A series of 16 photographs documenting an action for house lights performed by Alice Guareschi at the Olympia Music Hall in Paris (leporello).
Je m'appelle Olympia is an action for house lights performed by Alice Guareschi on just one occasion for a select audience of guests at the Olympia Music Hall, the legendary and iconic Parisian venue, on April 12th, 2012. The 16 photographs that make up this series were shot on the same day, right after the live activation of the light choreography in the theater's empty space, which involved all thirteen of the colored lighting channels that are permanently integrated into the architecture. With a fixed framing, similar but not identical, following the precise original lighting score composed by the artist, the images present a sequence of different movements of lights in the auditorium. The photographic series thus becomes a new synthesis of the image-idea and intention behind the performance: to activate a theater when no show is happening on stage, to play it live, to reawaken its latent memory and the secret life that eludes the spectator's gaze. By breaking down the duration of the action into photograms that can be viewed either separately or all together, the spatial arrangement of the work now makes it possible to embrace the overall idea at a glance.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition ar MAN_Museo d'Arte Provincia di Nuoro in 2023.
Alice Guareschi was born in 1976 in Parma (Italy), and lives and works in Milano. She graduated in philosophy at the University of Bologna. In 2005 she was resident artist at
Palais de Tokyo's Le Pavillon in Paris, in 2008 she was awarded with the Young Italian Art's grant promoted by Castello di Rivoli Contemporary Art Museum, in 2011/2012 she was the recipient of the Italian Atelier at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Solo shows include Galleria Alessandro De March (Milano), Galleria Sonia Rosso (Torino), Castello di Rivoli (Torino), DREI Galerie (Cologne) and Joey Ramone Gallery (Rotterdam).
"Over the years, my work was often confronted with concepts like void, distance, negation, absence, by 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. 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."
