La Fabbrica del Cioccolato is a new Foundation, open to all cultural and artistic expressions. On Saturday 21st May at 18:00 it will launch Foreignness, a curatorial, multidisciplinary, two-year project, developed by the artistic director Franco Marinotti.
The foundation is located in the fascinating Alps of the Tessin Canton, in the Blenio Valley, and it aims at protecting and maintaining the architectural and archaeological heritage of the former industrial complex Cima Norma, established in Torre-D'angio village at the beginning of 20th century. La Fabbrica del Cioccolato is sponsored by Banca Stato, Comune di Blenio [Blenio City], Tourist Agency Bellinzonese e Alto Ticino and Cham Paper Group and with the media partnership with Viafarini, Milan and Metalocus Architecture Magazine, Spain.
The site specific works Paper Building by Daniel González and Kamchatka ‘16 by Anna Galtarossa will provide the opening of Foreignness with a dreamlike and fascinating atmosphere.
The word Foreignness highlights different ways of feeling foreign, a stranger, and external to a specific reality. Foreignness is a fine arts festival that analyses the interaction between art, its different forms of expressions, and the territory, in the sense of an evolving cultural, social, and political heritage. La Fabbrica del Cioccolato will be a permanent workshop focussing on the creative process, interacting with the audience and the surrounding environment, establishing a new concept, different from the common one: opening-exhibition/exhibition-opening. All initiatives originate from the sharing of artistic experimentation.
During the opening the whole façade of the factory will be covered by the ephemeral architecture of Paper Building by Daniel González: a monumental installation of 890 square metres representing the feeling of being foreign in a certain context, and making the building interact with the audience’s intimate emotions, by applying several layers of white paper to the external façade of the factory. Paper Building hides the ancient architecture of the Cima Norma chocolate factory, causing a loss of identity, due to a change in the original environment. Citizens will lose an important point of reference for the territory, and they will find a new one by taking part in the opening, when they will tear the paper down to open the factory’s doors and windows.
It will then be possible to start a fantastic and daring journey to discover Kamchatka ’16 by Anna Galtarossa, a map in the mind of the artist, brought into the external world. Kamchatka ’16 is a prêt‐à‐porter trip; an exploration of tensions between culture and nature, started by the artist in 2005 with Kamchatka, at Viafarini, Milan. Visitors will transit this visionary universe and will be carried across a world of fantastic creatures, like pioneers on a wagon. At the end of the track, explorers will meet an ancient and famous fighter, who will be shaped with the help of local artisans, and influenced by local materials and nature: a guardian of the valley; a spirit coming from far away to protect it. The two works will be further examined in essays by Noah Stolz.
In July the Foreignness programme will also be screening Cacao Collective, a documentary produced by 46040studio, founded by the Spanish photographers and film makers Ivo Rovira and Ana Ponce. Il Pardo in Fabbrica will also take place in July and will schedule cinematographic events in collaboration with the Locarno Film Festival. In August the Austrian artist and director Oliver Ressler, who produces installations, films and projects in public space, will also be involved in the Foreignness programme (4 August – 14 September).
Paper Building
By interpreting the theme of Foreignness, the Paper Building project gives emotional intimacy back to the architecture; it removes the historical facade from the public view to generate a loss of identity through the change of the original context. With a change in the conditions in which they once lived, a building, a person or a community struggle to maintain their own identity, having been forced to adapt to the new conditions.
Referring to the curiosity of children when unwrapping chocolates or sweets, and to the work “Passing Through”, 1956, by Saburo Murakami of the Gutai Group, the windows and doors of the former factory will be opened by the forceful tearing of the paper by the public and inhabitants during the inauguration of the Fondazione. Paper Building creates a space in which people can feel free and that is resolved with the participation of the public as it undergoes an experience.
By referring back to the ephemeral Baroque architectures of Bernini, which were specifically made for a limited time in order to celebrate some historical event, Daniel González makes large-scale public works as social catalysts and for bringing people together.
The foundation is located in the fascinating Alps of the Tessin Canton, in the Blenio Valley, and it aims at protecting and maintaining the architectural and archaeological heritage of the former industrial complex Cima Norma, established in Torre-D'angio village at the beginning of 20th century. La Fabbrica del Cioccolato is sponsored by Banca Stato, Comune di Blenio [Blenio City], Tourist Agency Bellinzonese e Alto Ticino and Cham Paper Group and with the media partnership with Viafarini, Milan and Metalocus Architecture Magazine, Spain.
The site specific works Paper Building by Daniel González and Kamchatka ‘16 by Anna Galtarossa will provide the opening of Foreignness with a dreamlike and fascinating atmosphere.
The word Foreignness highlights different ways of feeling foreign, a stranger, and external to a specific reality. Foreignness is a fine arts festival that analyses the interaction between art, its different forms of expressions, and the territory, in the sense of an evolving cultural, social, and political heritage. La Fabbrica del Cioccolato will be a permanent workshop focussing on the creative process, interacting with the audience and the surrounding environment, establishing a new concept, different from the common one: opening-exhibition/exhibition-opening. All initiatives originate from the sharing of artistic experimentation.
