What type of printing do you prefer?
High-quality inkjet printing on photographic paper and, especially for this new work which we will talk about later, on plexiglass.
What comes first, the idea or the fascination with the material? In other words, does the artistic/photographic project come first, or is it inspired by particular techniques or processes that strike you?
These two aspects probably develop hand in hand when a new work project takes shape, similarly to what happens when creating sets in the theatre.
Of course, the idea comes first, but for example, in the case of the latest work, “Postcards from the Future,” made with backprinting on plexiglass, the support played a fundamental role in its creation as an integral part of the work itself: in fact, the result is a three-dimensional object where print and material become one, almost as if they were mini-sculptures.
Do you have any Masters you look up to and feel close to?
My favorite reference is definitely Fausto Melotti for his poetics and use of materials, then Meret Oppenheim, Max Ernst, Gehrad Richter.
His recent exhibition “Postcards from the Future,” held at Spazio Milesi in Milan, features a series of futuristic and futuristic imagery presented to the viewer, even in postcard format. This brings to mind Alighiero Boetti’s series “Abstract Postcards” and “Never Sent Postcards.” However, his works do not focus on artistically imagining unrealized actions and abstract scenarios, but rather imagine dystopian worlds of a hypothetical future anterior, where science fiction becomes science and the unreal becomes reality.
His works have an aesthetic shared with great masters of art history such as Hieronymus Bosch, for the meticulousness and complexity of meanings and symbolic content, and with the more recent and rediscovered artist Hilma Af Klint, with whom he shares, in my opinion, the solidity and structure of the images that abound with mysterious, almost Orphic declinations.
I’d like to ask you to delve deeper into your poetics for us, describing your inspirations and perhaps understanding if there is a connection, if any, between the series “Postcards from the Future” and “Urban Warriors,” both works exhibited in your recent solo show in Milan.
I am honored by the association with such artistic personalities that my work has evoked. I think that in the free space of the collective mind, ideas can expand in all possible directions and that we are certainly connected with multiple personalities similar to us (or in any case we can get in touch with them) from which we draw our imagination then visualized in the work of art. My experience is that of being a sort of instrument that mediates or acts as an intermediary from the world of ideas to that of everyday reality: the condition for visualizing it is to have the amazement of the child who is still in natural contact with other dimensions and who reveals his progenitor with a sign.
I share the spiritual thought by H.Af Klint that always has been also at the basis of my artistic research, from when I created mini collages with recycled and natural elements, a strip of aluminium, a decal, a piece of bark assembled in plexiglas cases almost as if they were a “scientific classification” of emotions, to the attempt to translate the videos shot going up the streams of the valleys of the Adamello glacier into color sequences to represent their unique and unrepeatable personality, exclusive bearers of life, generators of territories…
As regards your specific question on my recent work, it is a digital research undertaken in recent years starting from anthropomorphic humanoid representations, “Urban Warriors”, – my work from 2013 -, digital collages of out-of-scale mechanical images to “reconstruct” post-atomic man, an imaginary that refers to symbolisms and myths of the hyper-technological society of our times.
The new series of three-dimensional miniatures designed by a redesign of the traditional postcard format with a technique of superimposing images recovered from the Web, is a sort of pre-adolescent memory prequel, previously thought of to the above compositions even if created ten years later, where the legendary “Urania” series by Mondadori revealed to me fantastic worlds and futuristic visions which today, 50 years later, are incredibly confirmed by our daily experience. I therefore selected a series of science fiction novels that I read as a kid and I rediscovered their surprising relevance which inspired me. both in the imagination, hence the quotes that he rightly read there, and in the play of space and time of the postcards sent from the future (the first novels are from the 1950s).
Postcards sent into the past from a distant future are delivered to us today to tell us about our dystopian, technological and transcendental present, confirming Einstein’s theory of relativity, which tells us that when a body (the postcard) moves at a speed so high as to be comparable to that of light, it reaches its destination point in a shorter time than its recipient who remained immobile, see the “Twin Paradox”.
Future projects?
In addition to my work as a set designer in the theater, I will soon be working again in Italy on a Social Theater project for Idra Teatro in Brescia, and I hope to soon announce new dates for the performance of “Postcards from the Future.”
Biography
Silvio Motta
Artist-Set Designer
Silvio Motta
Silvio Motta, born in Heidelberg, Germany, graduated in 1988 in architectural design from the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic University of Milan under Professor V. Viganò; he earned a master’s degree in bioarchitecture in 2005 from ANAB in Rovereto.
Alongside his architectural studies, from the age of 16 he attended the Teatro dell’Acqua in Gargnano, run by the Lievi brothers, as assistant set designer to Daniele Lievi. This experience culminated in 1984 with the UBU prize for best avant-garde show for “Barbablù” by G. Trackl at the Venice Biennale.
