Alessandro Carboni is a visual artist, performer and researcher, whose artistic and conceptual production revolves around the complex web of correlations and permutations that occur between space and its constituent elements (people, places, relationships, meanings), starting from the concept of cartography, intended as a "scaled-down/reduced representation of the earth's surface and the phenomena that take place and evolve on it". In this sense, in his performative and installation projects, the artist uses the stage as an actual projection screen from which arise reflections and criticalities related to the contemporary world. Back in Sardinia, following on from a long path of field research and artistic production between Europe and Hong Kong, centred on the study of the relationships between urban space and performative gesture - leading to the creation of the method of "urban corporal mapping", EM Tools - the artist has grown the need to draw on from original styles and archetypes that could transpose his research to a symbolic way. Hence the creation, in 2018, of The Angular Distance Of A Celestial Body, in which the performative action replaces the body with the graphic sign of the map and manifests itself through a modular geometric structure composed of cotton threads, manipulated by the ritual gestures of two performers. From this work, spontaneously emerges an evocation of the warp of the Sardinian carpets and a consequent reflection on the possible declinations of the concept of "fabric" (urban, cultural, social ...) and on the "body-maker" intended as a vehicle of variable and discontinuous energies capable of de-structuring and re-structuring the existential perception of the self, the social and the cosmos, to paraphrase the great weaver Luciano Ghersi.
The research project that Alessandro Carboni intends to develop within Amìna, draws from these assumptions and aims to activate a reflection on the idea of weaving and loom as a model of the cosmic mind, and on its relations with the visual arts, cartographic processes and the stage. The artist intends to study and relate the patterns and modular structures developed in the Sardinian textile production, for example the traditional design developed in the town of Nule in Sardinia, called Nule's flame - given by the rhomboid shape of the drawing, which resembles precisely a flame - with geometric volumes and primary elementary units of American minimalism.
Starting from this relationship, the artist intends to explore and develop a visual/performative practice based on the manipulation of woollen threads and modular triangular geometric shapes in order to experiment an action poised between weaving, visual/performing arts and cartography: the carpet, intended as a map, and created on stage, becomes a cartographic projection plan, in which the plot and the warp are the spatial coordinates, latitude and longitude, on which the performer is positioned.
The aim of the research path is the production of materials designed to construct a prismatic work that, drawing from the idea of Context (pp of the Latin con-tèxere = weaving together, intertwining) as the set of circumstances that define an event, investigate the concept of spatial action as a continuous redefinition of a context by the agents who are part of it and constant negotiation between immobility and change, between moment and permanence. The project does not intend to represent reality, but to investigate the possibilities of combining and recombining its elements, keeping alive that component of uncertainty that is inherent in reality itself.
Alessandro Carboni is an artist whose practice is situated within the performing arts field as a choreographer and performer. After several years of training in the field of visual arts, creative media and performance art practice, he has developed an interdisciplinary practice focused on the production of performative and installation projects involving and collaborating with professionals from different disciplines. His projects are supported by Formati Sensibili, an independent production company that shapes projects involving arts, science, architecture and education. Besides his artistic production and research, Alessandro has created EM Tools for urban mapping and performance art practice, a choreographic system that uses the body as a device to capture/extract urban events and to map what happens in geometrical and temporal extensions of a place.