During the opening the whole façade of the factory will be covered by the ephemeral architecture of Paper Building by Daniel González: a monumental installation of 890 square metres representing the feeling of being foreign in a certain context, and making the building interact with the audience’s intimate emotions, by applying several layers of white paper to the external façade of the factory. Paper Building hides the ancient architecture of the Cima Norma chocolate factory, causing a loss of identity, due to a change in the original environment. Citizens will lose an important point of reference for the territory, and they will find a new one by taking part in the opening, when they will tear the paper down to open the factory’s doors and windows.
It will then be possible to start a fantastic and daring journey to discover Kamchatka ’16 by Anna Galtarossa, a map in the mind of the artist, brought into the external world. Kamchatka ’16 is a prêt‐à‐porter trip; an exploration of tensions between culture and nature, started by the artist in 2005 with Kamchatka, at Viafarini, Milan. Visitors will transit this visionary universe and will be carried across a world of fantastic creatures, like pioneers on a wagon. At the end of the track, explorers will meet an ancient and famous fighter, who will be shaped with the help of local artisans, and influenced by local materials and nature: a guardian of the valley; a spirit coming from far away to protect it. The two works will be further examined in essays by Noah Stolz.
In July the Foreignness programme will also be screening Cacao Collective, a documentary produced by 46040studio, founded by the Spanish photographers and film makers Ivo Rovira and Ana Ponce. Il Pardo in Fabbrica will also take place in July and will schedule cinematographic events in collaboration with the Locarno Film Festival. In August the Austrian artist and director Oliver Ressler, who produces installations, films and projects in public space, will also be involved in the Foreignness programme (4 August – 14 September).
Paper Building
By interpreting the theme of Foreignness, the Paper Building project gives emotional intimacy back to the architecture; it removes the historical facade from the public view to generate a loss of identity through the change of the original context. With a change in the conditions in which they once lived, a building, a person or a community struggle to maintain their own identity, having been forced to adapt to the new conditions.
Referring to the curiosity of children when unwrapping chocolates or sweets, and to the work “Passing Through”, 1956, by Saburo Murakami of the Gutai Group, the windows and doors of the former factory will be opened by the forceful tearing of the paper by the public and inhabitants during the inauguration of the Fondazione. Paper Building creates a space in which people can feel free and that is resolved with the participation of the public as it undergoes an experience.
By referring back to the ephemeral Baroque architectures of Bernini, which were specifically made for a limited time in order to celebrate some historical event, Daniel González makes large-scale public works as social catalysts and for bringing people together.
"An ephemeral building allows a radical alteration of architectural structures and so influences our experiences through an object, one that is linked to a specific time limit, after which there remains a record of it and, above all, the fact experienced". Said Daniel González.
With the use of white paper for Paper Building, the artist has created a space for a double interpretation of the material used: on the one hand the reset of the history of the former Cima Norma factory's architecture and, on the other, the infinite possibilities in the near future. For the citizens and those who experience the newly-established Fondazione, Paper Building represents the freedom to analyze the architecture of the former factory through one's own intimate and personal experience: a catalyst for the creation of a relationship between the architectural space and the visitor.
Kamchatka’16
Kamchatka'16 is a journey through the fantasy of imagination. It is a single, large work that alternates dreams with reality by moving the viewers through a world that is as visionary as it is real. Kamchatka'16 is a peninsula at the extreme east of Siberia, subject to strong volcanic activity, and inhabited by unlikely animals. This distant and mysterious world, as disturbing and enigmatic as the land of the Tartars was to Medieval Europeans, has been catapulted into the district of Blenio, where it has involved, completed, and integrated with the local nature and artisanal work. This is a new version of the work with respect to the first installation in 2005 at Viafarini (Milan). Kamchatka'16 is a mental map that has been shifted into the physical world, a handmade landscape to be explored as though by pioneers.
If you enter alone - as with a book - and you cannot decide when to stop or how long to stay, you are invited to let yourself go and feel free to "lose" yourself; in this way it will be easy to shed your prejudices. Kamchatka'16 will then reveal itself to be a free world uninhabited by the powerful. It is as though each individual were the "origin", and the Kamchatka becomes a journey through innocence. Kamchatka'16 is a geographical offer for penetration in order to extract meaning, like a mandala. A mandala in the sense of a model of the world, an origin of the universe. A place where we can appropriate something essential. An exercise for overcoming the dichotomy between object and subject, the viewer and the work, humanity and its setting.
The obligatory tour inside Kamchatka'16 is a comfortable and speedy way for being exposed to a different reality, to changing one's own point of view as a first step for growth. It is an undertaking for exploring the tensions between culture and nature, in vitro. And all this in the time a pop song takes. Kamchatka'16 is a ready-to-wear journey!
