Housewarming: Monowe by Ludovica Carbotta

Born in Turin in 1982, Ludovica Carbotta lives and works in Barcelona. After graduating in painting from the Accademia Albertina di Belle Art in Turin in 2005, she obtained her MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths in London in 2015, having studied at Central Saint Martins London between 2011 and 2012 thanks to a scholarship from the Ariane de Rothschild Prize. In 2008 she was one of the participants of the Advanced Course in Visual Arts by Yona Friedman at Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como. In her early years of research, Carbotta explored the ways that individuals make connections with the environment in which they live, through the physical exploration of urban space. In 2011 she had her first solo exhibition in an institutional space as part of the Greater Torino programme, sponsored by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin. The use of translation and, in particular, of ekphrasis, the art of evoking an absent artwork with words, has led the artist to explore the role of imagination and narration. Since 2014, her work has evolved in a delicate balance between reality and fiction, combining installations, texts and performances that address notions of place, identity and participation. In the same years, she first experimented with what she calls fictional site-specificity, a form of site-specific practice that generates imaginary territories or materializes real places through fictional scenarios, as exemplified by The Original Is Unfaithful to the Translation, 2015, and subsequent works.

Involved since the beginning of her career in the exploration of Italian art and in international group exhibitions, in 2019 she participated in 58. Esposizione Inter-nazionale d'Arte - La Biennale di Venezia. May You Live In Interesting Times, with Monowe (The Powder Room), Forte Marghera Special Project, and Monowe (The Terminal Outpost) in the outdoor spaces of the Arsenale. In the same year, at Fondazione Sandretto Re Re-baudengo, she held her solo exhibition Monowe, curated by Irene Calderoni, which brought together for the first time the various chapters of the project of the same name. Since 2020 she has been developing Die Telamonen, a group of sculptures depicting the members of an imaginary family whose history, marked by deep wounds from the past, is reflected in their formal features. Carbotta has co-founded several collective projects: Progetto Diogene, an international residency programme in Turin's public space; The Institute of Things to Come, a research centre on the future that proposes artistic projects linked to a training programme; and Pipistrello, a collective that organises solo exhibitions without a fixed space or time. She teaches sculpture at BAU, University Centre of Art and Design, Barcelona

Huib Haye van der Werf was interim-director at de Appel arts center in Amsterdam in 2022. Before that he initiated/led together with Radna Rumping mistral in Amsterdam, an organization dedicated to archives and abundance. In 2019, he was appointed curator of the 2020 Yinchuan Biennale in China (cancelled due to Covid-19). From 2013 to 2020 he was head of the artistic program at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht. Furthermore, from 2012 to 2014 he worked as founder/curator for TAAK, an international organization for social-artistic commissioning; from 2011 to 2012 curator for the Art in Public Space Foundation (SKOR); and from 2008 to 2011 curator for the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi) in Rotterdam (now Nieuwe Instituut). He also writes fiction, children’s stories, contributes to periodicals such as Artforum, Metropolis M, Mousse Magazine, Manifesta Journal and Open, and has written for various artist-publications and film/performance productions. He has a podcast series called The Listening Tide that he hosts in his living room in Amsterdam, where he is also the part-time father of a ten-year-old.