valerio rocco orlando

Lik e w alk w ays and not bridges, for the desire to be part of the places betw een w hich the exchange is created.
VALERIO ROCCO ORLANDO
THE REVERSE GRAND TOUR
(2012) In order to analyze how context and relationships influence an artist’ s practice today, Valerio Rocco Orlando films his conversations
w ith a number of artists-in-residence in the foreign academies spread out around Rome, such as the Sw iss Institute, the Real Academia de
España and the Deutsche Ak ademie Villa Massimo. Ideally moving from one country to another, Orlando retraces a Grand Tour in reverse,
collecting a series of portraits of cross-generational artists inside their studios. The alternate editing of all these stories creates a dialogue in
w hich shared perspectives and individual methodologies overlap, exploring a netw ork of relationships betw een artistic communities that
belong to an educational and cultural system w hich is unique in the w orld.
Promenades, 2012. Artist talk , Villa B orghese, Rome.
ENDLESS
(2011-ongoing) “An open book , a shared portrait that w ill be composed over time, recounting stories, relationships and visions through the
different experiences of my life”. B etw een a personal diary and a notebook , ENDLESS is an ongoing series of artist’ s book s, a
collaborative project w ith international artists and w riters such as Gilbert& George, Liam Gillick , Jean-Luc Nancy and Ugo Rondinone.
Endless 02 (Through w hat k ind of relationships can you imagine a better society?), 2011. Work shop, Civitella Ranieri F oundation, Umbertide.
WHAT EDUCATION FOR MARS?
(2011-ongoing) Multi-channel video installation focused on the relationships betw een students and teachers in different educational systems .
Through a series of w ork shops conducted by Orlando in some high schools in Italy in 2011 w ith the support of Nomas F oundation and in
Cuba in 2012 as part of the XI B ienal de la Habana, this community-based project has been experimenting w ith alternative models of
k now ledge's transmission. As the philosopher Bruno Latour, in his book " Laboratory Life" (1979) analyzed scientific discoveries through
the study of the relationships betw een the scientists and their families, in the same w ay this cycle of w ork s has been focused on various
public school-system through interview s betw een students themselves.
Quale Educazione per Marte?, 2011. Installation view , Nomas F oundation, Rome.
Personale è Politico, 2011. Green neon, 20x140cm. Nomas F oundation Collection. Installation view , MACRO, Rome.
What Educ ation for Mar s?
Education entails a burden of discipline and control and, at the same time, the riches of relationship. And the dynamic of the relationship,
the charged and complex core of Valerio Rocco Orlando’ s research, constitutes a resource w hen one think s of a community and the
mechanisms of micro-change that characterise it. Recalling the idea of community elaborated by the anthropologist Anthony Cohen,
Valerio Rocco Orlando intends through his w ork to “explore the sense of identity w hich comes from a symbolic perception of sharing an
experience together” (Valerio Rocco Orlando, 2011). In his new w ork shop project Quale educazione per Marte?, carried out w ith
esterno22, in collaboration w ith Nomas F oundation LAB, and conducted in some public high school classes in the city of Rome, the
theme of relationship develops at various levels: it is a relationship of pow er (among the students themselves and betw een students and
teachers); it is exchange, empathy, dialogue; it is conflictuality; and again a relationship w ith space, that explicit and clearly evident space of
the classroom, but also that aw k w ard and fleeting space of the interstices, the corridors, the bathrooms and the courtyard as places in
w hich the cognitive and emotional process does not stop, on the contrary it becomes stronger and intensifies in non-conventional
dynamics of interaction and learning. And it is precisely on these spaces that the artist focuses his attention; on the basis of dialogue
interview s he creates an emotional diary intended as an enquiry on the quality of the relationship w ith the other, carried out, in a play of
mirror reflections, w ithin the emotionally significant context of the school as an institution. The result is part dialogue betw een a number
of speak ers, a single conversation betw een the students themselves, betw een the artist and the students, betw een the students and the
teachers, w hich translates personal and fragmented stories into universal history. Through modalities of research typical of Valerio
Rocco Orlando’ s w ork - the attentive gathering of materials, the use of intense and clear close-ups, the editing, the documentation of the
process through photos and portraits also made by the students themselves, w ho are directly involved in the various phases of the
production - a reflection is developed on the perception of the relationship and on the possible w ays to change it, to overturn all the
foregone aspects in favour of a new aw areness of the nature of existence and of new educational priorities, w ithin an institution that
today is undergoing a deep crisis and a strong sense of decadence. It is interesting how , after having investigated in his previous w ork ,
Lover’ s Discourse, the couple relationship and the inevitable concept of coexistence typical of every w ay of being (J.L. Nancy, Etre
