DRAWN ONWARD is an exchange project between P/////AKT in Amsterdam (NL) and Progetto Diogene in Turin (IT). Both organisations operate on a non-for-profit basis and are interested in establishing a dialogue with emerging artistic talents. The aim of this collaboration is to share audiences, networks and experiences and to support and promote the work of artists on an international platform.
After a successful first collaboration in 2016, Progetto Diogene and P/////AKT – in partnership with Barriera – decided to continue the mutual collaboration in 2017 with a new edition of the exchange program. The artists invited for the project’s second edition are: Francesco Pedraglio (IT, lives and works in Mexico City) and Paul Geelen (NL, lives and works in Amsterdam). Each of them will spend a two-month residency period followed by a solo exhibition. The exchange project offers the artists the possibility to produce new work on location – conceived specifically for the given space and context – and to present it to an international audience.
Francesco Pedraglio – at P/////AKT, Amsterdam (NL)
Residency period: 1 April – 28 May 2017
Solo exhibition: Scripting Anticlockwise – Thinging part III – 7 May – 4 June 2017. Opening: 6 May, 20-24 hrs
Paul Geelen – at Progetto Diogene, Turin (IT)
Residency period at Progetto Diogene: 24 April – 18 June 2017
Solo exhibition: Chance Encounter at Barriera: 9 June – 1 July 2017.
Opening: 8 June, 18.30 hrs
About the artists
Francesco Pedraglio is interested in storytelling as a tool to decode intimate encounters with both mundane and historically complex situations. He looks at how the process of narrating and staging – oneself, or a situation – influences the relationship between teller and listener, making visible the fantasies and fictions that constitute our reality.
The starting point of Pedraglio’s practice – being performance, sculpture, installation, prints, films – is writing. A curious detail, an overheard rumour, a banal incident, anything could spark some telling. And it’s in the movement from the written text to the live action, from the live action to a staged installation or a film that the exploration of language, fiction and reality-making occurs.
Francesco Pedraglio was born in Como (IT) in 1981. He lives and works in Mexico City.
In his sculptural installations Paul Geelen questions the individual and final shape through a dualistic and process-based approach. Convinced that our experience of life ultimately transcends the feasible, the work will temporarily solidify and serve as a model, proof, valve or breath. He upends expected meanings, plays with context, and even shields his works from viewers in the present moment.
From 2004 to 2008 he studied at the AKV | St. Joost in Breda. In 2014 he completed his two-year residency at de Ateliers in Amsterdam. Recent exhibitions include: Sliding under traces – A Tale of Tub, Rotterdam (2016), Survival Blur – Grey Light Projects, Brussels (2015), Percussive Hunter – Akbank Sanat, Istanbul (2015), Axis Mundi (Art as a healing tool) – Moinsun, Paris (2015), The Hidden Picture – Cobra Museum, Amstelveen (2014), Offspring – de Ateliers, Amsterdam (2014) and Æon Flux at P///// AKT, Amsterdam (2014).
Paul Geelen was born in Weert (NL) in 1983. He lives and works in Amsterdam.
Information on the partner organisations
Progetto Diogene is an association which was established in Turin in 2007, thanks to the interaction and collaboration of artists who chose to work together to build a place for reflection, listening and exchange around the topics and methods of contemporary art practice. Guided by the need and the desire to dig in their own work and to share certain issues in discussion with other artists and with the public, they started to think of a process of mutual exchange, in order to show mechanisms of the artistic practice and to define the role of the artist nowadays. The main projects they deal with are Bivaccourbano, a residence for international artists; DiogeneLab, an educational workshop with the schools of the district; Serie inversa, studio visits and exhibitions of artists working in Piedmont; Collecting people, a series of conferences and debates, and Solid Void a training school for artists. Through each of these projects, Diogene’s goals are directed in specific directions and records innovations in the execution methodology. Since 2009 Progetto Diogene has a particular headquarters: a 50’s tram, finely restored, located in a large green roundabout between Corso Regio Parco and Corso Verona, in the Aurora district of Turin.
Barriera is a non-profit association located in Turin. It has been founded in 2007 by a group of contemporary art enthusiasts with the aim to promote initiatives, exhibitions and events in the field of contemporary art while encouraging the work of young international artists.
The project is supported by Mondriaan Fonds.
