ELIA900
In Residence:
November – December 24, 2022
Discipline:
Artist
Country:
Italy
About
Elia900 is an Italian artist. From a young age, he began working with graffiti. The colors, elements and symbols of the Rome street art soon sparked in him an interest in the composition of geometries. From his professor, the artist Cesare Tacchi, he learned about the Roman School of Piazza del Popolo and elected painting as his favorite medium. The urban environment, the Roman 60s, with literature, poetry, and cinema, are the leading suggestions that have given rise to several production cycles and constitute the primary reference of his poetic and research. In his artworks he creates decodable and narrative systems of visual structures that, in a skillful play of balances, bring into dialogue the abstract world of geometric figures with the harmonious symbolic world of human and animal profiles. Recently he has employed carpets and textiles from all over the globe as pictorial support. In 2017, with artist Leonardo Crudi, he founded the street art duo Collettivo900. In 2020 he has been Giosetta Fioroni's assistant painter. He collaborates with independent publishing. Private and public institutions often purchase or commission him for public art interventions.
WORK
FRANGIPANI
The Traveling Flower. Islands to Islands
On 19th December, the artworks of Elia900 and Niccolò Masini will activate Yayasan Bali Purnati’s grounds and spaces. This showcase is the result and restitution of their research and investigation during “Frangipani/The traveling flower. Islands to Islands”, a long-term Residency Exchange Program between Indonesia and Italy.
This bilateral initiative facilitates the synergy between multidisciplinary artists interested in cross-cultural interactions. It promotes on-site theoretical and practical research of two artists+one curator from Italy in Indonesia (2022) and two artists+one curator from Indonesia in Italy (2023). The program, directed by Elettra Bottazzi and Restu Kusumaningrum, is hosted and supported by their cultural centers: Amaneï (Salina, Aeolian Islands, Sicily) and Yayasan Bali Purnati and Losari Foundation (Bali and Central Java, Indonesia).
Under the support of the IIC Jakarta (Italian Cultural Institute), the 19th December event will showcase the developments of the project and the end of the first exchange cycle involving the Italian participant artists Elia900 and Niccolò Masini and the curator Elettra Bottazzi. Through the explorations of local stories and traditions, the artworks underline the main aspects of their transdisciplinary learning and process-based experimentations. The multilayered creation of meanings and minglings are the effects of the encounter between environments and cultures, suggesting instead a dialogue made of similarities and crossbreeding.
In 2024, the outcome of both residencies will manifest in a group show, which will gather the artists’ and curators’ research and works. The exhibition will unfold the collected experiences into a plurality of voices and gazes, revealing the curators’ and artists’ ability to match different poetics and backgrounds, questioning “from which point of view we see” since our gaze is never neutral but often cultural.
“Frangipani/The traveling flowers”’ project aims to engage the involved participants in diverse environments and traditions, fostering exchanges and dialogues between landscapes and cultures. The islands of Java/Bali and Aeolian Islands/Sicily are far apart, but in these volcanic territories, the Frangipani flower blooms abundantly. The artists and their works, which have always traveled the world, are like seeds that flourish even in the most remote places, reminding us that culture, like nature, knows no boundaries.
