Mirella Bentivoglio, Alessandro Alimonti: "Facce Murrate" / "Wallface"
from 18 july do 28 august 2005
fotogalerie

From July 18 to August 28, 2005, huge photographs of rectangular faces appeared within the niches of the great wall that lines the street besides the river Vltava in Prague. These faces belong to the 17th century “erme” (heads of pilasters) which crown the roof terrace of the Falconieri palast in Rome. Their author is the famous Italian architect Francesco Borromini, who, between 1646 and 1649, worked on the renovation of that palast. These ermes are casts (executed by Borromini´s artisans) of the feminine and masculine heads of ancient Roman sculptures (matrons and river gods) chosen by Borromini as models, and concretized in a poor material: a kind of paste of clay and stone crumbs.
The oval that delimits these faces has been cut away by the rectangular form of giant photographs which in shape and size correspond to the niches of the wall. The rectangle removes their beards, hair, and diadems, eliminating every connotation of epoch and gender. In this way, those images appear as to be the faces of the very earth from which they are made. They are timeless, running all the way back through the millennia to imperial Rome, and are likewise without a single creator, derived as they are from ancient sculptors, and then from an idea of Borromini, and finally from the present quoting of a camera.
This installation has been conceived by the Roman artist Mirella Bentivoglio, and the photos have been shot by the photographer Alessandro Alimonti. A documentary exhibition in the courtyard of the Italian Cultural Institute in Prague, (Šporkova 14) will inform about the source of these disquieting images.

Mirella Bentivoglio is a conceptual artist, performer, poet, curator, who works with stone in urban contexts; and with visualized words. She has exhibited in the most prestigious museums in Europe, North and South America, Australia and the Far East. Alessandro Alimonti is well known photographer, specialized in the creation of abstract pictures derived from urban details. They both will be present at the openings of installation and show.
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