Alice Guareschi
Limature 2002-2003

“These are images filmed out of friendship. It was a time of exploration; back then I had just made my first works with video, Andrea had been an important encounter for me, and Spazio Lima was a place I would keep returning to. Perhaps, in some way, I wanted to be an active part of that experience too, so I suggested to them that I be there and record what was happening. At first, I think my idea was to create a kind of modular documentation—a video archive that would keep track of what was unfolding over time—but then, after a while, I moved to Paris and never looked at those images again. C’est la vie. In the meantime, the project space on Via Masera changed its artistic direction, then closed; Studio pconp relocated; that experience came to an end… only to begin again in 2021 in the current space on Via Benedetto Marcello, with new energy and a different identity. When I proposed the idea to the new team, Riccardo Previdi and Anna Abbà, they  were immediately enthusiastic about the possibility of a moment of reflection and reunion around an experience that many of us remember with great affection. The spirit that drives this project today is a shared return to a shared moment in the past, but within the physical space of the present. The creation of small short circuit in space and time.

There is no claim to systematization or philological rigor, no interest in creating an exhaustive historical archive, which is not my task. Rather than focusing on the protagonists of the individual evenings or their works, these images tell the story of a time and a place—its atmosphere, the people who inhabited it, the things that happened—as seen through my eyes back then, paying homage to the reasons that led me to film in the first place: above all, curiosity and friendship. This is only a partial account—mine. I have always loved filming with low-definition video cameras. The camera often loses focus, the image breaks down, the direct sound is rough… yet there is a softness to the images, and the movement is light. One can be invisible and yet present. For the editing presented in the exhibition, I used most of the material recovered from five tapes. And since making a ‘best of’ compilation is neither in my nature nor of any interest to me, I kept the pauses, the waiting moments, the conversations both on and off screen, and the imperfections of a frame that adjusts itself and ‘looks’ in real time. Much of the editing had already been done in-camera at the time—how consciously, I can’t recall—and so I left it as it was, limiting myself to trimming the edges of the sequences as they unfold.

Images like filings, residues of memory in motion. On the walls of the exhibition space, large posters reproduce the timeline of the seven evenings for which I have material, allowing for an overall view of the contents. Punctuating the space—or as if attempting to enclose memories within small luminous white parentheses—are two recently produced neon texts. The first features a colloquial English word, hereish (“more or less here,” formed from the adverb here and the suffix -ish, which gives it an approximative value), while the second presents the palindrome yet not yet, where it is time itself that enters into a spiral movement capable of holding together past and future, within the present. In dialogue with the video, the neon works materialize that reflection on space and time, subjective experience and memory, which runs through all my work, inviting the viewer to trust their own subjective coordinates—even if imperfect—toward territories where real spaces and projections of mental landscapes inevitably overlap.”

Alice Guareschi (1976) is a visual artist living and working in Milan. She holds a MA in Philosophy from the University of Bologna with a thesis on experimental cinema. Over time her practice has included a wide range of media such as writing, sculpture, video and installation, with a conceptual approach and a free and playful inclination to different techniques. In her works, not everything is shown, not everything is said. The off-screen always stands out as a living, powerful and necessary presence, affirming the possibility of different perspectives, of images beyond the visible. Before moving back to Italy, she spent several years in Paris, where she was an artist-in-residence at the Palais de Tokyo’s ‘Le Pavillon’ in 2005 and at the Cité Internationale des Arts in 2012 and 2015. In 2008 she was awarded with the Young Italian Art’s grant promoted by the Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, and in 2022 was among the recipients of the PAC2021 grant promoted by the Italian Ministry of Culture. Since 2018 she is a lecturer in the Bachelor of Arts in Photography at IED, Milano. Her work has been exhibited in public and private institutions, as well as film festivals, in Italy and abroad, such as Fondazione Re Rebaudengo, Torino; Palais de Tokyo, Parigi; PAC, Milano; Castello di Rivoli, Torino; MAMbo, Bologna; GAMeC, Bergamo; Mart, Rovereto; The Delaware Contemporary, Philadelphia; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Roma; Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg; Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Parigi; Villa Arson, Nizza; Parco del Foro Italico, Roma; Filmmaker Festival, Milano; Impakt Festival, Utrecht; Italian Cinema London Festival; Mostra del Nuovo Cinema, Pesaro; Milano Design Film Festival; Microscope Gallery, New York; Triennale, Milano; Macro, Roma.