A bus ride with: Marco Morici
Born 1985, winner of 2008 Hugo Boss contest for their new advertising concept, Talento Autentico 2009, released by Knighthood Youth of the Province of Rome: this is Marco Morici.
We met him to ask him a couple of questions.
You study architecture, deal with electro music, approach graphic and photography, make videoart and installations. Is there a fil rouge that links your interests? Are you one of those people who finds inspiration even in sugar bags, or do you commit to specific ‘giants’ of art?
I’ve never been particularly fond of sugar bags. But one can never know, they could be the cue for something else. I don’t have big gurus to follow, there are some characters who strike me, from the youngest ones to giants. It’s an unconscious exchange that happens looking at a Del Piombo’s exhibit; it doesn’t matter whether one is inside a gallery, or holding the latest manual that explains contemporary sculpture’s tendencies. Ideas spark from different points, that’s why I leave open many expressive channels. I’m not purely a sculpture, nor a photographer, nor a video artist, and I think it’ll be like this for a long time, or at least I hope so.
A trade that ties everything must be there, but it’s not up to me to find it. I feel that there is something that links my first works to my last exhibition. There is a vision of nature saturated of symbols, clean out of everything, echoing of all the meanings that it bears, cultural legacies that belong to us.
In 2010 you’ve surrounded yourself with artists, architects, photographers and sound designers joining the Oblivious Artefacts collective. What is it about?
They are the ones who’ve surrounded me. They’ve asked me to join in, I’ve been ready to say yes. The Oblivious are a marvelous reality, that tells about the mixture of languages necessary to develop a truly interesting contemporary aesthetic.
Ignazio Mortellaro created the collective a few years ago. I became part of it in the year that we made The Hours, a video-installation at Diocletian Thermal Baths. It was a reflection on the four seasons: nature was the object of the work and, redrawing some of its symbols, we gave shape to a re-sacralization of the flow of time, dictated by the biological rhythms of plants, barks, waters.
The collective is a big container of ideas and experiences, which maintains common poetics and visions. There is this awareness among us: there mustn’t be any difference between a vjset and an exhibit in a gallery, or between a theatre performance and a graphic work.
At the moment, we are preparing a very complex packing for the new release of Stroboscopic Artefacts (a Berlin label that we collaborate with) in which we decided to insert a limited edition kind of work. It’s also thanks to the collaboration with Stroboscopic’s artists that many of our works were born.
You often make use of ordinary objects, you place them into atypical contexts, lending them a sacral quality. You dwell on details, you like to experiment, the way you did with the photos of My Heart is a Mineral for the Ossidiana exhibit at CO2 Gallery in Rome. Do you have fun creating new languages?
New symbols that draw new languages. To rediscover the sacred strength that an image can create is a very present poetic in My Heart is a Mineral. The rediscovery of a natural sacredness has been at the base of my work over the last year. I’ve already started to work on new ideas, that spark from this awareness. It’s enough to think about the poetic and cultural-scientific impact that Epicurus’ doctrine had: it’s form there that Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura was born, together with a completely different world view, especially of beauty, of body movements.
I believe that a contemporary artist couldn’t avoid observing nature and the latest scientific discoveries. The outburst towards sacred and symbolic elements is what interests me. The latest discovery at Cern in Geneva is proof of how nature awareness can fill with enthusiast our world vision; let’s just think about the aesthetic beauty of particle accelerators appeared in the news, reproduced everywhere, on newspapers, on blogs. These are extraordinarily beautiful and complex objects.
What changed between your first exhibition (Chambers of awaits in Monte Porzio Catone, Rome) and your last one (My Heart is a Mineral)?
A lot. In the first case, the reflection was on body anthropology, from birth to death, together with all the liquids that go lost during the terrestrial passage.
The idea of my last exhibit is the will to create an echo between the earthly symbolisms of minerals and landscapes, towards a vision of the obscure cosmos and its materials, of the radiations that reach us like mystic signs, such as stars’ pulses, terrestrial magnetism, solar radiations, the sacred power of minerals. The first exhibition has been an extraordinary adventure, it has been useful for me to understand how to manage a space, how to occupy spaces with my ideas. And I’ve realised that I often happen to go back in time to it, in my mind, to create new ideas.
Artistically speaking, I was born with that exhibition and, emotionally, I put myself at the stake; now I think about my projects a lot more, but the fundamental ideas of a certain world vision stay the same, the issue of sacredness and symbolisms is still a very basic aspect of my work. At the moment, I’ve put aside the idea of working on men as body and physicality, very present in my first exhibition, but completely non-existing in my last one.
About your first installation, The room of delivery; it is a site-specific work of art that you have presented other two times at the Museum of Trajan’s Markets and during the Contemporary Art Festival SEMInARIA sogninterra at Maranola di Formia.
Has it been difficult to readapt a work, spatially conceived ad hoc, into a different place?
Absolutely not. It’s very stimulating to make come to light again a work that one might have left into a warehouse for two years, to transform it. It’s a new birth for both, you are forced to reactivate some mechanisms that brought you to it. I really like working on places that have a very strong memory and history. It’s a tale that invades the artist, there is a constant struggle between the necessity of bringing your work into an ancient context and the desire to leave it intact, the hope that it could express by itself and have an influence on those who look at it. Well executed site-specific works are wonderful, but often this term is used for installation that are not all that much site-specific after all; they are just sculptures placed there, that might be beautiful, but that don’t have any kind of relation with space. To realise a site-specific work means to humbly lend an ear to the space that hosts you and to adapt your ideas to it, letting it be the protagonist of your work. Often, when in places of strong historical relevance, one is forced to jump through all sorts of hoops other than galleries; sometimes it becomes wild even to just hang a nail, if you’re dealing with walls in ward of landmarks. But all this is just an extra incentive.
Any anticipation about your future projects?
I’m preparing a work on deers that I’ll take to a collective exhibit of young Italian sculptors, a beautiful project supervised by Ludovico Pratesi, at CO2 Gallery in Rome.
I’m also working at an artistic contribution for a magazine about Higgs boson, but I don’t know what turn that will take.
