Idolo, LabOratorio degli Angeli, Bologna
Solo Exhibition in Bologna, curated by Leonardo Regano
The spaces of the former Oratory of Santa Maria degli Angeli, now used as a restoration laboratory, actively dialogued and interacted with the complexity of the collective's expressive languages (drawing, video, photography, sculpture) in the form of a dedicated installation.
In its multiple visual and experiential resonances, Idolo proposed an intimate dialogue between AdE's work and the exhibition space, absorbed and transformed through the interventions.
At the entrance to the exhibition, the visitor was welcomed by two benevolent entities, two protective Diòscuri in the form of a photographic installation - Castor (2018) and Pollux (2018) - that mark the exhibition path to the heart of the intervention. On the walls of the former Oratory, in dialogue with ancient frescoes depicting the great women of the Old Testament, we find the Great Mother Cell (2023) and 12 Oracular Cells (2020), a tribute to creative femininity and the origin of AdE's imaginative and vast bestiary (The Ghost Parade, 2023).
In dialogue with Idolino nero (2018), a single block of graphite on a brass base representing the basic material that gave birth to AdE's artistic activity, stands Idolino rosso (2019) an arachneiform sculpture exhibited for the first time. The sculpture, made of red insulating tape and brass wire and placed in the center of the Laboratory on top of a Sacred Mountain, was the stage for IDOL, a performative intervention interpreted by the two performers Nicole Domenichini (Pythia-Casssandra) and Matteo Morescalchi (Tiresia).
The central text, performed in the original language, is a cut-up from Ezra Pound's first thirty "Cantos" introduced and enclosed, in a symbolic and biographical dialogue, with Allen Ginsberg's "Psalm III".
The video Micro-Atlas (2018), set up in the Library Room, concludes the exhibition by marking the boundary between real and imaginary and suggesting a possible intersection between these two worlds.