in a low voice

miki tallone

listen to the sirens
space for conemporary art


23 may - 31 august, 2014
montagu bastion
gibraltar



www.listentothesirens.org
mousse magazine



Listen to the Sirens | Space for Contemporary Artis a project that has grown out of collaboration between the Ministry of Culture of the Government of Gibraltar and Little Constellation Network for Contemporary Art in small states and geo-political micro-areas in Europe, based in the Republic of San Marino.

The project entails the creation, within the historic eighteenth-century bastions that surround Gibraltar, of the first Project Space in the small British territory. In particular, the Government of Gibraltar has made available the prestigious Montagu Bastion, specially renovated for the occasion.

Listen to the Sirens is a project by Rita Canarezza and Pier Paolo Coro, based on the re-appropriation of this capacity for interpretation, through an exhibition programme based on continuous dialogue between the artists of the Little Constellation Network and artists who live and work in Gibraltar.

The activity of this centre for contemporary art is curated by Rita Canarezza & Pier Paolo Coro, the founding artists of Little Constellation, and Alessandro Castiglioni, curator of Little Constellation.

The first artist invited to work in Listen to the Sirens | Space for Contemporary Art is Miki Tallone. The experience of this artist, originally from Canton Ticino (Switzerland), being bound up with plastic-installational concerns rather than those of a site-specific character, correlated to research into a geographical and identity nature, was considered essential in developing an experimental project that related the construction of a solo exhibition with a socio-historical research related to the history of Gibraltar.

In a Low Voice grew out of these principles. The project will inaugurate Listen to the Sirens | Space for Contemporary Art, May 23, 2014.
To create her work, the Swiss artist decided to broach a highly sensitive issue in the history of Gibraltar: the evacuation of civilians from the fortress during World War II. In this respect, in the recent months spent developing the project, the artist wrote:
Knowing the history of Gibraltar I decided to tackle the delicate issue of evacuation during the World War II. I do not, however, wish to deal with the issue from a strictly historical or political angle, but to recover the traces of a shared visual memory. These traces, for me, are represented by the vision of the “sheets” that all the women and their evacuated families had to leave in their homes.”
With these few lines I asked every family that had a connection with the evacuation, which marked the history of Gibraltar and especially the personal history of each family, to take part in an action: to donate one of their sheets today, a sign of everyday life, in memory of a story that remains in the memory of many of the residents.

In a low voice is the title of this work. It is the voice that gains in importance; and history can make its way when so many individuals speak softly and from their hearts.
Beside the presentation of this installation, the exhibition sees the production of another new work, a video, which bears the same title as the exhibition and amplifies and intensifies the temporal aspect, the dimension of the work’s traversability (in memory and travel).
The exhibition is completed by “Can you give me my position”, an artist book produced by Miki Tallone for the exhibition at the National Gallery of Iceland in 2013, which forms the theoretical premise of the current project.

Miki Tallone, born in 1968, lives and works in Minusio, Canton Ticino, Switzerland. The path she has explored professionally to date, more closely associated with the applied arts and architecture, has led her to see the visual arts not as a realm of creation divided from other arts, but rather as an elastic and expandable catalyst for all other areas of creativity.
Her research interests turn on a spatial dimension primarily understood as the direct practice of space. This concept can be translated into an idea of space as an abstract entity, as an object of study and at the same time as the origin of hybrid compositional structures. The space she references is thus anthropocentric, constructed around people, but also an emanation of them.

promoted by
Ministry of Culture of the Government of Gibraltar

Listen To the Sirens - Space for contemporary Art
Montagu Bastion
Gibraltar (UK)
www.listentothesirens.org