Franco AriaudoActions, projects, performances, and everything else

Franco Ariaudo (Cuneo, 1979, lives and works in Turin), is an artist running along the border of disciplines, trying from time to time to break his personal (record). He wants to bring into question the look of the spectator, of the passer-by, of the participant, approaching him to something usual, i.e. the everyday life limits and challanges and the consequent attempt to cross the line. His artistic practice includes sculpture, the use of plastic materials, video, coordination of events and performance. Since 2011 he is a member of Progetto Diogene, Turin.

Pom Pomsmixed media installation 2013, at Khoj International Artists Association,New Delhi.This project has been supported by RESÒ

Pom Poms is a project that starts from an investigation into the world of 'Indian Premiere League‘ of cricket in New Delhi. During the period of residence in the city, I tried to immerse myself in the heart of 'IPL‘, actively attending games at the stadium, to personally experience all those inputs that the perfect machine of "cricketainement" offers, match after match, to the spectators. Colors, video cameras, trumpets, cheerleaders on the sideline enhance and hypnotize the crowd, which responds regularly with excited shouts and dances that go beyond the dynamics of the game and of organized supporters in the Western sense.The IPL is moving on a horizontal surface of superficiality, where perhaps reside instincts true and authentic, just because they can be easily shared: a bubble of fun with its own unwritten code but recognized by all. A place where one random shot in the stands may possibly change your life, or at least the evening. The IPL offers people a truth, an abnormal normality made of celebrations, dances and fizzy drinks. This is the context of my project, one that tries to calibrate its gaze with that of the people.

Starting from the simplicity and the "sincerity" which cheerleaders (or an idea of them) were implanted in Indian cricket, with preference given to aesthetics and winking instead of acrobatics, my work imagines an Indian antrophological background, visualized through an "Indianization" of iconographical and textual of covers of essays on the American history and spirit of cheerleading practice.

The Art Pacemaker_ a non-competitive running art guideperformance2013, Rome, Cosenza, Milan(in collaboration with Driant Zeneli)

Those who practice long distance running at a competitive level knows that, for example during a marathon, there is the figure of the "pacemaker", in charge of runners run the race at a steady pace to finish it in time indicated by the numbers written on the balloons that carry related to the vest, and do so as a reference point for athletes weaker or less experienced. In some cases, the pacemaker also acts as a motivator and driver urging his "followers" not to give up, providing instruction and valuable suggestions on the conduct of the race, in order to help them carry out in the best way the predetermined goal. The Art Pacemaker is a "race of the art", a guided tour of the galleries, foundations, non-profit spaces and museums in a particular city. a collective performance organized along the lines of an ordinary foot race (race package to the participants, refreshments, sponging, pasta party on arrival).We then visit the sites of contemporary artistic culture by alternating visits to the race. For each place visited, gallery or museum, we focus on a single work, where the artist introduces pacemaker work for runners. During these stops, as needed, are made simple exercises to loosen the muscles, breath or provides to refresh if prepared a snack.The rapid movements and dwell in a targeted manner from time to time on a single work, are aiming to achieve the feeling, once the race, he had not visited many places, but one big place of culture, as a museum expanded , reversing the sense of fragmentation between the individual locations.

QUESTO NON E’ PER GRANDIdigital print, text2012, Como.

Is a project realized during XVIII Advanced Course in Visual Arts at Fondazione Antonio Ratti. “Questo non è per grandi” (this is not for adults) is a rebuke received in a playground of Como…a sentence spoken by a child to claim its own space. To verify its effectiveness and allow its maximum disclosure, the sentence tries to use the communications channels of the exhibition becoming his poster.During the workshop I proposed to the others artists a debate about my project. With the aim of propose a certain problem to a community, and experiencing the sense of a democratic process in group decision, the project found its final form. The transcription of the debate was published on the catalogue of the Course as a part of the project.

Logos tu Staurosaction/video/installation/publication.2011-2012, Vione (Brescia).This project has been supported by Distretto Culturale Della Valle Camonica.

During an art residence, I was asked to work on a town, Vione. I was attracted by a small promontory next to the town, called Dòs delle Barbine. The area is part of people's life as a souvenir from the teenage period, and it is now neglected. At the top of the promontory, there was an iron cross in n advanced state of deterioration, which has mostly, and strangely represented a decorative element during these years keeping the area safe from property speculation. The heart of my project leaned to remove the cross from a place that never knew it as a religious element to let it go among its people in the shape of objects-relics after the transformation of its metal. The people from Vione became the keepers of a both intimate and general object-witness.

Museumrunningvideo HD, stereo, 8’54’'2012, Turin.

During his breaks, a restorer takes advantage of his possibility to enter places closed to the public to explore them.A breakneck speed run through the hidden parts of a mazy and uncommon Turin Egypt Museum. An architecture full of surreal paradoxes, and lived through the frenzied eye of a visitor who is not looking for anything and not finding anything, just covering far and wide the turin museums’ flagship to the edge of an off limits sports experience.

