Seminerò perle di principessa in una caverna (I will sow princess pearls in a cave), exhibition based on the Guha project by Francesco Bertelé and Sagas video-performance live, with music performer Nick McMullan

In the context of nctm e l’arte, Nctm Studio Legale hosts the exhibition Seminerò perle di principessa in una caverna by Francesco Bertelé based on the Guha project, and the Sagas video-performance with music performer Nick McMullan.

The work of Francesco Bertelé develops from the search for an individual relationship with the places in which the artist has lived; places in which the natural dimension has a strong presence and in which he can project his desire for a profound, primary, organic harmony. In an attempt to create this relationship, Bertelé activates connections in time and space, retrieving local tales and myths, unearthing objects and giving rise to different forms of sharing with local figures.

Seminerò perle di principessa in una caverna and Sagas, both based on the Guha project and realized during the period which the artist spent in Iceland, derive from a reflection in which different themes intersect. One of these themes is that of the artist’s studio, intended not only as a material place of production but as a condition for an internal voyage which includes meditation, in-depth study and the re-discovery of both individual and collective memory which, in solitude, emerges more easily from the past. It is a favourable condition for the coming together with the new and with the “other”.
The exhibition includes a series of drawings, photographs and artefacts; some are objects which have been found; a video; an optical device which, like the drawings, take us back through the history of vision to a kind of antique technology. The whole is realised in a sort of diary.

The exhibition path will conclude in the ecstatic moment of the projection of the video Sagas, a commentary on the seductive and dramatic aspect of the harsh, raw forces of nature, both in Icelandic everyday life and in Icelandic imagination.
The music performer Nick McMullan will follow the soundtrack of the video live.

The project and the performance were developed by Francesco Bertelé during his sojourn in Iceland in 2015 in the Skaftfell – Centre for visual Art in Seyðisfjörður, East Iceland, made possible thanks to the nctm e l’arte: Artists-in-Residence scholarship.