curated by Francesca Referza

Saturday, November 9, 2013, the Velan Center is pleased to present Go go my dancer, move your arms and feet until the floor ends. This song is for you, a performance and exhibition project curated by Francesca Referza, specially conceived for Velan by Jacopo Miliani, in conjunction with Artissima 20. Jacopo Miliani explains, The project has an intimate, personal quality that I wanted to develop in the Velan Center's space. It has an event/performance aspect as well as visual one tied to the place and its architecture. The idea started with the columns that bound a central area in the space. I saw this 'subspace' as an important vantage point. The concept was to lay out a print on fabric on the floor in the room's center  between the columns. During the opening, several dancers, each using their own choreography would individually activate it for a few minutes. Vogue Fabric (2013) is a printed fabric on which dance movements appear. My intention is to have the dancers activate the fabric through small acts of improvised choreography. This makes the subject both image and movement. A constant back-and-forth is established between the fabric and the dance movements during the opening's performance. The dance has a specific orientation determined by the fabric's presence, which will in turn change its condition depending on each dancer's choreography choices. This will create a doubling of the choreographed language, the printed language, and the language performed live. The space's walls are 'animated' by a number of works made up of found footage and fabrics. Photos and small pieces of glass join the textiles. The images are scene photographs from plays. The artist, and therefore the new viewer, are unaware of what is actually happening on the stage. The fabric (tessuto in Italian from the Latin 'textus', meaning both fabric and narrative plot), opens to infinite possible acts and further narratives, as Miliani explains. The intention is to create a theatrical image and 'bind' it to a base (the fabric) that is more than decorative, containing the traits of its contents and their ephemeral, temporal quality. The fabric's fold never repeats itself, and neither does the performance action.

Miliani has always been quite multifaceted in his expressive tools. In his works from recent years, he has made frequent use of performance while photography, installation, and video remain his work's preferred media. These different vocabularies may even coexist in a single exhibition project as they do in this solo show in Turin. Most recently his work seems to focus on investigating a particular film topos, such as in his series of posters, Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam (2009) or his recent work Knowledge is good (2012), and a more intimate reflection on the communication of the moving body through performance. In both instances, Miliani starts with the original, whether borrowed from film or theater, and creates a complete deconstruction of the original syntax. His exploration seeks to pinpoint individual fragments of a broader narrative, which breaks down into it quietly reaches its minimum, but that can still incite questions in viewers. An atmosphere of temporal and semantic suspension shoots through many of Miliani's works, including his installations and performances. Miliani's interests run the gamut from literature to pop and electronic music, cult movies to Grotowski's 'poor theater' in the late 1970s. In each of his projects, he strives to instill doubt in viewers about the mechanism of viewing, through uncommon deconstructions or unexpected formal juxtapositions. His show Go go my dancer, move your arms and feet until the floor ends. This song is for you embodies several aspects of Miliani's investigations. The aspect of music is absent here, though indirectly suggested by the dancers' movements. There is the body as a tool of non-verbal communication. simultaneously poetic and polysemic. And, last but not least, the aspect of fabric, understood and valued for its material consistency and its ability to be a narrative place, old and contemporary at once. The Velan Center's physical space, with its four central columns, will amplify the osmotic effect that Miliani seeks between vertical and horizontal, inside and outside, two-dimensions and volume, and stasis and movement. It will create a visual pattern whose fixed elements are the works on the walls and variable elements are the dancers creating the performance.

Jacopo Miliani (Florence, 1979) lives and works in Milan. He studied at DAMS in Bologna and at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. Among his solo exhibitions are Knowledge is good, Videoteca GAM, Turin (2013), Do you believe in mirages? (2012), EX3, Florence, Playmakesplay (2012), Frutta gallery, Rome, and Rehearsal for an image (2010), Studio Dabbeni, Lugano. He has participated in many group exhibitions, including, most recently, in 2013, A Revolution is a spinning force at Appleton Square in Lisbon, Footnotes, Footstep at the CAC in Vilnius and Fig.5 at the David Roberts Art Foundation in London. Miliani is currently one of four artists selected by the MACRO in Rome for its Artists in Residence program.

We would like to thank for their invaluable support Daniela Chianini, director of Dam in Turin, the dancers Edoardo Cino, Cristina Michelauz, Davide Sansoldo and the galleries, Frutta, Rome, and Studio Dabbeni, Lugano. The exhibition will run from November 9 to December 7, 2013 with the following hours: Thursday to Saturday, 3:30 pm to 7:30 pm.