The second edition of the Cima Norma Art Festival will be held from 14 August to 3 October 2021 in the spaces of the Foundation La Fabbrica del Cioccolato in Torre/Blenio. At the heart of the Festival there is the solo exhibition of the artist Tarik Hayward. Please note that the Anne Rochat’s SPO2 performance will be held on October 2 by the Pozzone in Osogna. On the occasion of the Festival, a public poster campaign with photographs by Gian Paolo Minelli is presented in various places in Ticino from 9 to 23 august.
This is the programme of the events. To view or download the PDF of the programme please click here.
14 August– 3 October
Tarik Hayward. Archifossile
Solo exhibition
ex Cima Norma – Torre/Blenio
Opening hours:
Thursday-Sunday
10.00-18.00
Monday-Wednesday
closed
In the occasion of the evening events opening hours are extended until 23.00
At the heart of this year’s edition of the Cima Norma Art Festival is a solo exhibition by the Swiss-French artist Tarik Hayward, whose work has been investigating the theme of ruins for years. His artistic approach is characterised by the extreme consistency with which he moves between craftsmanship and bricolage, between political-ecological activism and minimalist aesthetics, between art and life. For this exhibition the artist has developed a large sculptural project that deals with the monumentality of the spaces of the former chocolate factory Cima Norma. As always in the case of his works, this project is the result of a long production process that the artist carried out directly on site and that led to the creation of large sculptures suspended between fragility and monumentality. Sculptures that recall both architectural fragments and organic remains and that were born from a reflection on the concept of “archifossil” developed by the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux. In addition to the sculptures the exhibition also includes a sound installation created in collaboration with Ariel Garcia.
14 August-3 October
A Memory of Shadows and Stone
Montage of film excerpts by Elio Schenini
Loop, 59’
Ex Cima Norma – Torre/Blenio
During exhibition opening hours
In occasion of the evening events the projection is extended to 23.00
In this montage, specially made for the Festival, a fragmentary cinematic narrative unfolds among the ruins of the 20th century. A journey that ranges from the endless ruins of Berlin destroyed by Allied bombs, as filmed by Rossellini, to the empty desolation of rubble in the post-nuclear landscape of Hiroshima, as documented by Resnais; from the masses of bodies stiffened like blocks of basalt narrated by the survivors of the Shoha to Claude Lanzmann, to the everyday life torn apart by bombs in Sarajevo, as recounted by Angelopoulos. A journey that goes from Cocteau’s and Tarkovsky’s «zone» to the Apocalypse of the oil wells burning in the Iraqi desert filmed by Herzog. A journey about the value and duty of memory to which the ruins, those of stone and those of shadow, remind us.
14 August
18.30
Official opening of the edition 2021
Ex Cima Norma – Torre/Blenio
Official opening of the second edition of the Festival with speeches by Elio Schenini, artistic director of the Festival and Giovanni Casella Piazza, president of the Foundation La Fabbrica del Cioccolato. Apéro follows.
14 August
19.00
Sonic Boom
Performance by Tarik Hayward and Anne Rochat
Ex Cima Norma – Torre/Blenio
In 2019, during an artistic residency in China, Tarik Hayword and Anne Rochat developed a joint performance project, that they will present at the opening of the Festival. In the dark, cold spaces of the factory’s large cellars, the old walls seem to tremble as if they were about to collapse at any moment, with flashes of light, drum rolls and the sinuous crack of a whip breaking down the sound barrier.
14 August
21.00
Monte Mai
Concert
Ex Cima Norma – Torre/Blenio
The Swiss-English Avant-pop trio formed in 2019 by Fabio Pinto, Fabio Besomi and Anaïs Schmidt moves with great lightness and freedom among the multiplicity of styles that have emerged in recent decades, mixing, blending and hybridising different elements to give life to a fragmented soundscape that does not renounce to both, a taste for constant experimentation and the sensual pleasantness of the melodies. Between visionary ballads and dance and funky reminiscences of the Seventies, their music appears as a luxurious kaleidoscope of sounds that try to recompose the ruins of the past to give life to a sound universe that try to project us into the future.
18 August
20.00
Recompositions
Lecture by Martino Pedrozzi
Screening of the documentary Essere felici by Vasco Dones and Franco Cattaneo, 2020
Ex Cima Norma – Torre/Blenio
Just as when a corpse is reassembled before burial, by means of gestures that erase the signs of death and try to keep the image of the deceased alive during the painful moment of parting, some years ago Martino Pedrozzi began to tidy up the piles of untidy stones of some destroyed farmsteads in order to make traces of the ancient foundations re-emerge. This is how his first “recompositions” were born on the alpine pastures of Val Malvaglia: an architectural gesture that measures itself with simplicity and rigour against the ruins produced by abandonment. At the end of the lecture, the documentary Essere felici, made in 2020 by Vasco Dones and Franco Cattaneo, will be shown, documenting the “recomposition” of the Alpe di Luzzone.
