"untitled", 1998 - 2011, adaptation for mezzaterra11 - flat gallery
Courtesy of the artist
“(...) we wanted to start quietly; after all, it is a project intended to be discreet.”
mezzaterra11 – flat gallery, created by two artists, MinJi Kim and Alessandro Dal Pont based in Berlin, is an experimental project space where contemporary art works from international artists are introduced.
The idea of this project was born with two reasons: social and artistic. The social motivation is from our emotional and voluntary contribution to regenerate urban decay of the historic center of Belluno, Italy. By witnessing the growing vacancy of houses and shops over the recent years, we couldn’t help but think of artists as social role players. On this occasion, we decided to bring/introduce contemporary art most people in the town are not so familiar with. And the artistic reason is that we have created a conceptual space, playing with the world today in digital ubiquity and classical values accompanying their resistance. We mixed traditional terms of duration and materiality of the exhibition space with a format of digital flatness in which we re-define it containing a conceptual volume like a compressed space. This project space is physically and independently located in the street of Mezzaterra, Belluno, Italy, and yet it appears to be unconventional: the solid space and artworks are presented in flat as if they are translated for a digital platform, i.e. from white cube–a space in volume–to white square–a space zipped to be flat.
The exhibitions run in two spaces: online and offline. The offline space is a print as a format of a solo exhibition which is on the street level, exposed to the air, vulnerably, without glass or any protection; thus, it breathes and reflects its environment. On the other hand, the online space, the website, keeps permanent and inalterable digital flatness. mezzaterra11 – flat gallery combines characteristics of those two different spaces; and brings them to extremes, which leads to a paradox in the end: a print turns into a gallery; documentation images replace artworks; a layout for the print becomes an exhibition installation; and it allows a long physical temporal duration–free from compulsion of breathless online reproduction every second.
From January 1, 2015, mezzaterra11 – flat gallery begins with the exhibitions by the creators of the project, MinJi Kim and Alessandro Dal Pont, starting with #00 and #01. We’d prefer to inaugurate the project to be introduced as quietly and naturally as possible.
