BIOGRAPHY
Micol Assaël was born in Rome, 1979. Lives between Rome & Moscow
2008 Edicola Notte, Rome;
After Nature, New Museum, New York; 16th Biennale of Sydney
2007 Chizhevsky Lessons, Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland
2006 4. berlin biennale
2005 Free Fall in the Vortex of Time, ZERO…, Milan
Selected Bibliography GIONI, Massimiliano, “Micol Assaël”,
Art Review, March, 2008; SZYMCZYK, Adam & COEN, Ester, “Micol Assaël” (cat.) IN:
Chizhevsky Lessons, Basel Kunsthalle, Milan, Electa, 2007; MORGAN, Jessica,
Sempre un pò più lontano (cat.), 51. Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Marsilio, 2005
INTERVIEW
Bartolomeo Pietromarchi: Your works often have a strong character of a project and of a personal experience. The value of the experience is also well represented by the use that you often make of physical energy in your works. I am talking, for instance, of the great project that you carried out, in 2007, for the Kunsthalle Basel. In other words, it seems to me that the preparation, or the process that leads to the work, is as important as its final formalization.
Micol Assaël: The work is always born out of an experience and generates others unconditionally. There aren’t so many other outlets. I believe it is fundamental to leave room for the world and for all its enigmas, when you produce a work. The attempt of controlling all aspects beforehand is coercion and can lead to mistakes. Each work has an independent life and you never know where it can take you.
Chizhevsky Lessons was born in a tramontane morning, many years ago, the sun was dazzling, and I was with a person who spoke in a Slavic language. When we greeted each other, the encounter of our bodies produced a static electricity discharge in the form of sparks. In that period, I used electrical transformers to generate sparks and I found extraordinary that two people could produce the same phenomenon in a natural way. A few years were necessary, but I finally found some engineers in Russia, who weren’t afraid of the idea of working with extremely high tension and accepted to make some lab experiments to reproduce the effect of the electrostatic spark. After months of testing and calculating, we managed to create an environment filled with electrical tension and light, where people, when encountering, would produce microdischarges.
Bartolomeo Pietromarchi: It seems to me that another important aspect is the cooperation between other disciplines that, every now and then, you choose based on the project you are doing (physicists, mathematicians, musicians, performers) as the importance of the place and the context where you do the work.
Micol Assaël: To meet experts on other areas may disclose hidden possibilities that would otherwise remain implicit in the work. It is always stimulating to make energy to converge from diverse points of view. I believe it is one of the best instruments at my disposal to suggest novel readings and interpretations for the work, exploring new territories. It is a way of making the work alive and to avoid it becoming self-referential. In other cases, the dialogue between the space that receives the work and work itself is enough. Such relationship with the space is always essential. In most situations, it is the space that defines the rules of the game.
Bartolomeo Pietromarchi: Your works involve the spectator in a highly physical and emotional dimension, with strategies that may adopt the elements of danger, of invisibility, of disturbance, or of the extreme. It seems to me that the critical and opposing nature of your work declares the inadequateness of the contemporary individual, of being in the world, a necessary suspension to reflect deep inside on the limits of oneself through the esthetical experience.
Micol Assaël: My works are born out of intuitions that later on are metabolized with the instruments that I have at my disposal every now and then. I try to put the spectator in the condition of having an experience capable of modifying one’s own vision of the world and of causing a reaction. The situations of risk are those that put more easily in motion a reaction in the person who encounters them. I don’t know if it is still the case of talking about the inadequateness of the contemporary individual. I somewhat believe that making any experiment is always the opportunity for losing oneself and finding oneself again.
Bartolomeo Pietromarchi is a curator at maxxi, the Museo Nazionale per le Arti del XXI Secolo in Rome.
Projects with updated content