20 August
20.00
Notes from the Holocene
A reading from the novel Man in the Holocene by Max Frisch
Adapted by Flavio Stroppini and Monica de Benedictis
With Margherita Saltamacchia and Rocco Schira
Original music by Andrea Manzoni
Production Teatro Sociale Bellinzona – Bellinzona Teatro, 2021
Ex Cima Norma – Torre/Blenio
In the solitude of his hermitage in the Onsernone valley, Mr Geiser searches through memory and books for weapons to resist time. He struggles against the cloudburst that has torn nature apart and against the merciless erosion of his body and mind. His daughter Corinne is the only one who can decipher the efforts of an increasingly fragile man. Rummaging through the marks left by her father, she tries to regain possession of his memories… The Teatro Sociale Bellinzona stages for the first time in Italian Max Frisch’s most Ticinese novel, perhaps his most profound and fascinating work. The play will make its debut on 7 December. In Dangio, a study in the form of a reading is proposed in an adaptation conceived for the Cima Norma Art Festival.
21 August
20.00
The city and its ghosts. An excursion with Yari Bernasconi
Poetry reading
Ex Cima Norma – Torre/Blenio
Like a common thread, images of ruins continually surface in the poetry of Yari Bernasconi, ever since his debut in 2009 with the poem Lettera da Dejevo. This existential travelogue, later included in Nuovi giorni di polvere (Edizioni Casagrande, 2015), sketches with extreme synthesis the images of a ruined village, abandoned by Soviet soldiers in the early 1990s. In this place reduced to rubble, at the mercy of the forces of nature, a low wall symbolically “stands, almost proud. / As if awaiting execution”. Thus, amidst “lumps of faded and abandoned walls”, images of ruined architecture serve the poet to evoke the “shaky places” outside and inside us. An exploration that Yari Bernasconi also continues in his latest book of poems, with the significant title La casa vuota (to be published in September by Marcos y Marcos), which opens, not by chance, with Ritorno a Dejevo and closes with La città fantasma.
21 August
21.00
Cyril Cyril
Concert
Ex Cima Norma – Torre/Blenio
Composed of guitarist and singer Cyril Yeterian and drummer and percussionist Cyril Bondi, the Geneva-based duo released their first album entitled Certaine ruines in 2017. An album that immediately brought them to the attention of the public and critics for their singularity in the Swiss music scene. Their music seems to be born on the ruins of a soundscape where ethnic and oriental influences are mixed. A music of hypnotic power that seems to emerge from the vestiges of a future apocalypse. It is a music in which the remixed fragments of ancient melodies blend together, interwoven with pressing rhythms and enthralling riffs, and where the lyrics stand out obsessively like relentless litanies describing the failures of our world.
2 October
19.00
SPO2
Performance by Anne and Jean Rochat
Music by Laurent Bruttin
Pozzone
la Réssiga 9
6703 Osogna/Riviera
To save one’s breath, to become aware of the strain on one’s lungs, to rebuild the link with the other through shared breathing. Anne and Jean Rochat dive into the Pozzone di Osogna with a tube that they have to share and which is fed by volunteers who pump air from the shore. The two performers find themselves both in the belly of the planet, the water from which life originates, and in a hostile environment in which they have to organise themselves in order to survive. The images of this performance, projected live on a screen placed on the shore and accompanied by the music of Laurent Bruttin, project us into a world marked by the ruins produced by climate change and become a symbol of the need to redefine our relationship with the world, starting with an understanding of the profound relationship of interdependence that links all the beings and organisms that populate this planet.
9 August– 23 August
Gian Paolo Minelli. Ruins of our time
Photographs in public advertising spaces
Different places in Ticino
Since 1998, when he produced the work series Landfills, Ticino photographer Gian Paolo Minelli has often focused on the rubble and ruins that populate the peripheral places of our society. Semi-abandoned places, where, amid disorderly piles of broken bricks, fragments of peeling plaster and rusty metal sheets, rise shaky buildings on which are engraved the desperate traces of those who are forced to live in these places. Whether it is the suburbs of Chiasso, the Parisian suburbs or the villas miserias in Argentina, what we see are nothing more than the ruins of that carefree and happy world that dominates the advertisements.
To view the posters and some images of the poster campaign please click here.
