By Pantani-Surace and Paolo Parisi
Until March 30, 2024
mH Florence Hotel
Florence, Via Luigi Alamanni 37
With the Chambres exhibition, the mH Florence & Spa hotel , located in the heart of the city, welcomes in its various indoor and outdoor spaces, including the newly built lounge, the works (sculpture, painting, performance, photography, video, installation) of Anna Dormio, Lori Lako, Matteo Coluccia, Max Mondini, Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi and Stefano Giuri.
Chambres was born from the will of Irene Vezzosi, director of the hotel mH Florence & Spa and if it proposes to create a special occasion for artists and artists, and to allevi delle Accademie di Belle Arti Italiane, which have not completed the first training session and which are internationally distinguished by the quality of the loro ricerca. It is a project curated by artists (and teachers) Pantani-Surace and Paolo Parisi, which will continue year after year with diverse workers and protagonists.
The first of the Chambres posters, visible from the outside, in the window of the mH Florence & Spa, is a work that emerges from a hybrid imagination, bordering on figuration and abstraction. The artist explores a vast array of sources, systematically reusing existing images, drawing on the society in which we live, and the reality we each inhabit becomes, in this case, its archive. The installation, conceived ad hoc, places the element placed on the glass in dialogue with another aluminum element placed inside, as well as with the hotel guests and the other works on display.
Poems Until the Sheets Are Changed (2023) is a series of works conceived by Lori Lako and inspired by Erica Jong's poetry, "Hotel Rooms." These are staged scenes created within the rooms of the mH Florence & Spa, between the guest's departure the night before and their arrival the following evening. The rooms are places of temporary privacy with a continuous rotation of actors, which the artist highlights through these previously unseen shots, which will be displayed on the landings leading to the hotel's four floors.
Through the technique that characterizes his practice, coating iron rods, typical architectural materials, with cement and copper sulfate, Mohsen Baghernejad Moghanjooghi creates sculptures that behave like plants: when they get wet, they turn green. In this context, he connects two different works: a sculpture, Me and My Brothers (2021) , and an installation composed of a photograph and a sculpture in dialogue with each other, Lilly if he was calling! (2022) , which introduce us to a human/non-human experience of the hotel's living spaces.
Anna Dormio presents two series of works: Boom Boom Papa (2021) and Shooting Sky (2017/ongoing) . The artist's father owns a gun shop, and the title of the first series evokes an expression from his childhood. The guns, here stripped of their function, take on a playful and "affective" presence, capable of evoking the memory of the father even in an alienating context. At the same time, it lightly addresses the issue of the growing proliferation of weapons and the militarization of Western society. The second series, composed of 16 Polaroids, refers both to the photo shoot and to the English verb "to shoot." The sky, abstract, impalpable, immaterial, is "filmed" with the "click" of the instant camera, obtaining a two-dimensional result: a photograph of the sky, in its day and night vision, to map a hypothetical temporal variety, forced between four margins. The skin of this simulacrum of the sky is then pierced by the brutality of a gunshot.
Stefano Giuri engages with both public and more private spaces, working on collective and individual memory, addressing current social issues linked to the places where he operates. For Chambres, he created a sculpture that will be placed from time to time in different rooms and will spark a dialogue with the temporary inhabitants—the hotel guests—who will face a crossroads upon checkout: purchase the work, produced in unlimited series, or decree its destruction. The remains of any destruction will be carefully preserved and displayed, thus constituting a new sculpture resulting from this relationship between the work and the hotel guests.
