September 2023

Camilla Boemio

Portrait of Camilla Boemio by Fabrizio Orsini

Rome-based curator Camilla Boemio discusses her background, curatorial focus, and recent projects with artists Zoè Gruni and Ron Laboray.

Camilla Boemio is an internationally published author, curator, and member of the AICA (International Arts Critics) based in Rome. In 2013, Boemio was the co-associate curator of PORTABLE NATION: Disappearance as Work in Progress – Approaches to Ecological Romanticism, the Maldives Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. In 2016, Boemio curated Diminished Capacity, the First Nigerian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Boemio’s recent curatorial projects include her role as co-associate curator at Pera + Flora + Fauna. The Story of Indigenousness and The Ownership of History, an official collateral event at the 59th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia, 2022. Invitations to speak include the Tate Liverpool, MUSE Science Museum, and the Cambridge Festival 2021 at Crassh, in the UK.

Interview by Natalie Varbedian

Please tell us about your background as a curator. What were your initial interests when entering this profession?

I understood that contemporary and modern art was becoming very important in my life when I was a teenager. My best afternoon of the week was dedicated to making drawings and taking photos in the museums of Rome and Venice, thus becoming familiar with the permanent collections. When I discovered Land Art, I was completely absorbed by artists creating artworks in and with the landscape made with natural materials, including soil, rock, boulders, and trees, sometimes along with manufactured materials such as concrete, metal, and asphalt. The Pilgrims Way 1971 by Hamish Fulton and The Lightning Field by Walter De Maria were fundamental for my imagination.

What I found inspiring for me and for my research focusing on the body was how, more than forty years ago, Cindy Sherman debuted “Cindy Sherman,” the polymorphous persona who has been the artist’s primary subject since then: not only a reflection of herself but also of mass culture’s often strange and troubling depictions of women as a whole.

My work (as well as my Ph.D. thesis) focuses on interdisciplinary systems from an intersectional feminist perspective, highlighting gender and the body, with special attention devoted to social systems and other ecologies.

I started writing about contemporary art twenty years ago and curated my first exhibitions. Art is dynamic and regenerates itself. Power, belief, and the perception of reality are being shaped and shared in society at large, and for me, this is such a key aspect of understanding how society and art are evolving.

Zoè Gruni, Fromoso#4, 2019/2020, video still, lambda print on aluminum, 6 3/4 x 11 3/4 inches

The artist Zoè Gruni touches on different social issues. What drew you to her work?

Gruni is one of her generation’s most representative Italian-Brazilian artists; her work is coherent, principled, and consistent to the point of being radical. She has no filters in her exploration and embrace of gender issues, identity, diaspora, forced colonization in Brazil, and indigenous history. Gruni’s works also address the tension and conflicts in valorizing women’s role in Italy. She uses her body to promote the feminist cause and engage in a choral dialogue with other performers, writers, and directors, creating collective works that touch raw nerves. This approach has enabled her to attain great heights in her production as an artist creating ‘total works’ of contemporary art.

I’m interested in practices that develop discourses around gender, body, the body politics resulting in a new vision of society, “identity bending,” a key Modernist trope spanning at least from Marcel Duchamp to Matthew Barney. If, at the beginning of my career, I only wrote about it, now I engage in curatorial activities and would like to continue curating even more art projects.

My initiation was the solo show Jérôme Chazeix: The coat of hipness (materiali velati) curated for AltaRoma2020 agenda at Label201, in Rome and Marina Moreno: Dance as sculpture in space research project expanded in Brazil supported by Arts Council England (2019-2020). It’s one of the hottest and most relevant topics in the current proliferation of gender fluid, transvestism, and cross-gender identifications. Informed by diverse strands of critical theory, political militancy, and pop-cultural investigations, these playful explorations of identity and desire reflect the widespread reinterpretation of the relations between sexuality, power, and identity that have occurred over the last years.

Installation view, Zoè Gruni, Fromoso, AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi, Rome, May 13—May 25, 2023, photo by Elisabetta A. Villa

Please tell me about Fromoso, the exhibition you recently curated of Gruni’s work at AOC F58-Galleria Bruno Lisi.

The exhibition was organized and took shape around the video installation Fromoso (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2019-2020), which was inspired by the concept of anthropophagy. The action was carried out inside the dump where floats used in the Carnival celebration are discarded in the harbor area of Rio de Janeiro. The dancer Ana Kavalis lends her body to an esoteric ritual that absorbs it until it disappears. The soundtrack, created specifically for the project, is by Polish musician Jeff Gburek.

The works on display incorporated and started from the site-specific installation composed of fabrics that surround the video installation. It consists of six elements made from photographic print on forex, and Fromoso I, Fromoso II, Fromoso III, and Fromoso IV (2020), a series of two linocuts on paper.

In this catharsis, symbols branch out and take shape. Identity becomes investigation, a politico-aesthetic bulwark echoing from Peter Gorsen’s Obscene Dimension. The ideological content of moral rebellion becomes an anti-capitalist vision, a return to Rousseau’s ‘noble savage,’ applying the revolutionary sense of ‘obscene’ aggressions to established morality.

