MI LECCA COME
UN GELATO
STAGE - TOTEM - PERFORMANCE - VIDEO - INSTALLATION - CRIT
MI lecca come un gelato, a multi-year research that is always being enriched with new chapters, "began as a challenge and a game at the birth of our collaboration and then turned into the fertile basin that allowed us to go and emphasize from time to time conceptual structures that are fundamental for us: each chapter is to be understood as a new challenge towards an exhaustion of the research on the work and on the act of its creation and fruition."
Supported by Strategia Fotografia 2023 - Direzione Generale Creatività Contemporanea del Ministero della Cultura, OD'A enter into dialogue with the series Exposure in Real Time No. 12. Viaggio - Trip Lucido by Franco Vaccari (Modena 1936), OD'A made the two-channel site -specific video Mi lecca come un gelato n. 11 - In uno spazio pubblico e privato, filming a performative action that includes Vaccari's original works in the place where they are preserved: the FMAV archives at Palazzo Santa Margherita. In the play of mirrors between the two channels of the video, dominated by black and white, the figures concealed by the suits enact a chanted procession in which Franco Vaccari's five photographic works, as if they were sacred icons used in the traditional rites of Holy Week (the week before Easter), are found, set in motion, documented and exhibited in the exhibition hall. The private space is FMAV's archive and the public space is the adjacent exhibition hall where the works are actually displayed at the exhibition.
Orecchie D’Asino, Orecchie D’Asino, Mi lecca come un gelato n.11 in uno spazio pubblico e privato, still from video (IT), 2024
Orecchie D’Asino, Orecchie D’Asino, Mi lecca come un gelato n.11 in uno spazio pubblico e privato, installation view, Fondazione Arti Visive Modena (IT), 2024
On the occasion of Arte Fiera 2024, in collaboration with MLZ Art Dep, Orecchie D'Asino presents the different design stages of Mi lecca come un gelato. The project develops around the artists' practice itself: born in 2019 as the genesis of their collaboration through a shared dream, it then continued following different forms and languages, multiplying the questions about the artistic practice itself rather than seeking a resolution. The artists' imagination is thus identified as a puzzle in which various recurring elements meet according to different combinations, questioning the observer and immersing him in a symbolic system poised between the dreamlike and the everyday.
Orecchie D’Asino, Mi lecca come un gelato - in uno spazio privato, installation view, Arte Fiera, Bologna (IT), 2024
On the occasion of ART CITY Bologna 2024, Orecchie D'Asino proposes the tenth phase of the project Mi lecca come un gelato - No. 10 - in uno spazio pubblico, at Piccola Galleria: in the showcase that marks the exhibition space, on a mirror is engraved Where does the outside end? Simultaneously inside Arte Fiera, the artists exhibit the ninth phase of the project: on another mirror it reads Where does the inside begin?
The two interventions arise from the will and need to connect two spaces that are different from each other, one public and one private, one internal and one external, during the temporal parenthesis of Art City and Arte Fiera 2024. In a silent but intimate and personal way, the artists put the public of the two initiatives in the city of Bologna at the center of their intervention, creating in them the doubt but also the surprise of searching for an answer to a question that perhaps has none.
Orecchie D’Asino, Mi lecca come un gelato - in uno spazio pubblico, installation view, Piccola Galleria, Bologna (IT), in the occasion of ART CITY Bologna 2024
Orecchie D'Asino invited by Parsec Bologna to organize a crit decides to stage Parliamone: performance and critical action which is hard to define its nature. Reintroducing the iconic elements of Mi lecca come un gelato, Orecchie D'asino fills the spaces of Parsec with sand, overturning the very concept of crit. The result is a meta-crit in which the boundaries between work, artist and public are blurred and visitors become the protagonists called to direct action in the project.
With a series of questions directed to the public, Parliamone has triggered a series of doubts about the roles and stigmas of the art system. The role of the artist and his authorship is questioned in favor of an art of life without distinctions or borders.
Orecchie D’Asino, Mi lecca come un gelato - Parliamone, installation view and performance, Parsec, Bologna (IT), 2022
On the occasion of Art City Bologna 2022, Orecchie D'Asino created a site-specific project inside the frame of Fondazione Carlo Gajani: overturning the archive of the house museum and staging an archaeology of the project Mi lecca come un gelato, the artists have changed the Bolognese artist's perception of the domestic space. Furthermore, during the days of the festival Orecchie D'Asino animated the house itself: the two shadows, almost an echo of the presence of Carlo Gajani and Gianni Celati, twisted again the various artworks by Gajani and in doing so they reconstruct the original order of the house.
Inside the Fondazione Carlo Gajani, the artists exhibited the video interview made with the curator Giuseppe Virelli. Inside the video, blinking at Celati's artwork La bottega dei mimi (1975), they explain without explaining and without saying a word their intervention on the Gajani archive.
Orecchie D’Asino, Mi lecca come un gelato - DUE | DUO, installation view, Fondazione Carlo Gajani, Bologna (IT) | video interview, 4'36", full HD, video stil, 2022
On the occasion of Metafotografare III (2021) Orecchie D'Asino created a site-specific installation inside the frame of BACO - Base Arte Contemporanea, indipendent art space in Bergamo. Taking up the project Mi lecca come un gelato, the artists develop it to a further step: a theatrical dialogue animated by the various characters is born from the original text.
The protagonist of the original story is now split into two black figures that animate the video in which the very action of photographing and using an image becomes the thematic focus around which the dream narrative develops.
The video then finds its own sculptural dimension within the installation space: the main elements that characterize the video explode in the room and the observer finds himself with his feet in the sand, surrounded by cones, umbrellas and a black head.
Orecchie D’Asino, Mi lecca come un gelato, installation view at BACO – Base Arte Contemporanea, Bergamo (IT), 2021
Se non mi lecchi mi scioglierò (If you don't lick me, I'll melt) is the action made by Orecchie D'Asino during the opening of the Francesco Fabbri Prize 2022. In the exhibition context, the artists animated their installation Totem in the studio (2019) in an ironic and alluring way: wearing black overalls gave to visitors a vanilla ice cream accompanied by the phrase that gives the project its name. With this gesture, the artists have tried to bring reflection on the consumption of art within the contemporary cultural and economic system right during its creation.
Orecchie D’Asino, Mi lecca come un gelato - Se non mi lecchi mi scioglierò, installation view + performance, Fondazione Francesco Fabbri, Pieve del Soligo (IT), 2022
Continuing the research within different languages, Orecchie D'Asino arrives at a new step in the representation of Mi lecca come un gelato. By mixing the elements that distinguish the project and electing the totem as an architectural structure capable of containing past memories through an aggregation of shapes and figures, the artists conceive a sculpture that lives only in its photographic image. Mi lecca come un gelato is constituted in this totem as an expanded archive, in which the image becomes a mirror of itself and the different layers of reality are out of phase, reshuffled: the gaze becomes the field of investigation to reconstruct the different fragments.
Orecchie D’Asino, Mi lecca come un gelato, Totem and details, print 180 x 90 cm, 2019
Mi lecca come un gelato (2018) was born from the shared dream created by Orecchie D'Asino following theatrical improvisation exercises. The narrative text finds its first physical realization within an ephemeral installation in which different everyday objects find themselves coexisting as in a rebus: the artists, playing with the associative qualities of dreams, stage a scenography which is waiting for its actors.
Orecchie D’Asino, Mi lecca come un gelato, stage at Fondazione Arti Visive Modena, 2019