Untitled_Italia Giovane Statomixed media, cm 7x7x72011.

A cube of Rubik, where the only colours are green white and red to recall clearly the italian national flag. The cube's nature is already rotten, it is a broken toy whose faces hide its real being to seek a different aim: to be something different, alienated from itself. Its laws are subverted, the flag's colours will never compose the correct sequence, the brainteaser cannot be solved.

Into The Wildaction/video.2012, Poirino (Turin).

During a three weeks residency, I went through a crisis, and my emotional distress became a displacement action. I found an element, an elm bonsai seen as a transposition of myself, and I started on it a state of crisis to empathize the artist with the bonsai, a similarity between our two existences and the vicissitudes that daily life would have reserved to both of us.

To B.installation and audio track2010

I've been very keen on music since my adolescence, on wind instruments, and on trumpet above all. The dream stayed unfulfilled until I finally got my economic independence. At 24 years of age, I bought myself a brand new silver trumpet. After a couple of weeks spent in solitary exercises, I understood I wouldn't have gone too far as a self-taught man, then I started asking around for a teacher. A regular customer at my town's jazz club gave me a young talented trumpeter's telephone number, who could coach me at a reasonable price. Then I called him, and he told me we could have met for the first lesson the day after. This is the way I met B. Since the beginning, B. and I developed a good relationship. I felt his refinement and patience to me, the way he tried to get along with my urge, trying to make me exercise without I got bored, on things I liked, on easy Chet Backer's and Miles Davis' solos... he looked as he could perfectly understand the nature of my fascination, a twenty-five years old' s one to a world that would have hardly become his own.After a few months, indeed, my enthusiasm started to drop off, the way it happens to some kind of love stories. At one point, I realized I could no longer afford exercises, my early giant steps had stopped, and I had to decide what part of my life I wanted to consecrate to music and if I really wanted to be a trumpeter. To choose... I chose to be a visual artist, and this is how B. and I lost sight f each other.And today, after six years, something that keeps me linked to my short musical past, apart my trumpet, are three objects of B.: a trumpet mouthpiece, an analogue tuner, and an old handbook for trumpet and horn that I had borrowed from B. to practice and I had forgotten to give back to him.I was browsing through the jazz club program in the town I left five years ago, this morning, and I read about a concert “tribute to B.”. Becoming suspicious, I quickly search in the net, and discover that last September B. died during a cycling tour. I keep in my hand the three objects which don't belong to me, I feel their weight, I turn them on the other side, and decide to use them in my new work. It' s a recording during which I'll try to live again my first trumpet lesson B. held with me, thinking over choices one has to take in life, what I decided to be, and to pay homage to B.

Turin, November 13th, 2010

Waiting for Primierafound playing cards1994-...

Playing cards found randomly on the street in twenty years, one at a time. Incidental and unintentional findings. They involve dynamics of popular superstitions in connection with existential speculations about the question: is this a card mach against God or the rest of the world?

Pulseinstallation2008

A picture of the Globe printed on transparent paper, enlighted by the rear by a powerful blue flashes in slow intermittence: it is the simulation of Earth’s ill heart.The work avoids easy ecological campaigns, to stimulate the alarm bell ring inside of the body of the spectator, because of the difficult perception of the work.Pulse, intrudes for a short instant into the spectator’s eye, an instant of consciousness that realizes in its peripheral lines by the painful eye’s discovering. The overimpressed image lays in the observer’s retina after a violent lightning that cuts out any further attempt of investigation.

Apnea2012a project of Progetto Diogene (www.progettodiogene.eu)

Mayol said to me: “If you want to dive with me, give up your human personality, take off your diver watch. You should not have any other goal but this: every time you dive you must go deep into your feelings and, in order to do that, you cannot be concerned with the meters of depth or the seconds in apnea.”Umberto PelizzariPoetry Slam has been called “art of sport and sport of art”. It started in the USA, where Mark Kelly Smith is credited with starting the project in the second half of the 80s, and it aims to approach public to poetry again. More recently, in 2001, the Dutch artist Iepe Rubingh transported from a comic strip into reality a nonexistent sport, Chessboxing, carrying on his aim to approach public to contemporary art again. An artist from Genova, Giorgia Vian, chooses the pole-jumping as research field, and the runner Marco Olmo, one of the greatest exponents of ultra marathons, exalts sport's spiritual side. The meetings intend to start a research on the less known sport's side to general public, the psychological training, and to show how close are the approach to sports disciplines and the one to art.If technical aspects are different from sport to sport, somehow psychological training is the red shed connecting all of them: analysis of sensations, motivation, concentration, visualization, identification with the surroundings, performance. It is matter of going beyond one's body, beyond the realm of chronometers and heart rate monitors. It is the forgotten realm of every human action, even the sports' one.

FRANCO ARIAUDOBorn in Cuneo on 07/02/1979Lives and works in Torino, via Vigone 45+39 338 3894323ariaudo@hotmail.comwww.francoariaudo.comwww.progettodiogene.eu

Education1998-2003Academy of Fine Art of Florence.