Installation view, Zoè Gruni, Fromoso, AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi, Rome, May 13—May 25, 2023, photo by Elisabetta A. Villa

“My work focuses on interdisciplinary systems from an intersectional feminist perspective, highlighting gender and the body, with special attention devoted to social systems and other ecologies.”

How did you decide on the placement of her work in the exhibition space?

The visual references throughout the exhibition hone a mnemonic and seductive approach to the subject. The strong energy released catalyzes the spectator to absorb the colors, assimilating the dancer’s gestures and the liveliness of the materials that compose it. The relationship between perception and form emerges in the repetitions of the images and the accompaniment of the sound of the video installation in relation to the prints on the walls.

Gruni identifies this moment of crossing when the physical state of the artwork passes between flow and finality. Recalling the dump of the Carnival floats, the gaudy fabrics of the installation split up the space and open a secret passage (between the spectators and the narration, reality and fiction, the spirit and the body, everyday life and the esoteric ritual) articulating an area of physical and psychological intensity, one in which a paradoxical strength born of fragility becomes literal.

To understand what inspires the artist and what is involved in the concept of anthropophagy, we need to go back to her experience in Brazil, her exposure to the contaminations and experiences that have shaped and inspired her artistic practice. In those long years in which she tirelessly forged relationships with the creative and intellectual scene of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, she also got to know the connective tissue that moves the culture of this unique country in South America.

Installation view, Zoè Gruni, Fromoso, AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi, Rome, May 13—May 25, 2023, photo by Elisabetta A. Villa

What overall message or goal did you have in mind when developing this exhibition?

Expanding a seductive solo show. The body is the last frontier, the uncomfortable subject where transformations occur. The concept of the body as a frontier is treated from a wide variety of different angles. A range of formal, aesthetic, existential, and political approaches are used to exorcise, revere, and mystify the body while it retains its status of the absolute protagonist.

How has Fromoso impacted the way you go about curating?

This solo show expanded a part of my curatorial studies. Gruni also draws on the visual tradition of the Later Renaissance evoked by Eugenio Battisti in his “L’Antirinascimento,” as well as on kaleidoscopic anthropological modalities of art in which the archaic power of the historical legacy is in conversation with the more rigorous language of contemporary art. The human body is described as a porous instrument of pleasure, a fiery maze of transformation, fluid, independent, irreverent, ancestral terror hovering over it with different degrees of asceticism. The artist’s skillful dexterity and her masterful use of materials forge a sculpture that becomes an armor (a second skin) to be worn, which can be connected to San Francisco Bay Area movements, a place where she lived for a long time, and from which expands the pagan, mestizo and indigenous heritage present in the fabric of carioca culture.

Zoè Gruni and Camilla Boemio, photo by Elisabetta A. Villa

Can you share another recent project?

I recently worked on a new site-specific solo exhibition of drawings by the American-based artist Ron Laboray at Colla Super, which was on view from June 23 —July 7, 2023, in Milan. Laboray is a multimedia conceptual artist known for his paintings, drawings, videos, and sculpture about time and popular culture. His work is scientific and digitally influenced, using abstraction and realism to discuss topics within mass culture, shared histories, globalization, and time.

The drawings presented at Colla Super represented points along timelines that include common facts and known histories, science, collections of stuff describing our shared world, invented fiction, and cultural myths. Laboray is interested in subject matter that compels hope and demonstrates important values. These timelines operate using appropriated scientific laws such as “The Law of Superposition,” which is a way to tell geological time. The older information, which came first in time, is in the foreground, and the more recent information is in the background. This reading can also be flipped depending on the temporal position of the drawing’s information.

Drawing traditions also lend themselves to deciphering the timelines. Clarity and overlap create a sense of time through distance, detail, and sharpness. In the end, the drawings frame a narrative of humanity and demonstrate the information and ideas that are current and accessible to almost everyone.

Installation view, Ron Laboray, Drawing and Time, Colla Super, Milan, June 23 — July 7, 2023

Zoè Gruni
Fromoso
Curated by Camilla Boemio
AOC F58-Galleria Bruno Lisi
Rome
May 5 — May 26, 2023

Ron Laboray
Drawing and Time
Curated by Camilla Boemio
Colla Super
Milan
June 23 — July 7, 2023

Zoè Gruni
Motherboard
Curated by Camilla Boemio
Galleria Il Ponte
Florence
September 28 — November 17, 2023

Camilla Boemio
@camillaboemio

Zoè Gruni
@zoegruni

Ron Laboray
@ron_laboray_studio

AOC F58-Galleria Bruno Lisi
@aocf58

Colla Super
@colla.super

Galleria Il Ponte
@galleriailponte

Natalie Varbedian
@nataliev1

Natalie Varbedian is dedicated to examining changing conceptions of art and the disciplines of art history. She received her MA in art history from UC Davis while working as a teaching and research assistant. She has collaborated on exhibitions with several institutions, including the Bakersfield Museum of Art and the Fresno Museum. Natalie lives and works in Los Angeles, and her recent exhibition, Discovering Takouhi, is on view at the Armenian Museum of America in Boston.