wider conversations — they testify and act as bridges between these two dimensions which we silently contend with each day. Implacable infinity, the vastness of space, the incalculable, superhuman time; and the everyday, contingent gesture, the constant and inevitable action of choices and gazes. Not everything is shown, not everything is said. The off-screen stands out as a living, powerful and necessary presence. In an open, endless dialogue — between the artist and the viewer, but also between the thing and the context, the object and its possible meanings, what is visible and tangible and what is not, what is made known and what instead remains untold.”

Alice Guareschi 

Alice Guareschi was born in 1976 in Parma (Italy), formerly based in Paris she currently lives and works in Milano. She holds a MA in Philosophy with a thesis on experimental cinema. In 2005 she was resident artist at Palais de Tokyo’s Le Pavillon in Paris, in 2012 and 2015 at the Cité Internationale des Arts. Other residencies include Triangle, New York, and Kaus Australis, Rotterdam. In 2008 she was awarded with the Young Italian Art’s grant promoted by Castello di Rivoli Contemporary Art Museum, and in 2022 she was among the recipients of the PAC2021 production grant, promoted by the DGCC of the Italian Ministry of Culture.  Solo shows include Galleria Alessandro De March, Milan, Centre Culturel Francais, Milan, Galleria Sonia Rosso,Turin, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Microscope Gallery, New York, Istituto italiano di Cultura, Paris, Galerie DREI, Cologne, Museo Man,Nuoro, Spazio Treccani Arte, Roma. Selected group shows: Fondazione Re Rebaudengo,Turin; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin; MAMbo, Bologna; GAMeC, Bergamo; Mart, Rovereto; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Roma; Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg; Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Parigi; Villa Arson, Nizza. Selected film festivals and screenings: Filmmaker Festival, Milano; Impakt Festival, Utrecht; Italian Cinema London Festival; Mostra del Nuovo Cinema, Pesaro; Milano Design Film Festival; La Fondazione, Roma; Triennale, Milano; Macro, Roma.

Sara van Bussel