secondo gusto
strawberry and basil
Opening, 26.05.2025, 6pm
26.05. – 29.06.2025
A walk 2/7
by Salvatore Lacagnina
The history of art and literature is filled with wanderers, flâneurs, and travelers. There is Courbet’s wanderer (the painter himself), who meets his friend and collector, Alfred Bruyas, accompanied by his servant and a dog. The shadow of a large tree, just outside the frame, stretches across the path. The painter of the Pavilion of Realism declared the death of traditional painting: everyday life was to become the new subject of modern art. It would be Baudelaire, portrayed by Courbet in The Painter’s Studio, who would define the figure of the metropolitan flâneur, strolling slowly, wandering without direction, without task or goal. A “sidewalk botanist,” he observes the hurried, indistinct crowd, a crowd so vividly captured by Pissarro or Tasche and prefigured in Edgar Allan Poe’s masterful tale The Man of the Crowd.
“LAVINIA,” reads the yellow sign of a new Atac stop, the company that manages public transport in Rome. But LAVINIA is not the stop that takes us to work, to shop, to the cinema, or to visit an exhibition. LAVINIA is the stop for daydreaming, for reverie; it invites us to look, not to be looked at. What happens in our minds when we are doing nothing? Is it possible to have an aesthetic experience outside the rhythms of routine?
LAVINIA is built as a narrative machine moving through chronological, linear, and psychological time, and through the cyclical time of the seasons. It repeats itself, seemingly the same, yet it changes: orange and lemon verbena in autumn; strawberry and basil in spring. Some works remain, others leave, new ones are added.
Johanna Grawunder
Tunnel of Imagination
The Loggia dei Vini is enclosed by high retaining walls. Walls, as we know, have an ambiguous status: they protect and they seclude.
The skin of the walls tells stories, creates space for forms of life, signals the passage of the seasons. The movement of the sun casts ever-changing patterns across their surface. Architects, engineers, and archaeologists can trace their history by analyzing construction techniques and materials. Botanists and entomologists can study the life forms they host and marvel at the movements of mosses, organisms that have existed for hundreds of millions of years, surely for a reason.
Johanna Grawunder’s wall lamps are fields of fluorescent color that draw geometric shapes, marking cardinal directions and highlighting the surface of the wall: plaster, bricks, porosity, thickness, edges, softness. At the same time, as the title suggests, they
are abstract renderings of possible openings, of passageways, of tunnels of the imagination. Like in the famous Wile E. Coyote cartoon, endlessly chasing the speedy Beep Beep—the roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus)—is it possible to break through from a closed space? Is it still possible to imagine the infinite?
Designer/artist Johanna Grawunder works on a broad range of projects including large-scale public lighting and color installations, architectural interventions, exhibition design, and private bespoke commissions. Trained as an architect, her work incorporates architectural principles with high technology light research. As a partner at Sottsass Associati Milan (1985-2001), she co-designed with Ettore Sottsass, many of the firm’s architecture projects. In 2001 she opened her own design studio in San Francisco and Milan. Her work is included in the permanent collections of LACMA, SFMOMA, Fine Arts Museum Houston, the Art Institute of Chicago, High Museum Atlanta, and MAD in Paris.
Daniel Knorr
Liber Artificis
We imagined the oval architecture of the Loggia as a theatrical stage, where art weaves its web—the center of the narrative device. A strong sense of theatricality, after all, defines the celebration held in honor of the Princess of Saxony—depicted by Ignaz Unterberger in 1772–1773—in one of the rare visual records of the Loggia’s historical use. Daniel Knorr has transformed it into an editorial laboratory for the production of an “Artist’s Book.” Now in its thirteenth edition, this publication presents worthless objects collected from public spaces, embedded and impressed between blank pages using a 50-ton press. Each edition includes an introductory text in a minority language of the host country. In Rome, for this form of contemporary archaeology, the chosen language is Latin. How many stories do the discarded remnants of contemporary consumption tell?
His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at international institutions, including: Documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel; Pingshan Art Museum, China; Burda Museum, Baden-Baden; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Arter Museum, Istanbul; OMM Museum, Eskişehir; Oi Space, Hong Kong; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Kunsthalle Basel; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Kunstmuseum Bonn; 5th Berlin Biennale; 51st Venice Biennale, Romanian Pavilion; Manifesta 7, Rovereto; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Kunsthalle Zürich.
Ross Birrell/Wissam Boustany
Ross Birrell, Wissam Boustany, Mural, concerto per flauto solo, H. 20.00
Mural is a collaboration between the artist Ross Birrell and Lebanese flautist and composer, Wissam Boustany, based upon the transposition of lines by Mahmoud Darwish into musical notation. Boustany is an established musician and teacher who teaches according to “A Method Called Love”, and the collaboration responds to the context of Birrell and Harding’s Love (Dante Desire Line Path) in which Dante expresses “love” as the ultimate ground for forgiveness of injury. The recital will take place at the point in the path where the words “Love” and “Amore” meet.
Wissam Boustany’s passionate musicality has helped him forge a distinctive reputation as an international flute soloist. His charismatic stage presence brings tremendous power and nuance to a diverse range of musical genres ranging from baroque, classical, romantic, contemporary and cultural settings. Imaginative programming often mixes the innovative with the traditional, combining an improvisatory flair with a wide emotional and expressive range, as well as an acute sense of tone colour and nuance. Wissam’s approach to teaching has become known as his ‘Method Called Love’, inspiring many students and audiences. In recent years, Wissam has developed a keen interest in conducting, which led to the launch of his own orchestra, the Pro Youth Philharmonia, in 2018. The orchestra’s ethos, based on Wissam’s ‘Method Called Love’, embarked on two glorious tours before having to wind down during the pandemic. Recently, Wissam has reinvented his recital and orchestral presentations under the title Inner Journeys, transforming them into an arena for shared inspiration, debate and audience engagement. He is currently President of the British Flute Society, chairman of PalMusic UK, Patron of Musicians for Peace and Disarmament and Patron of the British Susuki Music Association.
For LAVINIA, Ross Birrell realized Dante Desire Line Poetry Path in collaboration with David Harding.
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding, Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding, Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Johanna Grawunder, Gianni Politi