Ittiodromo and Senza Ideologia

Despite the seven-year gap between Aldo Mondino's Ittiodromo (1968) and Fabio Mauri's Senza ideologia (1975), the two exhibitions best outline the heterogeneity of the exhibition choices of Mara Coccia and Daniela Ferraria in their activity at the Arco d’Alibert.

The two exhibitions, among other things, take place in decidedly different periods: in 1968 Daniela Ferraria is a newly arrived assistant who begins to show her organisational and curatorial skills, while in 1975 she becomes the actual owner of the space, placing Mara Coccia more on the sidelines.

On 13 December 1968 the two gallery owners presented at the Arco d’Alibert Ittiodromo by Aldo Mondino, who in the same year had already worked with Coccia as part of a collective dedicated to the Turin artists of Arte Povera.

The scenario that emerges in the exhibition astonishes the eyes of the public: Mondino exhibits actual bleeding fish arranged in various positions in the room. Some of these stretch out on a slide, others are placed parallel on a scenography paper followed by the trails of their blood. In the rest of the room, other fish are arranged circularly on a table or trapped in a basketball net.

To conclude the exhibition, the artist organises the performance Disegni e caramelle (Drawings and candies) on the same evening, where he exhibits mint sculptures and drawings with sugar and glitter aboard a boat on the Tiber. Crucial to both the documentary and aesthetic value are the photographs by Claudio Abate which show the Ittiodromo in all its cruel realism. Shots that can be found in the exhibition Le opere e gli archivi: Mara Coccia (The works and archives: Mara Coccia).

Mondino's exhibition combines the surreal irony and cruelty to display one of the multiple trends found in the exhibition choices of the two gallery owners, that is the procedural side in which two central themes of the 1960s converge: the mixture of art and life and the escape from the gallery’s boundaries.

The performance Senza Ideologia by Fabio Mauri is entirely different. On 9 December 1975 the Arco d'Alibert collaborated in the production of this event at the Teatro in Trastevere. Senza Ideologia is the extension of Oscuramento (another contemporary action by Mauri) and consists in the projection of films on the body of individuals and on objects.

The various film sequences include Victor Fleming's Giovanna d’Arco projected on the chest of a naked black woman, Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata on the chest of a hooded man, Alexander Nevskij by Sergej Ejzenstejn on a metal basin full of milk, Il Vangelo secondo Matteo by Pier Paolo Pasolini on a shirt leaning against an empty chair.

Mauri's performance combines iconic fragments of auteur cinematography with elements alluding to a more broad modern culture. In some cases, this resulted in a short-circuit between the film and its projection support, while in others a slight and symbolic similarity between the two could be discerned.

It is clear that an event of this kind is part of the choices made by Mara Coccia and Daniela Ferraria on a very different side from that of the Ittiodromo: not the direct and audacious exhibition in the gallery of the real world, but a much more reasoned and subtle abstract operation in which we are repeatedly induced to shift our thoughts between quotations, allusions and disturbances.