Claudia Virginia Vitari PANOPTICON

Dario — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 16:17:25 +0000

The volume documents the retrospective exhibition “Panopticon”, by the artist Claudia Virginia Vitari, set up at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
This catalogue is a study on the concept of “total institutions” that the artist, born in Turin and living in Berlin, has been researching for almost two decades.
The title refers to Jeremy Bentham’s concept of an ideal prison, where a guard, placed in a central control tower, can observe all the inmates without their knowledge. This system of control reflects the conditions of people residing inside “total institutions”, a term developed by Erving Goffman to indicate places where individuals are isolated from interactions with the outside society and their daily activities are strictly regulated by a central authority.
Vitari’s experimentation with materials responds to the need to find new tools of communication. The use of glass makes this process transparent but at the same time complex and layered, while the silkscreen technique allows for the incorporation of the stories and portraits of those who live within total institutions. The glass objects are embedded in iron structures, a cold and rigid material that symbolizes institutional inflexibility and the attempt to keep individuals detached from society. Social tensions are fixed in glass and exposed as a brutal social experiment. Through large-scale installations that border on the performative act, the exhibition “Panopticon” aims to give visibility to marginalized, almost invisible people. Vitari’s ethnographic, psychological and sociological research, conducted through the study of scientific literature, has allowed her to frame these issues. The artist then spent years talking to people at risk of exclusion to better understand issues related to mental health, incarceration and migration flows.

Claudia Virginia Vitari IDENTITÁ INTERSTIZIALI

Dario — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 13:07:03 +0000

The volume documents the personal exhibition of the artist Claudia Virginia Vitari at the Widespread Museum of Resistance, Deportation, War, Rights and Freedom in Turin. Since 2014 the artist has been dealing with migration, refugees and asylum seekers. The installation on display combines two themes of his most recent project: “Interstitial Identities”. Claudia Virginia Vitari has always focused her work on long research and collaboration projects on social issues such as crime and detention, subjects diagnosed with mental illness and refugees and asylum seekers. The large installations created are accompanied by drawings and serigraphs that illustrate in detail some of the stories that make up the artistic project. The Interstitial Identity work proposes a comparison between two distinct but related “interstitial experiences”: protest and waiting. The “Interstitial Identities” project by Claudia Virginia Vitari represents the most recent stage of an artistic and theoretical research, now ten years old, focused on the relationship between identity and cultural otherness, narratives of inclusion / exclusion, total institutions, discipline of bodies and production of humanity and inhumanity. The artist has always focused his attention on social issues that have to do with “marginality”, discomfort and the forms of normalization and discipline carried out by the institutions, giving life to long research and experimentation projects on materials and languages in the name of a broad relational and participatory approach. These are assumptions that have pushed it over time to relate to subjects with psychiatric diagnoses, prisoners, refugees and asylum seekers. (from the critical essay by Roberto Mastroianni)

VITARI CLAUDIA VIRGINIA – Prinp Editoria d'Arte

Claudia Virginia Vitari PANOPTICON

Claudia Virginia Vitari IDENTITÁ INTERSTIZIALI