Alessandro Bulgini from Turin
Your new daily ritual…
The peculiarity of my daily life starts from afar since I have always lived a very complex life that has led me to work in equally complex strategies designed to carry me forward anyway. This is to say that what I do right now for a living doesn't differ so much from what has been in my past, at least for methodology. I've always considered myself in a precarious situation so I've learned to put the pre-existing to good use, making it an instrument of elaboration and sustenance. In short, I often felt shipwrecked, or better, lost in a jungle, which I thought I had to remedy through the art of arrangement (in the noblest sense of the term). My daily life at home during this period is the perfect adaptation to the available conditions, it could be boring to tell about it, less so is the equation that defines it.
How your way of working has changed?
As I said, I make use of the pre-existing one. From a certain moment on, in my artistic journey, I left the studio and made myself available on the street to verify how much art could relate to life without having to make too complicated journeys. I started projects of close relationship between art and territory, the first very suggestive was called B.A.R.L.U.I.G.I. Opera Viva, a kind of free franchise that allowed, under the aegis of this name, any public or private space to become a free and unfiltered creative welcome space. Inefficient project declared, inaugurated a lot of spaces in Italy and beyond, after the closure of its base (where I have been for more than a year), I dedicated myself to my Turin neighborhood Barriera di Milano. Neighborhood in which I began to produce artistic activities of all kinds in order to bring attention to it. These experiences have reinforced what I said earlier for me to be fundamental, that is, the ability to use the pre-existing in its possibility of being reworked in order to then be made available to the community. We arrive, after this long preface, to define what has changed in these days, actually now they are in the study phase. Years ago I started this important project, among others, which promotes the figure of the neighborhood artist, Well these days I'm trying to figure out how it will be possible compared to before, move with equal effectiveness in the human/urban fabric. I trust in the willingness and ability to adapt to understand the new strategies, totally to be reinvented, totally for a new world.
What you're missing? Your personal experience of "absence" and "lack".
I'm used to absences, I've had mourning upon mourning at home, I usually "do without", … that doesn't mean he doesn't suffer, but rather that this has also become part of my baggage, of what I put into play.
How do you imagine the world, when everything will start again?
As I imagine or as I hope? Either way, you have the answers at your fingertips.
To date, what have been the immediate consequences of the spread of Covid-19 on your work for you and what do you think the long-term consequences may be?
The economic consequences having distanced myself from the art market? Indifferent, not received. In the long run I think that if things take an unexpected turn and the world agrees on a common vision, finally… I could retire. On the other hand, everyone knows that art exists as long as there is "the problem".
Alessandro Bulgini. Born in Taranto in 1962, lives and works in Turin. Graduated from the Carrara Academy of Fine Arts in theatrical scenography, he lived in numerous Italian cities: Rome, Milan, Livorno, Venice, Genoa, Taranto, to whom it owes the absolute independence and individuality of its work. Difficult to be assimilated and framed in any artistic current, Bulgini uses a wide range of means; from painting to photography, from video to performance.
From the outset, Bulgini has concentrated his research on the theme of the invisible and the submerged. From 1990 to the 2000 realizes the cycle of works "Le déjeuner sur l'herbe" and from 2001 to date the cycles "Hairetikos" and "Opera Viva". Performances, paintings, photographs and installations, different tools, acts of opposition to a truth held to be absolute, attempts to point to something beyond the visible. The 15 November 2008 start, with your facebook membership, the cycle still in existence entitled "Opera Viva" (the Opera viva in nautical jargon is the submerged part of the hull and therefore represents the submerged, all that is invisible, all suburbs, mental and physical), a social work that makes use of the active contribution of all its participants, through which the artist develops various innovative ways of artistic use of the network and pays attention to the idea of choral work, a work that arises from the relationship with the other than itself. The 24 April of 2012 Bulgini opens an important new chapter of its social work with the inauguration of the B.A.R.L.U.I.G.I. project., Opera Viva, project with which the artist leaves the studio to enter the everyday life, thus the figure of the District Artist was born, the neighborhood artist. From a suburban bar he sets out the simple rules for transforming the pre-existing, in this case transform pre-existing spaces (which bars, butcher shops or whole towns) in spaces of creative reception without filters, free and non-profit connected to each other on the net through personal facebook pages, under the same aegis of the B.A.R.L.U.I.G.I; they contacted 11 in the world. With the closure of the B.A.R.L.U.I.G.I base, it pours its activities into the territories, starting from your neighborhood, Barrier of Milan in Turin, of which he begins to decorate his sidewalks with chalk for a year “urban decorum”. Of 2013 it's the project “Flashback is Opera Viva” for the ancient and modern art fair Flashback, text project to stigmatize the immortality of art by connecting the inside and the outside, the submerged and the emerged, the visible and the invisible, the center and the suburbs. Afterwards it is activated in a varied way for the cities of Taranto, Cosenza, Peekskill – NEW, Livorno, Verona and then again to the S. Anne of Turin, for the city of Imlil in Morocco, for the Jungle of Calais. The chapter concerning schools is incisive and peculiar: born in 2015 in San Vito dei Normanni Opera Viva, Flight school which was activated later for the Benedetto Croce and Gozzi primary schools in Turin. https://alessandrobulgini.wordpress.com/