The Murano Monologues

These Murano glass bowls, or ones like these, can be found on eBay.

Liu Bolin " Hiding in Italy 2010 "

Liu Bolin, a young Beijing-based artist, has become known as the “invisible man” due to his ability to use his own body as an art material. The chameleon paints on himself, appearing to blend in with the backdrop. In 2008, his series named “Hiding in the City” shocked the world. Inspired by how some animals can blend into their environment, Liu Bolin uses camouflage principles to create amazing contemporary art. This series is an exploration of human nature and animal instincts which features Chinese citizens painted to blend into their surroundings (see earlier post). Liu Bolin's photography series are not the product of manipulation of a digital image. Instead, they display a skillful use of painting blended together with a sculptor's sense of space and the human body within it.


His new project "Hiding in Italy" has come to life in buildings and places that are of social and historical significance for the history of Italy.

Teatro alla Scala 1

Teatro alla Scala 2

Piazza San Marco

Canal Grande, Ponte di Rialto

Duomodi Milano

Ponte dei Conzafelzi

Palazzo Lombardia

Exhibition on view at Forma

October 21 to November 14, 2010

Italy and David McGrievey

Copyright David McGrievey

One of the greatest things about blogging is stumbling across amazing talent. I had that WOW sensation  when I first clapped my eyes on the beautiful illustrations of David McGrievey at An Illustrated Life.

David's illustrations are a cocktail of elegance, colour with a twist of humour thrown in. His posts of his adventures in New York and beyond are just as interesting.

Copyright David McGrievey

When I first saw these two illustrations of Italy they struck a cord with me. It was the Italy of the Amalfi Coast that I know and I love. Especially the bottom one with the curly wrought iron railing and water for as far as you can see. He might have been inspired by another place but it took me straight to a balcony I know in Positano.

Though his beach tents are more glamorous than the little wooden changing sheds and colourful umbrellas they are evocative of the era that still permeates that part of the world. A world that still adores old wooden boats, where people  'dress' to go to the beach, capri pants and glam sandals.

God how I would love one those beach tents when I go to the beach!

I figure from his illustrations that this man must have has a kind, elegant and romantic heart. If you have chance check out his beautiful work at An Illustrated Life.

Carla x

Team Uncool Loves: Lave by Canedicoda

A collaborative video and photographic project done for the launch of the Lave collection by Italian screenprinting and fashion brand, Canedicoda. 

The Project was a collaboration between myself and local italian photographer Silvia Boschiero. 

The project is meant to give a visual representation of a personal emotional response to his creations and the place that he creates them in. When I first met Gio (Canedicoda) inside his enviroment, it was quiet and meditational. I wanted to portray this to the viewer.

Fortune's 1934 Map of Italy

Today’s 'Cover of the Day’ over at Vintage Fortune Magazine is the special issue on Italy and Fascism published in July 1934. But that's not all. VFM’s Linda Rubes posts yet another cover today—the REJECTED one that was first created by illustrator Antonio Petruccelli. Read about that here.

What a perfect opportunity for me to share the fabulous map by L.H. Appleton that ran inside that issue. The map is printed double truck, sideways and uses three colors and black.

Now keep in mind that the size of the magazine was 11”x14”, so the full spread (22” x14”) accommodated an incredible amount of description. Clicking on this map will make it bigger, but really not big enough to read clearly. In order to really read the text you need to see the image at full size. (Another reason for me to get back to writing that book about Fortune’s glorious graphic past—wouldn’t it be awesome to see this reproduced at its original size?)

There are two details you can still make out at this size. One is the little black hand representing the Mafia to left of Sicily, and the other is the mileage scale, bottom right, which has to be one of the best mileage scales ever. To show the width of Italy, Appleton gives us a map of Connecticut indicating that it is 68 miles wide. Now if you consider that Fortune’s subscribers at the time, were wealthy businessmen, the size of Connecticut was probably familiar to most of them!

I promise to run more of Fortune’s amazing infographics very soon.

Team Uncool Likes: Silvia Boschiero

I've been living up in Treviso Italy for the last week and I met a very talented photographer while on trial at Fabrica. Her name is Silvia Boschiero, she is the epitomisation of the Italian women.

Ct2009

Photograph by Chris Saunders

While I was out

The girls on the way to the Vatican
Ready for the 3D show in Rome

Santa Maria della Salute Venice

Madonna Rome

the girls on the way to Laurito

Piazza San Marco in the morning

Eliza at Fornillo

Positano at sunset

Bella Isabella

Fornillo

Fete du Tuileries

Nuns Rome

ADRIANO CELENTANO - "Prisencolinesunaciusol"

(post status: high priority)
(effect of following clip on your face: melting)

Adriano Celentano - "Prisencolinesunaciusol"




WE, reader, are only a blog. We cannot make you read us, we cannot make you add us to your RSS feed. We cannot make you check us out intermittently on your iPhone. WE cannot tap almost imperceptibly at your window every night for several hours, in order to send the disturbing signal to your unconscious mind that we know where you sleep.

WE can only do so much. But, reader, if you choose on your own to step within the bounds of the line-drawn sand that marks what we can do, then that is another story entirely.

WE cannot make you watch this clip, or enjoy it. This bothers us. It bothers us that you reader are still allowed to decide for yourself. Because, were it up to us, not only would you have no choice in the matter, a lack of enjoyment of this clip would as well be officially recognized as a symptom of a mild personality disorder.

Celentano, an Italian, sings, as do his back-up vocalists, in a language wholly of his own devising. In an interview, he said that making a song that reckoned with incommunicability was a result of 'modern life, where no one understands each other anymore'. You don't need to be a graduate student to pick up on a whole other kind of understanding and communication that's going on in this song, so invigorating is it that sea urchins and lichen are responsive to it - remember in Ghostbusters 2, when they play that song that makes the ooze dance in the toaster? Same thing. Oh and Prisencolinwhatever is supposed to mean "universal love".

Here's a post over at Cosmic Boogie about DJ edit master Greg Wilson's new version of the track: http://www.cosmicboogie.co.uk/2008/03/27/greg-wilson-ruff-edits/

And here's a mix by Baleric DJ Timm Sure posted over at Nearest Faraway Place, which features said edit by Greg Wilson:

http://nearestfarawayplace.blogspot.com/2008/04/well-is-it.html

NEW WEEKEND PRINCE: CAVA SCURA

WEEKEND PRINCE: CAVA SCURA



In the moment we are born, the spirit that we are before we enter into this world is split. I don't want to say that it is split into two. Because, it's not a matter of the one becoming a two, two symmetric halves, that might one day become again the one. As is spoken, for example, in the famous image from Plato's Symposium. In that scene, the reconciliation spoken of is one of love, and of a relation between two beings of the same kind. Here, instead, I mean that in order for us to take a living form, a form that is alive in this world, there is part of us that is clipped or cut, and sent away. I don't know where it goes to. I don't know if this part is sent to meet with the other parts that have been clipped from all those in the world, and if they know and commune with one another, in some phantom city never seen, erected on an Asian plain, or beneath the ocean's deepest doldrums, where furious currents have gone to die.

I know that there is a way to meet this split spirit again. Or maybe it is not a meeting face-to-face, maybe it is a way only to wear the face of this spirit, the way that one acts on a stage, or wears a festival mask. In the way that there are some things that live in this world as a mask, a disguise, a costume, and when the costume is laid down again on the bed, the spirit is gone.

Often this way involves visiting a foreign country. It can happen that while traveling abroad, this shadow lost before birth can be heard in a silent speech by one's innermost ear. No matter what, you will never see or touch this shadow, at most you will hear its wordless pronouncement: here, in this land, you and I may come to know about each other. And in all that you take in about this land, its foods and languages and music and so on, it is in a kind of mute and private acknowledgment, a recognition, a greeting.

So it is, I think, with Christina and Italy. Who for our all-too-brief trip seemed to be living the life of another, not one which is an escape from one's first life, but which makes the first seem to be an extended exile from the second. In some people, travel is a catharsis, a kind of necessary semi-regular exercise useful in purging built-up energies and tensions. In others, it cleaves the psyche in two for good, such that dynamic energies are sparked for eternity. It is not known whether in this case the soul becomes permanently restless, or turns to face for the first time the restlessness which has always haunted it.

On a trip for five days through Rome, in the ceaseless heat, on the stony earth, each day punctuated by the shot from the noon cannon. Those traveling days where everything bears a faint halo of mythic intensity. We spent three days on the island of Ischia, a volcanic island reachable by ferry from Napoli, and home to several thermal springs, one of which is cava scura, 'secret cave', and that lies at the end of a path one can take from the small beach of Maronti, where we took seafood pasta on the beach for lunch.

Not on purpose is the song structured into three parts. The song is so structured, in three parts which do not repeat in an A-B form, because this form is boring and constraining and I can't do it. Whatever inner daimon it is whose hand moves my creative impulses, it is one that seems to prefer the horizontal flows, tangents, contiguities, unfoldings, and so on, and all those other trappings of nomadic freedom.

(..As much as on the other hand there is another daimon, perhaps one who resents the first, one who craves the brutal cut, the unforgiving amputation, the diabolical reduction....)