Opening: Saturday 20 September at 5 p.m.

This overview aims at giving the opportunity to see the most interesting fi gures in avant-garde contemporary art through a series of solo shows mounted in close collaboration with private galleries, national and international public bodies, and private sponsors. The artists who have been chosen are not necessarily those of the youngest generation but also include those who use peripheral languages and stand apart from fashionable trends. The particularity of CeSAC and the Marcovaldo Association has always been that of promoting information about art and of suggesting new ways for considering an art world that has become ever more globalized and dumbed-down. The “Avamposti” series of shows has been undertaken in close collaboration with the artists themselves, though they have not been asked to follow preconceived themes. They are given complete autonomy so that the public may appreciate what they have to say in an autonomous and free way. The challenge of these exhibitions is that of allowing the visitors to the Filatoio di Caraglio to get to know the voices off-stage that express great cultural and innovative sense through their poetics.

In the Filatoio, Patrizia Guerresi Maïmouna will be presenting a completely new work with the title Le stanze dei giganti, The Giants’ Rooms.

This new project has been planned specifi cally for Caraglio and was sparked off by some mystic characters of Islamic Africa who have inspired the artist for some time as a result of their great charisma; they are personages to whom she has devoted a sacred place in which to dwell.

The characters represented in her photos have something in common: that of being “large” yet “emptied out”. In fact their form is dictated by the mantle that covers them and which the artist has created in an autonomous and sculptural form.

The show consists of various photographic, sculptural, and video works which make up a complex yet harmonious installation.

The sculptures, created from steel tubing, consist of two long, thin drawers. In one of these is placed a long bed under which a disorderly line of aluminium-cast slippers is placed directly on the fl oor. Inside the second drawer is a long narrow table on which the artist has placed bread rolls, these too made from aluminium. The two structures refer to some mystic architecture which can only develop beyond real space in order to arrive at the metaphysical and dreamlike space of ecstatic meditation and silence. At the same time the archetype of drawers alludes both to Islamic burials as well as to contemporary housing and to the prehistoric collective inhumations in Sardinia called The Giants’ Rooms.

In the video a group of veiled women from Kenya, with faces, hands and feet marked in white, move in slow rotation while the wind ruffl es their long robes. This video is made up of groups of images, sometimes lengthened through slow motion, sometimes as quick fl ashes emerging and then disappearing into a white background.

The long and hypnotic turning of their feet and garments moving in the wind alternates with white and radiant pauses, recalling the warm, sunny day on the beach at Malindi where the fi lm was taken.

The Dhikr is a prayer sung by these Kenyan women, with the sounds of their deep breaths almost simulating the wind on that African day.

Patrizia Guerresi Maïmouna offers us a hybrid situation, one that mixes Eastern and Western cultural references whose common poetics go beyond the boundaries of what is represented in order to create the universal condition of what is beautiful, mystic, and approachable for all the peoples in the world.

After many exhibitions, such as The Sisters, the name of which refers to her two daughters Marlene and Adji and which was held in the Paola Colombari gallery, Milan, and her recent show in the Photo & Contemporary gallery in Turin, the artist now returns to the theme of making everyday life sacred through the gestures and behaviours of a fi gurative rituality that joins together women of different cultures and religions.

A sculptor and the creator of videos and installations, Patrizia Guerresi Maïmouna works with myths, the sacred, and the female dimension that arises from fragments of signifi cant parts of the human body which then also become the religious and mystic body. From photos to videos, from sculptures to installations, Patrizia Guerresi Maïmouna continues to narrate, with constant sensibility and without compromises, the discomfort and beauty of diversity.

She has taken part in numerous national and international shows. In 1982 and 1986 she was invited to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, and in 1987 at Documenta in Kassel. Her solo shows include those in the La Giarina gallery, Verona, 1995; the Bianca Pilat gallery, Milan,1996; the Rocca Umbertide, Perugia, and the Mudima Foundation, Milan, both in1999; the Valmore gallery, Vicenza, 2001; the Varart gallery, Florence, and the Levi gallery, Madrid, in 2002; the Contemporary Museum III, Atlanta, 2004; the Bel Art gallery, Milan, 2005; “En plain air”, curated by Maurizio Calvesi, Studio Copernico, Turin, for the occasion of the 2006 Winter Olympics; in 2006 she exhibited her works in the Paola Colombari gallery, Milan, and the Galleria Photo & Contemporary, Turin.

In 2007 she was represented in the exhibition curated by Giorgio Cortenova “Il settimo splendore”, Palazzo della Ragione, Verona, and in “Il velo”, curated by Andrea Busto in the Filatoio, Caraglio.

The artist is represented by Edizioni Galleria Paola Colombari in Milan, which specializes since 1994 in avant-garde design by important international designer and since the year 2000 (with Paola Colombari as curator) also in contemporary international art. Paola Colombari began her experience as a gallery owner and dealer in 1981, with the opening of her first gallery, Galleria Colombari, in Turin. After 25 years of activity, the Galleria Colombari was divided into two galleries wih different specializations. The Galleria Rossella Colombari still focuses on 20th century modernism.