Carola Bonfili. ‘The Stone Monkey’
18 — 19 November 2023
- Artists
- Carola Bonfili
- Curators
- Daniela Cotimbo and Ilaria Gianni
- Venues
- Centre d’Art la Capella
- A project by
- Centre d'Art La Capella & The Green Parrot
Supported by the Italian Council (2022), the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity, Italian Ministry of Culture
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The Stone Monkey is a work developed through two forms of media narrative: a CGI video trailer and a navigable VR environment that recounts the journey of a small monkey who suddenly witnesses certain parts of its body undergoing a slow process of petrification without any apparent reason and embarks on an initiatory path of healing. The work is part of Second Order Reality, a project that envisions the construction of a work in the form of a videogame inspired by the text La Tentation de Saint Antoine by Gustave Flaubert. The interest in the book stems from the description of the repeated hallucinatory states experienced by its protagonist, Saint Antoine Abbé. These liminal states can be associated, in some aspects, with virtual experiences where the perception of the body and that of the surrounding environment are presented in altered ways. The resulting story also stems from a collaboration with a group of children through workshops and explores the potential of the virtual to engage the visitor in a hybrid perceptual experience.
Carola Bonfili
- Artist
1981, Rome
Carola Bonfili lives and works between Brescia and Rome. Taking inspiration from natural forms and cognitive mechanics, her work is structured in multy-layered narrations that develop towards mixed source texts. AI principles, CGI, VR a/v environments and automatic writing are the main tools of her recent research. A performative matrix is often found in the production processes at the basis of her sculptural works and environmental installations, which are immersive in nature and tend to forms of transmedial narration.
Her work has been presented in various institutional locations in Italy and abroad, including: the MAXXI Museum, Rome; the Milan Triennial; the Los Angeles Italian Culture Institute; the GNAM National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rome; the Ludwig Museum, Budapest, the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva, MAMbo – Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, the MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome. She has received various prizes and awards, including the 2022 Italian Council 11th edition; the 2020 Re:humanism Prize; the 2011 LUM Prize; the 2008 2009 Rome Prize and the 2009 Strozzina Prize, Florence, while also participating in residences at the American Academy of Rome (2009) and MACRO, Rome (2012).
Works of hers in public collections include those at MAXXI Museum, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Farnesina Collection and the MACRO Museum in Rome. Since 2004 she has been working with Nero Editions, with which in 2011 she began publishing her Names of Numbers, a series of monographic books on drawing.
Daniela Cotimbo
Curator.
Ilaria Gianni
Curator
