Italian artist Gianluca Cingolani presents Imago Sum at the Italian Cultural Institute in Beijing

With a site-specific installation, Cingolani comes back to China with a tribute to Matteo Ricci.

Posted on: 23 May 2023

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Three and a half years after his solo exhibition Fragmenta at Beijing’s Today Museum in November 2019, Gianluca Cingolani returns to China from 19 to 25 May  with the site-specific installation Imago sum at the Italian Cultural Institute in Beijing.

It is a tribute to the Art of memory narrated by what is still recognized in China as the cultural ambassador par excellence in relations with the Western world: Matteo Ricci. To this art  Ricci in 1596 dedicates a small treatise written in Chinese and titled 西国记法 (Xiguo jifa).

Created by Collettivo G_B, Imago Sum leads us along the path of memory created from and through images: to osberve, imagine a space (a palace, a theatre, a colonnade), then insert what we whish to remember in that space. When we want to remember we come back with the mind to the palace, the theatre, we make an immaginary walk thorugh the colonnade. In the installation Imago sum, we meet Matteo Ricci, but also Plato, Cicero and Giordano Bruno, crossing the world from East to West.

The exhibition itinerary unfolds through six rolls of artificial silk and two videos, made with the artistic technique of digital compositing. The works talk to each other, in a dialogue held together by the great Masters of the art of memory.

“Imago sum – I am image – is an installation work dedicated to the power of memory, which is also a great creative  power” – the artist says – “in order to remember, one should be able to imagine. The power of imagination: this is what Ricci narrates to the Chinese.”

 

Press Communique (PDF, 147 KB)

Note by the Curator, italian language (PDF, 841 KB)

Artworks in the exhibition, italian language (PDF, 1,47 MB)

 

 

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