singulier pluriel, Galilée, Paris 1996), Valerio Rocco Orlando now considers the educational experience as one of the most important
processes in w hich personal research is defined and in w hich the representation of the self that then becomes determinant in each
mechanism of reciprocipity and confrontation tak es shape. On the other hand, his entire research starts precisely from an idea of identity
as incessant metamorphosis, a continuous stratification of memory that tak es place in the sharing of sentiments and relations. Educating
means planning one’ s ow n existence, constructing the self in relationship w ith the other and in the projection of oneself in space and amid
the objects that surround us. In Valerio Rocco Orlando’ s w ork the idea of reciprocity and empathetic sharing is essential and tak es on a
performative and procedural character that, beyond the installation and final result of the w ork , is the real core of his research:
metamorphosis then as method of research and investigation in w hich the role of those under scrutiny alw ays plays an active part, and
the spectators themselves become an active counterpart in turn, w ith their ow n experience, their emotiveness, their ow n w ay of enjoying
and dealing w ith the w ork . The videos and the photographic portraits convey, on one hand, the idea of the procedure and of continuous
becoming and, on the other hand, the idea of a “relationship of perfect correspondence experienced betw een w hat objectively appears
and the subjective gaze, […] betw een vision and sight, and therefore the complete mutuality and interchangeability betw een the observer
and the object being observed” (Valerio Rocco Orlando, 2009). Hence the centrality of the gaze, of the faces, of that intensity that
develops in the relationship and that the portrait and the dialogue grasp in the pow er of their becoming.
Chiara Sartori
Rome, 2011
Personale è Politico, 2011. Green neon, 20x140cm. Nomas F oundation Collection. Installation view , MACRO, Rome.
LOVER’S DISCOURSE
(2010-ongoing) A multi-channel video installation show s the portrait of the artist’ s relationship through the vision of different stories.
Starting from the F rench philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’ s theories about being-in-common and the dynamics of self-reflection and sharing
coexisting in a w eb of relations, this project investigates the importance of reciprocity and interchange w ith “the other” in order to build up
one’ s ow n identity and at the same time evolve the community’ s aw areness. Produced during the artist’ s residencies at ISCP in New York
in 2010 and at SIM in Reyk javík in 2011, Lover’ s Discourse is a collection of close-ups w ith different narratives, exploring all the changes
and correspondences experienced inside the identity of the couple and the community itself.
Lover’ s Discourse (F lyer), 2010. Installation view , X Initiative, New York .
Lover’ s Discourse (New York ), 2010. Installation view s, Momenta Art, New York .
I’ ll Be Your Mir r or
Love songs and poems are, by definition, monologues. They speak —w hether in the language of John Keats, Pablo Neruda or The
Velvet Underground—to an enunciated other w ho is present in name only. We read loneliness into them, the absence of the beloved; the
lyric mode’ s creative engine being, as it w ere, the agonizingly dramatic fact that a certain someone is not around. Absence mak es the heart
grow fonder, the Valentine’ s Day industry says. But w hat about the things w e say to each other w hen w e are face to face?
Valerio Rocco Orlando, a young Italian artist fascinated by the multiple human correspondences contained in the 8 million-strong mash
note that is New York , w ants to k now . Tak ing the most basic but complex of premises, Orlando posted flyers around Brook lyn ask ing
for “couples and lovers” to collaborate w ith him in his new video project. Along w ith his w ebsite and email address, Orlando included a
quote by the F rench philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. “There is no being w ithout b e ing-w ith,” it read unromantically, “and there is no
existence w ithout co-existence.”
F rench philosophy, despite much evidence to the contrary, is still, quite obviously, in. I say this because Orlando received many answ ers
to his humble postings. F rom these, the artist chose responses he felt w ould best contribute to the project. Then he split the responding
couples up and posed a set of questions to the individual “lovers” w hose implications grow in importance as they ripple out from the
basic unit that is the monogamy to w hich our species holds fast: Are you in love ? Whe n in love , c an you p re se rve your ide ntity? What is the
re lationship b e tw e e n the ide ntity of a c oup le and the c ommunity? How c an w e e volve the c ommunity’s aw are ne ss through love ?
The answ ers to these and other questions as related by New York ers from all w alk s of life mak e up the meat and sinew of Orlando’ s
deceptively simple video mock umentary Love r’s D isc ourse. We get Ivy, Dustin, Natalie, Jonathan, and Sarah-Jane (their names, in
Dragnet parlance, have been changed to protect the innocent) relaying w hat—to tak e a page from Raymond Carver—one might term the
issues surrounding w hat w e talk ab out w he n w e talk ab out love . These tales are, as one might expect, as varied and engaging as there are
apartment stories in New York .