Exhibitions2013"The Arena, The Imagination & The Body", Khoj Internationa Artists Association,New Delhi, India. Curator: Simrat Dugal.

2012“VIVA Performance, International Performance Festival”, Cosenza,Curators: Tania Bruguera, Cristiana Perrella.“Vetrinale, contemporary art festival”, Rome. presentation of theperformance “The Art Pacemaker”, Curator: Cecilia Casorati.“Corso Aperto 2012” XVIII Advanced Course in Visual Arts; FondazioneAntonio Ratti- Como, Curators: Andrea Lissoni, Annie Ratti“Torinover_one year tour”, Torino-Edimburgo- Rotterdam- Bordeaux-Glasgow, Curators: Elisa Lenhard, Francesa Solero.

2011“Italia Giovane Stato”, Cuneo, Curator: Enrico Perotto.

2010“Premio Città di Treviglio”, Treviglio, BG. Curator Sara Fontana“ZooInCittà”, site specific installation, CN. Curated by Art.Ur association.

2008“Nuove Forme Artistiche nella Comunicazione Contemporanea”, EspaciOccitan,CN. Curated by Liberi Artisti association.

2007"Protocollo Lovelock, equilibri molesti", Palazzo della Provincia, CN.Curator: Claudio Cravero.

2006"Kentu Concas, Kentu Berrittas- Cronache d' Arte Contemporanea", CasaChironi, NU. Curated by Madriche association."ZOOART", Giardini Fresia, CN. Curated by Thees association."Ispirina C, Idee a Lento Rilascio", Spazio LS, CUNEO. Curator: OrnellaCalvetti.

Workshops and residency programs2013Residency Program at Khoj Intenational Artists Association, New Delhi.

2012Viva Performance Lab, Cosenza (visiting professors Tania Bruguera, Joshua Okhon).Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Corso Superiore di Arti Visive “SiamoDavvero Liberi? Are We Really Free?”, Como (visiting professor LilianaMoro).

2011Aperto 2011_art on the border, Alta Valle Camonica, BS (visitingprofessors Andrea caretto/Raffaella Spagna).

2010Fondazione Spinola Banna per l’Arte,Poirino, Torino (visitingprofessor Liliana Moro).

2009C/o Galleria Franco Soffiantino, Torino “laboratorio sull’abolizionedell’autocensura nelle pratiche artistiche” with Cesare Pietroiusti.

FRANCO ARIAUDOBorn in Cuneo on 07/02/1979Lives and works in Torino, via Vigone 45+39 338 3894323ariaudo@hotmail.comwww.francoariaudo.comwww.progettodiogene.eu

Education1998-2003Academy of Fine Art of Florence.

Exhibitions2013"The Arena, The Imagination & The Body", Khoj Internationa Artists Association,New Delhi, India. Curator: Simrat Dugal.

2012“VIVA Performance, International Performance Festival”, Cosenza,Curators: Tania Bruguera, Cristiana Perrella.“Vetrinale, contemporary art festival”, Rome. presentation of theperformance “The Art Pacemaker”, Curator: Cecilia Casorati.“Corso Aperto 2012” XVIII Advanced Course in Visual Arts; FondazioneAntonio Ratti- Como, Curators: Andrea Lissoni, Annie Ratti“Torinover_one year tour”, Torino-Edimburgo- Rotterdam- Bordeaux-Glasgow, Curators: Elisa Lenhard, Francesa Solero.

2011“Italia Giovane Stato”, Cuneo, Curator: Enrico Perotto.

2010“Premio Città di Treviglio”, Treviglio, BG. Curator Sara Fontana“ZooInCittà”, site specific installation, CN. Curated by Art.Ur association.

2008“Nuove Forme Artistiche nella Comunicazione Contemporanea”, EspaciOccitan,CN. Curated by Liberi Artisti association.

2007"Protocollo Lovelock, equilibri molesti", Palazzo della Provincia, CN.Curator: Claudio Cravero.

2006"Kentu Concas, Kentu Berrittas- Cronache d' Arte Contemporanea", CasaChironi, NU. Curated by Madriche association."ZOOART", Giardini Fresia, CN. Curated by Thees association."Ispirina C, Idee a Lento Rilascio", Spazio LS, CUNEO. Curator: OrnellaCalvetti.

Workshops and residency programs2013Residency Program at Khoj Intenational Artists Association, New Delhi.

2012Viva Performance Lab, Cosenza (visiting professors Tania Bruguera, Joshua Okhon).Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Corso Superiore di Arti Visive “SiamoDavvero Liberi? Are We Really Free?”, Como (visiting professor LilianaMoro).

2011Aperto 2011_art on the border, Alta Valle Camonica, BS (visitingprofessors Andrea caretto/Raffaella Spagna).

2010Fondazione Spinola Banna per l’Arte,Poirino, Torino (visitingprofessor Liliana Moro).

2009C/o Galleria Franco Soffiantino, Torino “laboratorio sull’abolizionedell’autocensura nelle pratiche artistiche” with Cesare Pietroiusti.