ADORATION_Final_h264Full3.mp4

FESCH.TV INFORMIERT:

On 19 April from 5 to 7.30pm, LIAF- Lofoten International Art Festival unveiled a permanent communal installation by artist Pauline Curnier Jardin (Marseille, France 1980) in collaboration with the inmates of the Casa di Reclusione Femminile della Giudecca, an Italian women’s prison located in the former monastery of the Convertite where around 60 inmates now live.

Reversing institutional hierarchies, the inmates have briefed and commissioned Curnier Jardin to reshape the interior of the parlor of the prison, and to create the new film ‚Adoration (censored version)‘. The film developed through collective script writing and the animation of the inmates’ drawings and self-portrait pictures and was premiered on the big screen of the permanent installation in the parlour of the prison.

The redecoration of the parlor has been inspired by Black Narcissus, a 1947 British psychological drama revolving around the growing tensions and desires within a small convent of Anglican nuns who are trying to establish a school in the old palace of an Indian Raja at the top of an isolated mountain in the Himalayas.

The movie will then travel to Centraal Museum Utrecht, which coproduced the piece, and LIAF2022, which will open in Kabelvåg on September 3rd, 2022.

Curnier Jardin’s project thus reveals a hidden history related to the Venetian monastery. Recent research shows that the parlour of the religious institution was used as a theatrical stage by the nuns who occasionally performed in front of their family members and Venetian authorities. Such carnival-like performances allowed the nuns to wear profane clothes and to suspend the social rules that forced them into a monastic life.

By overturning both the spectacular and exclusive logic of large-scale art events, and above all the isolation that has afflicted life in prisons during the pandemic, the work will be intended for the privileged use of the inhabitants of the detention community. The technical equipment, the objects and the signs that constitute it will be donated to the institution, so that the parlour can be used, on a permanent basis, as a hybrid space of reception.

The new film by Pauline Curnier Jardin—developed through the collaboration and collective script writing with inmates—will also be presented in Lofoten, Norway in September on the occasion of LIAF – Lofoten International Art Festival curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi. ‚Adoration‘ has been co-produced by the Centraal Museum Utrecht.

This project is curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi.