Projects for Colle Val d'Elsa, Ilya Kabakov, 1998

Ilya Kabakov intervened in three different locations in Colle Val d’Elsa for the third edition of Arte all’Arte, by invitation and under the curatorship of Florian Matzner and Angela Vettese: in front of the Bastione di Sapia, inside a bar, and in a garden, where the visitor encounters three different yet equally evocative perspectives on a world suspended between past and present, between sky and earth.

“…contemporary art still represents a strong sign, and precisely in a historically connoted space, by establishing a fruitful connection between past and present, it is able to develop not only aesthetic but also social perspectives for the future. This latter aspect is particularly clear in the three-part installation by Ilya Kabakov in Colle di Val d’Elsa. The first part of the story that the artist tells us takes place in antiquity, physically located in a ‘no place’ outside the city walls; the second part recounts the period in which those Tuscan municipalities were formed that still today, intact, shape the image of this cultural landscape. The last chapter of the story, instead, unfolds in a bar, on the interior wall of which hundreds of flies form the phrase “Noi siamo libere!” Kabakov dedicated an entire solo exhibition to the motif of flies – La vita delle mosche, 1992 at the Kunstverein in Cologne – and he himself wrote in his project description for Arte all’Arte that the third project Noi siamo libere! is associated with the current situation, indeed – as Boris Groys said – “the fly by its nature has no fixed place in any system. It continuously flies in circles, buzzes, lands and immediately flies off again. The circles it draws in the air are always chaotic. The place where it lands on the surface of objects is always random.” The fly is the metaphor for the propensity and the right (of art) to freedom.”

Florian Matzner, Arte all’Arte III, 1998