“Letting love in is really how you learn to love,” a pretty brunette identified as Sarah-Jane declares in one particularly lucid passage of
video. Expanding on that piece of w isdom is w here Orlando and his project strik e ontological ground. “Meaning is itself the sharing of
Being,” sage Nancy philosophizes elsew here. Put in Brook lynese, this means essentially that love consists of more than an American
Apparel-style posing or a throw aw ay emotion. It is, instead, the motor that guarantees our expanding connections—person to person,
couple to couple, community to community, and everyw here in betw een.“Love is not a feeling,” Ludw ig Wittgenstein once said. By
w hich he meant simply that it is something much harder to figure, an activity ak in to w ork . Lik e art, love is labor. A labor of love.
Christian Viveros-F auné
Brook lyn, 2010
Lover’ s Discourse (New York ), 2011. Installation view , Careof DOCVA , Milan.
Coexistence, 2010. Purple and red neon, 15x180cm. Lek sell Collection, Stock holm.
NIENDORF (THE DAMAGED PIANO)
(2008) Tw o-channel video installation: a consideration on memories and the stratification of different identities. When the English composer
Michael Nyman discovered a forgotten piano in a Berlin restorer’ s w ork shop he w as mesmerized. The reflections of colourful lights on the
piano reveal its unique ancestral sound, w hile the black & w hite Nyman’ s close-up shot in 35mm represents the alter ego of every musician
w ho played the instrument in the past.
Niendorf (The Damaged Piano), 2008. 2-channel video installation, 8 minutes 10 seconds. F ilm stills.
My Ow n Little Damaged Piano, 2008. Slideshow on black w all. Installation view , MAZE, Turin.
THE SENTIMENTAL GLANCE
(2002-2007) Seven-channel video installation: different video and film w ork s realized during five years of the artist’ s life. In a stratified
Bildungsroman populated by the portraits of six young w omen (CELESTE, RITA, EVA, DOBROCHNA, AMALIA, ELEONORA),
Orlando represents his sentimental education, reflecting on the tension betw een childhood and adulthood, passion and loneliness,
melancholy, maternity and androgyny.
The Sentimental Glance, 2007. 7-channel video installation. Installation view s and sk etch, MAZE, Turin.
The Night in My Eyes, 2007. Slideshow on black w all. Installation view , MAZE, Turin.
Amalia, 2006. Installation view , Viafarini, Milan.
BISIÀC
(2007) Tw o-channel video installation, commissioned by GC. AC Monfalcone: first chapter of a cycle about the relation betw een the new
generations’ vision and the local dying languages and traditions. In BISIÀC tw in boy-girl aged five are paddling across the Isonzo river,
playing w ith the stones in the w ater and chanting nursery rhymes in their ow n language, the old Veneto dialect.
VALERIO ROCCO ORLANDO (1978, Italy) received a BA in Dramaturgy from Università Cattolica in Milan and an MA in F ilm
Directing from Queen Mary, University of London. Crossing the threshold from an intimate portrait to a choral dialogue, through film,
photography and installation, Valerio Rocco Orlando's community-based projects focus on the relation betw een individual and collective
identity in order to explore and enhance the complexity of human relationships in contemporary society. His solo show s include: The
Reverse Grand Tour, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Roma, 2013; Què Educaciòn para Marte?, Villa e Collezione
Panza, Varese, 2013; Quale Educazione per Marte?, Nomas F oundation, Rome, 2011; Lover’ s Discourse, Careof DOCVA, Milan, 2011;
Lover’ s Discourse, Momenta Art, New York , 2010; Coexistence, Galleria Tiziana Di Caro, Salerno, 2010; Niendorf (The Damaged Piano),
Galleria Maze, Turin, 2008; The Sentimental Glance, Galleria Maze, Turin, 2007. Among his group show s: XI Bienal de La Habana, Centro
de Arte Contemporaneo Wifredo Lam, Havana, 2012; Neon. La materia luminosa dell’ arte, MACRO Museo d’ Arte Contemporanea, Rome,
2012; Re-generation, MACRO Museo d’ Arte Contemporanea, Rome, 2012; Estate, Marianne Boesk y Gallery, New York , 2012; Nurture
Art, Chelsea Art Museum, New York , 2011; videoREPORT ITALIA: 08_09, GC. AC, Monfalcone, 2010; Emerging Talents - New Italian
Art, CCCS, Palazzo Strozzi, F lorence, 2009. In 2009 Valerio Rocco Orlando w on the Iscp New York Prize promoted by Parc/Seat/Gai and
in 2011 he w as aw arded a Civitella Ranieri F oundation F ellow ship in Visual Arts.