A project for Florence 
curated by Chiara Bertola and Stephan Köhler

The Department of Culture of the City of Florence and Frittelli arte contemporanea promote the Florentine stage of “La rencontre”...! Venise-Florence...! by Georges Adéagbo, who is considered the most important artist in West Africa and who has been widely recognized in Europe for some years now. Two cities, two places rich in history involved in constructing Adéagbo's “encounter” with western culture: if in the past months Venice and the Fondazione Querini Stampalia have been an extraordinary source of inspiration for him, Florence and Palazzo Vecchio will be the new occasion that will even involve two exhibition venues.

The first installation is specifically conceived for the rooms of the Museum of Palazzo Vecchio, the political centre and symbol of the city, while the second is presented in the exhibition space of the Frittelli arte contemporanea gallery.
 

The exhibition at the Museum of Palazzo Vecchio

For the first time, the Museum of Palazzo Vecchio will open the Quartieri Monumentali to an exhibition of contemporary art. Georges Adéagbo will realize a site-specific project born from the relationship between the history of Florence and the contemporary vision of a West African artist: an alienating gaze originated from the encounter of two such different cultures. The books and ancient maps of the Library, the cycles of frescoes, the artworks distributed in the Museum, but also the ancient musical instruments and the depictions of the world in the Sala delle Mappe, such as the sounds and colors of the city, its architecture, monuments, and the people who populate it, become for the artist an inexhaustible source of inspiration for constructing his “encounter” with Florence. 

In his art-making, Adéagbo highlights the difficulties of people living apart and seeking contact: “...close, separated by a high wall, each one hears each other's noises, but have only a vague idea of how the others live. Eventually one of them builds a ladder, climbs up it and gets a glimpse of who the others are and how they live.”

In the rooms of the Museo di Palazzo Vecchio, Adéagbo intervenes with small wooden sculptures, books, everyday objects, papers and paintings by artists from Benin, making them dialogue and react with the environment and the works charged with history and meaning. Presences never in the foreground, but rather placed/hidden/committed to fill and saturate the void, the unoccupied, the edge, the margin. 

The idea of Adéagbo's project invites us to rethink our history in the conviction that an “other” gaze can help us not only to understand the time in which we live, but also to see our past in a different way, interwoven with this condition of relativity and confrontation that we otherwise risk losing.

A gaze unencumbered by the superstructures of Western culture allows a “third” space to emerge in which new interpretative categories take shape that go beyond the traditional Africa/Europe relationship. The artist's action is like a plough stirring up clods, bringing to light what was previously buried, asleep in time.

This is what is asked of us by the artist in order to discover the past not only as memory, but as action, transformation, as living matter and not as a motionless concept.
 

The exhibition at Frittelli arte contemporanea 

The spaces of Frittelli arte contemporanea gallery host the artwork that Georges Adéagbo has realized for Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice: the encounter between Venice and Florence "La rencontre"...Venise - Florence...! Here the gaze expands over the whole of western society represented by a multiplicity of objects (newspaper excerpts, photographs, used books, vinyl records, umbrellas, bottles, etc.) that, like traces of our culture, dialogue with artefacts from the artist's homeland, composed in a great visionary fresco, a reflected image of our complexity and contradiction.

You need just one look at the composition on the long white walls covered with a continuous flow of things and words to evoke the thousand voices of our time, the thousand languages that separate us, and that here speak united.