All posts by wp@ghilardi

VIA STUDIOS

Art Curator: Mila Ghilardi

VIA STUDIOS is a travelling art platform.

VIA STUDIOS is a mobile art communication tool.

VIA STUDIOS is a temporary art space for innovative creators.

VIA STUDIOS consists of three main modules:

The Visual Studio is an exhibition space for visual art, multimedia, light and sound art projects, design and new technology, video projections.

The Action Studio is a performing space for contemporary theatre, dance performances, live concerts and interactive installations.

The Ideal Studio is a workshop space, art kitchen, on-line studio and temporal archive.

KEYWORDS:

Dislocation, mobility, networks, fine arts, visual arts, media arts, performances, urban interventions, cooperation, discussion.

Curatorial statement:

The choice of the suggested program for VIA Studios is based on the intention to present projects in which the artists contextualize the theme of diverse identity constantly relocating and re-defining it. Considering the specific nature of VIA Studios, the accents in the selected projects are put on themes treating the relations of the artists with the urban environment. The temporal art studios are a tool for artistic research and new audience. Challenging the interdisciplinary of the different artistic practices as media/art, net-art, performances, installations, interventions, we are aiming to create a unique expression. The interaction of the visitors is an important issue for the artistic approach.

Ihtiman, Radomir and Samokov are turned into a point of attraction for local and guest artists with nomadic life and art style who dare to go beyond the stereotypes and have the will to create a new artistic and cultural framework.

We believe that VIA Studios is a meeting point of new artistic positions, encouraging the reflexion and debating on our own relation to culture.

VIA Studios

A Sleeping Dog

Dance Performance

Director: Masaki Iwana
Concept and Choreography: Ivo Dimchev
Performers: Mila Ghilardi; Juliana Saiska; Ivo Dimchev
Concept and Choreography: Ivo Dimchev
Production: Odavision; National Theatre-Sofia
Support: Soros Foundation; The Japan Foundation

Butoh’s largest characteristics is to ‘give birth to’ dances by drawing out the ‘dance’ already, immanent in the dancer’s body ( this dance maybe refer to as original experience’; the word of inner landscape’ is often used in the butoh world).

We have recognized and amassed personal experiences, memories and bodily habits; and since butoh is an art of expression, we have montage those personal elements.

Masaki Iwana

The Garden of the Singing Ficuses

Dance Performance

Director: Ivo Dimchev
Horeography and Music: Ivo Dimchev
Performers: Mila Ghilardi; Juliana Saiska; Ivo Dimchev

There is a totally isolated special zone into the periphery or even in the center of the common conscious space where the deepest unforeseeable movements of my spirit trace out a picture of grotesque, dead beauty.

I call this place “The Garden of the Singing Ficuses”- a parallel reality of these particular states of the human body and spirit.

Watch Your Back

Dance Performance

Idea: Neli Mitewa
Concept: Brain Store Project
Fashion Design: Neli Mitewa in collaboration with the performers
Performers: Iva Sveshtarova; Mila Ghilardi; Neli Mitewa; Willy Prager; Stefan A. Shtereff
Support: Goethe Institut-Sofia; Swiss Cultural Program
Production: Brain Store Project

It is a performance of fashion, movement and text design. The theme embedded in the art work where the personal stories of the participants together with the peculiar study on the identity, attributed simplicity and uniformity to the front of their fashion creations, while they elaborated on the back.

Stitch

Concept: Brain Store Project
Choreography: Alan Good
Performers: Alan Good; Willy Prager; Mila Ghilardi; Stefan A. Shtereff; Dragana Alfirević
Costume Design: Neli Mitewa
Production: Odavision
Support: The American Foundation; Soros Foundation

Stitch is a stage performance, both a physical examination and a journey in the inner world of five wanderer walking along the edge . The author is the American choreographer Alan Goode who worked for fifteen years with Merce Cunningham and John Cage and later as a free artist with contemporary European choreographers. Critics compare his performances in the company of Merce Cunningham with an “unstoppable force of nature” and “scenes from the martial arts movie.”

Stitch is a research of Alan Good, which he defines as an “anthropology of sarcasm.” The choreographer enriches the movements by studying their origins in everyday events and images. Starting from the techniques of Cage/Cunningham , Duchamp/Rauschenberg and the Judson School, he prepares the contractors for unknown and unexpected perceptions, challenges them to repeat movements and divide them into smaller fragments, encourages them to oppose their own doubts.

Sofia SP/Science is Fiction

Concept: Kattrin Deufert; Thomas Plischke
Performers: Mila Ghilardi; Willy Prager; Greta Gancheva; Maya Stefanova
Production: Goethe Institut-Sofia; Odavision

Theater is Fiction

On the stage of Theatre Lab “SFUMATO” there are some cardboard boxes. Greta Gancheva, Mila Ghilardi and Willy Prager are presented to viewers as A, B, C and tell them that they are on the Sofia / SP station. Passengers have to remain calm. This is a scientific and cultural experiment. Just a Science-Fiction performance.

Maya Stefanova shows on a video wall the translation of their words in English, after asking the viewers to set their watches right with her own. The next performance is scheduled for Belgrade.

