What is the time of research and experimentation for you?
For us it is a crucial time. Our work always begins with theoretical and historical research. We always begin more or less voluntarily with an analysis of time, focusing on a theme or an event to which for some reason we wish to restore space in our context. Thus we reduce the object of our research to an isolated molecule, as though it were the essence or the soul, something that existed and that continues to exist, but that in some ways and indeed above all we rediscover within ourselves. We began VEGA precisely because we found a space for experimenting within it. We like working with video, performance art, texts, the media least bound to the spaces and rules of the market, and that is no mere coincidence. We also like creating spaces in which to cause artists and research different from ours to dialogue. For us, engaging in art is possibly, at the end of the day, nothing more than a pretext for researching and experimenting.
In what way is your practice influenced by the space of an artistic residency?
The space of a residency is something of a sacred space, it is where one holds the preparatory ritual that leads to the sublimation of ideas, it is the safe space in which ideas have not yet gone out into the world. It is a gestation that we live by playing the role of a child, in an unknown space, that gradually becomes more and more like home, to then leave it when the time comes. It is an opportunity that opens up, both personally and artistically, for looking at one’s own ideas from new points of view.
How do care and artistic research interact?
Curating for us is a collective process whether it sets out from or returns to the self – something very similar to research, which is a product of one’s own sensitivity but which requires going out in order to change, to explore in depth and to grow. A part of what we do with VEGA is also, together with others, curating episodes or situations in which different people and practices meet with ours, to experiment and to pursue research in new and hybrid directions.
VEGA is a duo of visual artists and directors based in Rome, founded by Francesca Pionati and Tommaso Arnaldi.
Their practice has emerged from the urgency to hybridate elements that are predefined or have been previously contextualized (archive materials, stories, traditions and rituals) with contemporary languages and aesthetics, putting into question all foundational elements, in order to make room for what is buried to resurface.
They mostly investigate stories and subcultural phenomenons from Italy, impressed by a Gothic Cosmic-Mediterranean vision. In their research for truly autonomous zones of expression and existence, they ended up exploring the link between experiments from the past and what they experience as crucial in the contemporary world (from visual culture, to technology, philosophy, ecology and politics).
Born within the intersection of video art and docu-fiction, their research incorporates elements of performance, in an effort to integrate the physicality and the presence of the body with the immaterial quality and the semiotics of video.
@vega.kollective