Giulia Zabarellaselected works

«Extension mobile, espacements, écartements géologiques et cosmologiques, dérives, sutures et fractures des archi-continents du sens, des plaques tectoniques immémoriales qui remuent sous nos pieds, sous notre histoire. Le corps est l’archi-tectonique du sens.

Discours inquiet, syntaxe casuelle, déclinaison d’occurrences. Clinamen, prose inclinée vers l’accident, fragile, fractale. Non le corps-animal du sens, mais l’aréalité des corps...

Un corps est une déflagration.»

Jean-Luc Nancy

Index of a biography2015-20166 books (cm 19x11,5 each), audio recording (12’37’’)installation view

Index means trace, symptom, imprint of the real.Like photographic film physically embodies a fragment of reality, due to its chemical mechanism, the written word appears as a physical trace of daily oral conversation, which flows continuously and restlessly, and which usually does not leave any retraceable formal ruins.The fragmented, mobile and decontextualized flow of these everyday conversations between the artist and her friends are recorded and written down with great accuracy: they are indeed unique biographies, intimate “archaeological finds”, personal imprints of different people, at the same time being facets and perspective of the artist’s own autobiography.Every worthless detail, digression, grammar mistake, cough and laugh are crystalised in this way, instead of being omitted and dismissed like in formal texts or traditional interview transcripts.The refusal to use punctuation, in addition, underlines the open, loose and unrestricted feature of these conversations.The structure of the book itself, with its shape, the necessity of a title and of an author’s name, plays with the total discontinuity of its content.A sound track is to listen while reading the books: it’s a fragmented and unrecognizable audio made of background noises, discarded sounds of the everyday like cars in the streets or glasses in a bar, which fuse at times with the sound of the artist’s breathe.One and plural is one person’s story, a fragile archive of possible identities merging together.The voices of others construct one’s own.

Full sound track here: http://indexofabiography.eu/works/index-of-a-biography/

Spuren20168 backlit slides mounted on cardboardcm 10x10 eachinstallation view

Eight small luminous worlds, appearing as ghosts (or phàsmides, to use a word by Didi-Huberman), are made of backlit slides, presented as fossils of what has been.These fragments of colour film manifest inhabited places which have been temporarily crystalised, in which centimeters of walkable space get frozen into centimeters of memory.Floors like places of the everyday, grounds, windows, fingerprints on glass are traces of the lazy but constant flow of time and of bodies in motion.These surfaces add up, get fused and con-fused, they overlap to evoke spaces and evanescent memories.The consequent happening of events and the unaware movement of objects in space induce dust and small marks on treaded surfaces, that the artist picks and gathers here like precious gems, murmuring in their unheard whispered language.

I have come here to meet you (Clumsy Version 1 and 2)20162 juxtaposed non-sync videos (3’22’’, 3’58’’) with soundinstallation viewfollowing pages: video stills from Clusmy Version 1 and Clumsy Version 2

Two juxtaposed, but not syncronised, video-projections combine and reflect each other in a flow of texts and images. The words collected by the artist (the same words constituting the past work “Index of a biography”) become tactile experience melting with the intimate and personal place par excellence: the bedsheets.Observations, dialogues and conversations are shaped into some kind of transparent membrane of empty signs, projected onto the idleness and indolence of nocturnal rest. Another layer is added to this stratification of experience and memories: the background noise produced by the projection of the texts on the bed at the artist’s place: whispers, mechanical noises by the projector, almost inaudible alterations make this accumulation of impressions potentially continuous and infinite.The visual quality of the videos is unstable and blurred, making explicit and public the fragility of the work itself, which does not impose itself as a unitary and compact body but appears ambiguous and vague, like a diary, an everyday sketchbook, un-fiished and un-refined.

Group exhibition Algorithm of my life AkademieGalerie (Munich), February 10th - 16th 2016curated and lead by artist Melanie Gilligan as conclusion of her seminar “Art and the world” at Akademie der Bildenden Künste MünchenContribution to the exhibition: videos “Jour ordinaire” and “Talk Show”(both videos here: http://indexofabiography.eu/works/algorithm-of-my-life/)

Jour ordinairestill from video, 4’27’’

Talk Showstill from video, 4’46’’

Series of events and interventions Quality Time relating to the current exhibitions of Karel Martens and Adam Putnam Kunstverein (Munich), February 3rd - March 31st 2017 organised and curated by Klasse Olaf Nicolai at Akademie der Bildenden Künste MünchenContribution to the exhibition: video installation “Detritus movie (what happens between the sentences)” and performance “Message in a bottle 2 Aby” with Veronika Galli

Detritus Movie (what happens between the sentences)video installation of 3 sync videoson March 3rd

“The installation consists of 3 looped videos, an aggregation of quick excerpts of family found footage and amateurish recordings. As Adam Putnam’s video is supposed as the commingling of unfinished pieces and remnants of past works, so this installation tries to literally construct a rhythm, a symphony, with the fragments and discarded traces of intimate family memories. Both in sound and in images the technical, graphical hints of the recording and the intimate raw material merge together. These “detrituses” are to be grasped quickly, they are “what is not said...so important...what happens between the sentences” (John Berger) - they are the ruins, electro-signals, test patterns, waste material, background noise between “proper” sentences.”

Message in a bottle 2 Abyperformance with Veronika Galli (30.000 A4 papers, ladder, bottle, other materials), sound track 35’on March 18thfollowing pages: documentation of the performance

“The complex and ambiguous concepts of the archive, the collection and the iconographical research are at the core of Veronika’s and Giulia’s performance. Starting points of their reflection are Adam’s video “Reclaimed Empire”, considered as a fruitful, enormous database of countless references, and the visionary and eccentric approach by Aby Warburg to historiography and iconography, embedded in his Mnemosyne Atlas. The performance unfolds itself as an attempt (at the same time naif, ironic and carefully thought-out) to both analyse and play with the idea of accumulation and distribution of information, meaning and memories. Actions, sounds and objects create a constellation of gestures, temporary interconnections and fragile relics.”

excerpt of sound track

gzabarella@gmail.com+49 151 44959557www.indexofabiography.eu