The action is set in 2468; the Earth has suffered a major cataclysm in 2007, so A, B, C have to excavate the remnant memories of human life of people on various places such as Station Sofia / SP. The survey is conducted in cooperation with the Swiss Air Steel Knives without Borders or something alike and, loyal to their “sponsor”, A, B, C constantly remind that, while “unfreezing” fragments of individual statements of different people from the past.
Individual phrases and lines are quoted out of context and form a palimpsest accumulation of statements, which rarely attract our attention in everyday conversation. The result is that now we hear them and pay attention to them. For example, „That who cannot make normal art makes conceptual art ” or “See you. Know where. / What?/ Know what .” and the like.

This is an action both funny and ironically dismantling our experience. It turns upside down and alienates by the theatrical presentation fragments of behavior patterns, reflections on the nature art, ways of communication, media, work, politics, etc.
Such laboratories create much more serious prospects in the meaningfulness of the theatre than those staging „serious art”…

Violeta Decheva (Kultura, newspaper)

The House of Bernarda Alba

After Federico Garcia Lorca

Director: Elena Panayotova
Performers: Veronika Petrova; Mila Ghilardi; Asia Ivanova; Rositza Gevrenova; Tzvetelina Gospodinova; Stela Krustev; Milena Stanoevich
Flamenco Trainer: Louise Catan
Set and Costume Design: Anna Kirilova
Production: Den Gri Foundation; Sfumato Theatre

Designed as a research drama constructed in a dance language mosaic – Spanish flamenco, takoneo, clapping and a bold transposition of Lorka’s text into a music of silence, psychologically emphasized, the performance The House of Bernarda Alba steps into the moody currents of the theatre of ’the new Romanticism’, of a personal inner flicker of emotion. Elena Panayotova by her creative energy and well-thought over gesture of dramatist-director, proves that the heroine of her play is a possible-realistic archetypal Alba.

The performance “The House of Bernarda Alba” is a distinct esthetic artefact and a significant socio-cultural gesture… in the theatre situation of today in Bulgaria.

Kamelia Nikolova, “Literaturen vestnik” Newspaper

Prager Strasse

Manipulative Performance

Director: Willy Prager
Dramaturgy and Visual Surrounding: Brain Store Project
Costume Adviser: Neli Mitewa
Performers: Mila Ghilardi; Stephan A. Shtereff; Neli Mitewa; Stoyan Nikolov
Support: Goethe Institut-Sofia; Swiss Cultural Programe in Bulgaria; Dance WEB; National Cultural Fund of the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture

“Everyone has its own place, own house, own town. I have my street – Prager Strasse.”

Prager Strasse is a manipulative performance. Through the game between the multimedia and everyday realities a new fiction world is achieved, with new own borders and rules.

Irresistible/Reconstruction

Visual Interactive Installation

Idea and Concept: Mila Ghilardi

The Project

It is basic for the project to establish reciprocal artistic relations. The research phase will be the first step towards the creation. I will work with the other artists on a conceptualized structure, where a short story about a woman and her mysterious encounter will be the ground floor to create a physical and visual material.

Irresistible/Reconstruction will be composed in three content parts:

BODY
CITY
LOVE

The Story

One late evening Ada will meet Him. In this encounter, time and places dissolve for her. Ada’s future is His love. But will she has the strength to embrace it. A psychological story about Ada, who forgets her past and must believe strongly in the present, in order to gain the future.

First Phase

In this research work we will structure all dramaturgically active pieces that will be connecting tool and important means of expression for the whole installation. In their special structure and execution, the resulting pieces process recognizably the elements, which will be found in collaborative artistic research. Each visual piece consists entity of idea, content and form.

Within the development of the structure of Irresistible/Reconstruction, the materials will be collected, synchronized and structured as choreographic systems in a sense of communicative, auto poetic tools, as well as visual and sound material, explored by the artists. The material will be the reflective, communicative means of expression. In the laboratory way of research, the artistic structure will be influenced by the idea itself. It will be transposed into different cultural contexts and vice versa how the context applying itself to the idea.

In Irresistible/Reconstruction all aspects are combined: reciprocity, encounter with the potential of the unknown, diversity generating serial structure, application and variation of one idea in different contexts. In this First Phase the structure will be in an open process, where the actual potential of a joint creation will be worth.

Second Phase

The visual material will be done and ready to be explored and after exhibit in the proper format for the exhibition space.

In part BODY, the process will follow the development of the story from very intimate and personal body approach. It will be the dance of the total physical experience, where the audience will be challenged by images, that will be transformable, unfinished, interactively asking for their input.

In part CITY, the visual story will continue with interactions with the real city environment/ street, bar, house where the figure of the main character will be architecturally and thematically changing these places for a while, with its own presence there. Here the material will have the touch of the reality and will challenge the spectators with familiar places, but differently reflected on our imaginary CITY MAP.

In part LOVE the audience will experience the short encounter of the main character with one that will change her, challenge her, and make her dreams real for a while. We will try to get the very fragile and almost untouchable moment that can be lost very easy, because of fear to change and to follow ourselves.

Irresistible/Reconstruction will be unique visual creation, dealing with one of the most fundamental questions about the Love, the Loneliness, the power of the will to Dream and Change our World.

The Last Room

Digital Photography Installation - 2004

Author: Ivo Dimchev
Director of Photography: Ivo Dimchev
Performers: Juliana Saiska; Mila Ghilardi; Stefan Shterev; Ivo Dimchev

(photos on dry corns in a box)