After graduating, he began a collaboration with set designer Tobia Ercolino at the Teatro Rifredi in Florence, which culminated in the 1991 UBU award for best set design for “Improvvisamente l’estate scorso” by T. Williams, directed by Cherif, Teatro Testoni in Bologna.
In 1994 he moved to Germany where he alternated collaborations with architectural firms (Prof. Nestler, BDP in Munich) with work as a set and costume designer for numerous theatrical productions in German-speaking countries.
In 2021 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award for his work as a set designer at the Afragola Film Festival, Naples.
His artistic production continues alongside his other activities, pursuing an intimate inspiration in which reality and fantasy tend to overlap in the search for a survival map, as in his first solo exhibition at the Romana Loda Multimedia Gallery in Brescia in 1991: “Motta narrates through sequences (‘The Secret Life of Plants’, ‘My Little Flying Theatre’, ‘Black Square with Clouds, with Shooting Stars, with Fireflies…’) assembling geometric shapes, fabrics, leaves, twigs, pieces of bark, taut wire, pins, glass, and writing. His works are like display cases, archives of memory that, in place of a systematic and ordering index, feature constellations of fragments, maps of emotional routes.
He is the opposite of the hero artist (think of Beuys’ theorisations) but he pursues in delicate cobwebs the same manifestation of the force inherent in matter, in fragments of that global work that is life. Some sculptures in primary forms present themselves as a harmonious occupation of space and “encumbrance” of dreams or, to quote the title of the exhibition, as “the tree that transformed into a star”. (f.l.)
Starting from the mid-90s the increasingly frequent use of video as a form of “dynamic fifth” inherited from theatrical practice will lead to a series of “site specific” multimedia installations: among others the video installation “29MUC7 – the cross and the square”, psychedelic mandala (Festival Emmas, Olbia 2004) whose individual video frames are as many light boxes; “Adamello the transparent heart” (MUSIL by Cedegolo, 2011), video shot filming the seven streams of the Adamello and its source on the glacier in search of the “spiritual” essence of each valley finally highlighted by a colored bar code obtained from the colors reflected in the different waters; “Chromatic suspensions” (Tagliata del Ponale, 2007) where the projection of images inspired by the poems of H. Michaux contrast with the wrinkled surface of the caves of the Austrian fort dug into the heart of the mountain; “He who seeks man finds homo advertisingus” (Galleria Inga Pin, Milan 2007) in collaboration with Gianfranco Milanesi as the late Maria Grazia Torri wrote “here are the amazing creators of the BIG MOUTH machine, Gianfranco Milanesi and Silvio Motta, who perfectly nail the thorny problem of human relationships between couples.
Here is BIG MOUTH, a white wax box on which the images of the famous lips made known by Man Ray are imprinted, which release a typical announcement. The purpose is declared (relationship or possible marriage) and predetermined clichés such as sentimentality, money, innocence, exclusivity, or lack of vices are followed. These clichés actually imply, between the lines, a desire or impossibility of meeting, even sexual, or an ideal of presupposed unattainable happiness. Inability to communicate, hypocrisy, denial of the relationship, loneliness, finally desperation are the true protagonists of the installation (and of life) which reduces the feeling of a couple to a virtual farce based on ephemeral visions and non-existent and pre-packaged ideals”.
In the 2000s the digital dimension acquires a new narrative dimension with the work presented in the collective “Being Human, Haitsma’s way” (Spazio Contemporanea a Brescia, 2013), partly exhibited today at the Spazio Milesi; Giampietro Guiotto writes about it: “The collective “Being Human, Haitsma’s way” presents itself as a reflection on the uncertain human identity in the contemporary age and on the difficulties of philosophical and aesthetic thought in alleviating the tragedy of living… Motta’s recourse to the world of the web, from which he takes fragments of images to assemble robots with artificial eyes, pieces of engines and architecture, such as the Eiffel Tower, gives rise to hypothetical visions of surrealist and futurist origin, which revisit the superpowers of the machine and the science fiction spirit of the technological superman. The human restlessness, masked by the artist with the creation of powerful monsters, is that relating to the body and its changes in the era of cloning, hybridization and scientific manipulation, which lead the individual to physical metamorphosis and the enhancement of unprecedented sensations and perceptions”.
recent exhibitions:
2022 – Installation at the Villingen-Schwenningen City Museum “Utopie-Heimat”
2017 – Multimedia Installation “Dafne’s room and other metamorphoses” – Casa del Provveditore in Salò.
2013 – Spazio Contemporanea in Brescia “Being Human, Haitsma’s way”
2011 – Video installation “Adamello/ the transparent heart” for LAQUA/Aperto – MUSIL by Cedegolo.
2009 – Video performance “The dream of the Parco del Sogni” for Lorenzago Aperta
2007 – Inga Pin Gallery in Milan: “Big Mouth: those who seek man find homo advertisingus”