When: February 5th, 2016
Where: Casa Bertoli – Borsani, via Orti 19, Milan

Artists: Sophie Ko & Alessandro Roma
Curators: Alberta Romano

Website: www.catapultartplatform.org

Opening the doors to his home is Ambrogio Borsani, Italian writer and advertiser, that with pleasure and a special sensibility is hosting Sophie Ko and Alessandro Roma. Xenia Project rises from the will of experimenting and deepening the experience of contemporary art in a more intimate and less formal domestic environment. The objective is also giving life to a stimulating dialogue between the artworks and the context in which they are placed, between the host and the artists and, last but not least, between the public and the exhibition itself. Art, declined within domestic walls, crawls inside the pattern of daily life starting a conversation with a diverse and naturally multidisciplinary context, that constantly stimulates creativity of whomever takes part in the exhibition, or simply walks in to visit it.

Artists, curator and host are the first ones to be brought into the conversation, sharing their research, passions and backgrounds, through a series of gatherings that give life to an exhibition that doesn’t want to be a simple exposition, but the actual narration of a shared experience.

Sophie Ko (Tbilisi, 1981) made, for Xenia Volume II, Insondabili. Created through the stratification of glass plates, the piece keeps within itself fixed and sometimes faint traces, that despite their appearance of abandonment are still bearers of new hypotheses and new possible worlds. As a forgotten flower, left to dry within the pages of a book of an unfinished landscape, the newly found fragments become carriers of memories and new meanings. A simple variation in light or prospective is enough to perceive its infinite number of possibilities.

Alessandro Roma (Milano, 1977) presents for the first time his Suspending your judgement. A journal of drawings and collages that holds within its pages sketches, projects and memories collected while studying and researching. Alessandro Roma exhibits his research, spontaneously dressing it for the occasion with its formal, conceptual and stylistic evolution. Other fundamental character is memory, together with regrets and expectations, held in a miniaturized photocopy or in the spine of a small journal, kept between its successor’s pages.

Two works that, having to face the huge amount of pages and stories kept in Borsani’s home, couldn’t do anything but become the bearers of the stories of their makers. It is those stories that are now confronted with a multifaced and stratified reality of this ever-growing environment.

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For the occasion of Xenia Volume II was produced a catalogue/artist’s book born from the cooperation of all of those who took part in the second edition of Xenia Project, under the graphic direction of Silvia Monticelli with the collaboration of Yanal Wattar.

Xenia Project is a series of home exhibition curated by Alberta Romano in collaboration with Catapult Art Platform.
Born on June 19th 2015 thanks to the contribution of the artists Giuseppe De Siati and Nicole Bacchiega in Giovanni Cassuti’s home, it has gotten, today, to its second appointment: Xenia Volume II.

Alessandro Roma, Suspending your judgement (detail), 2015