ARTE FIERA OBSERVATORY

Filippo Tappi (b. Cesena, 1985, living in Bologna) is an artist who works with sculpture, the press, and collective dynamics. In 2010 he founded Tipografia Testamento, a press organ devoted to quick-print and artisanal publications. In 2019, he co-founded Nights, a travelling group project mixing visual art, robotics, and writing, and has been on the staff of Localedue since 2020. He was one of the artists in residence at MAMbo for the “Il Nuovo Forno del Pane” project and, with Marco Casella, has created the new visual identity of Art City Bologna 2021.

Photocredit: Federico Landi, Valentina Cafarotti

The night is a direction of our gaze. The places we know so well during the day change direction, and the time we spend there slips into a zone that has other rules. This was the idea for the new visual identity of Art City Bologna 2021, created with Marco Casella. The city becomes nocturnal, shining with an artificial and astronomical light: Art City becomes Bologna at night.

In 2016, I spent a whole night in the Chimney Room at MAMbo. The space was full of the slow, repetitive movements of a few figures, there were objects here and there, intertwined hanging fabrics, a faint light intersected by pale flashes and cloudy projections, and a soundtrack with drawn-out fragments of music and sleepy loops. You could come and go as you pleased, sleep, wait, get bored, think, go blank. It was full immersion in an altered, endless time dimension: it was Mårten Spångberg’s “Natten” for Live Arts Week V.

Last night some strange antennas appeared on the lamp posts in a square here in Bologna: lumps of crystalised isomalt and metal, their sugary transparency filtering and retransmitting artificial light. They also relay an image of invisible energy, of data and paranoia, distilling the sharp metal shapes we see when we look up as we walk around the city or observe the profiles of the hills at sunset. 
 

1 - A photo from the visual identity of Art City Bologna 2021
2 - Mårten Spångberg, Natten, 2016. (Live Arts Week V, MAMbo - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna, photo by Luca Ghedini, courtesy Xing)
3 - Lorenzo Lunghi, Now I Got You! You’re the One Putting Up the Antennas, 2021. Caramel and steel. (Leftovers, curated by Luca Poncetta, courtesy Localedue)