Federico Bonelli

Born in Rome 13-06-1969, lives in Amsterdam since 2002 Download as pdf here: Art-Statement.pdf

Poetic

My own philosophy is expressed through dialogue. In encounters with people, nature, knowledge and with my own imagination.

Arts is a form of magic. And has to be conjured to exist. The arts allow the embodiment of dialogue in outcomes of actions that are performed in the world.

To be able to act in the world, Chaos, both as fear of the dark abyss and as richness of the unknown, has to be taken into account and confronted.

Art as dialogue exists within a situation, inhabited by someone, with degrees of freedom we cannot control. Nature, circumstances, an audience or a cloud. My philosophical dialogue is made of moments in which I have to listen and in those in which I have to think, pause or talk. Allows silences, as when two friends meet after many years, and the arguments flows back for them unscathed by the time that passed.

My take on the art of the century is that calls to be a TRASFORMATORE, an artwork has to have a law of evolution and act upon this law to represent and change a given situation. A transformer can be a dynamic painting that lives on a wall, a game, a performance, a movie that re edit itself, an artist manifesto that reshuffle its concepts according to some esoteric algorithm. As human beings this is the golden way to suffer, observe, test, move, research, enjoy, destroy, panic, laugh, love and learn.

Processes, like paths walked in company, are remembered documented or transformed into stories that shift while they are told.

Sometimes as finished artworks those processes are left to stand on their own, often in company of strangers. To be loved, hated, ignored, bullied or laughed on, cherish or bought, kept as precious for generations or be forgotten, even by you. If is not released in the world an artwork is only a ghostly piece of ego. To release in the appropriate way is an act of love and fate.

I am a learner that aims to become wise.

I have published a book of prose and poetry, Altrove. Storie da qualche altra parte, Farandula, 2014 ISBN 9781326442439 that you can find on lulu.com (with permission of the editor, that has gone out of business in 2016)

Professional

Humanist, Practitioner. I earned a degree in Philosophy with a thesis on Chaos and Complex Systems. I studied history of science, history of mathematics, the renaissance of sciences in Tor Vergata in 1990es wiith Lucio Russo. I learned to read from him the esoteric teachings that border the ideology of arts and sciences in a similar way, as "fossiles of ideas"; I practiced for 25 years in the digital and performative arts in all kind of roles and capacity.

I have been inspired by futurism freedom and energy. I investigated new art forms, that arise from the practical, societal and theoretical possibilities of digitization. I worked as consultant and an entrepreneur in the field of art lead innovation. In the last 10 years has developed a different approach to innovation that took me to collaborate with the European Commission and with the Max Planck Institute.

I am the founder of the Trasformatorio Foundation and its artistic director.

To create with others, in cooperation and community, allowing self organization and emergence of the unexpected is the way I operate. I strive to invent ways to change situations into encounters and people's attention into a state of wonder. I believe in the thaumaturgical role of arts.

I am interested into flow, principles that shape improvisation and in surprised enlightenment. I wish for a technology that is to be used at night in a wood, after a walk, and is as effective as a fire and a story. I use hacking because it is a form of poetic use of technology that I have been part of since my youth.

Selected work and active projects

Visual Arts: Protoquadro, generative painting (2003-2023)

Protoquadro is a painting technique conceived using digital supports to produce objects that will stand into a space as paintings used to. It pertains to the realm of Generative art.

Protoquadro objects have some characteristics of a painting and some of a totally new class of objects, therefore the name, formed by the Greek term "protos" (first) and the Italian "quadro" (painting).

All of these ideas are based on the concept of transformation through Synchronicity. The painting has to evolve in time, this evolution has to be connected to the situation where it was conceived and to the material chosen to compose it.

Existing Protoquadro are based on photographic material, a compositing idea and a rule of evolution.

Very relevant to the spirit of the existing objects has been the Italian Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni. He writes in his own book about painting:

"We synthesize all instants (of time, place, form, color-tone) and we build the painting upon them. And this painting, as an independent organism, has its own law, and the elements that made it obey to this law, creating as such, the similarity of the painting with itself"

(Umberto Boccioni, 1914)

Recording of a fragment of EPQ-ICE-Z-01 https://vimeo.com/47003916 (2010)

Recent shows, catalogues and mentions:

2024 - Collective "Le Latitudini dell'arte VI", Genova, Curated by Virginia Monteverde
2024 - Collective "Etherea Universo Digitale", Genova
2023 - Understanding Karl Marx through Love, Curator. Hsiao Ying LAI, Taitung (ROC)
2022 - Pasolini lo sguardo del contemporaneo, Den Haag, ISBN 978-88-6057-542-5
2021 - Latiutudini dell'arte IV Edition, Pulchri, Den Haag, ISBN 9-789062-169023
2019 - Latitudini dell'arte IV edition, Palazzo Ducale, Genova , Catalog ISBN 978-88-9339-169-6
2018 - BIAS, Biennale dell'arte sacra e delle religioni del mondo, Palermo
2016 - BIAS Biennale dell'arte sacra e delle religioni del mondo, Palermo ISBN 978-88-942293-0-1

Happening for Movie Camera, Cinema Solubile and Performative Cinema

I am very much interested about Cinema. Digital Cinema allows to expand the palette of the maker, as well as brake up the format, in the sense of trasformatore, so to say to work not only at the level of artifact but as well at the meta level of rules of evolution or situation. This is how I conceptualized my experiments into cinema.

CINEMA SOLUBILE: First experiments in time were grouped under the name of "Cinema Solubile", a performative futurist forma for a spectacle, were 11 makers were called to participate to a "impossible" task, to make in 23 hours a short film according or against the rules of the 1914 Futurist Manifesto of Cinema. The short film should have been maximum 6'22"11 frames long, could be realised with any technique that allowed the viewer to receive it as cinema, projected on a dark screen ad viewed together. After the vision of the clip the original would be destroyed by the maker on stage. The stage, presented by me, was composed by an orchestra of musical improvisation and of the vision, the first night, of fragments of futurist cinema and poetry. The format started in 2006, in de Melkweg, Amsterdam, and had 10 editions so far in Europe.

HAPPENING FOR MOVIE CAMERA the film is the mover of a process, that includes all the people participating performing for the camera. The viewer can access the point of view of the camera but the artwork is the creation of the film itself, again, creating the situation, the connections, te collective vision, that justify the performance. Is to be performed in single shots, and you can see some examples here below

Apart of the use of Cinema as a performative element I have been designing, shooting, writing, performing with images and directing short movies. You can have an impression choosing on my vimeo channel what you like to see.

Trasformatorio Lab, artistic direction, 7 editions 2013-2023

Trasformatorio is an international laboratory focusing on research related to site-specific performance. It’s objective is to integrate the practice of the hacklab with the research over performative arts and sustainability and embrace the place is hosted in.

T#0 2013- Establishing the basics
T#1 2014- Limes, liminality; how small can you get
T#2 2017- Darkness
T#3 2018- Kintsugi
T#4 2020- Radio Antidoto
T#5 2021 In Absentia
T#6 2021 In Presentia
T#7 2023 – Chaos

Installation

BIAS Biennale (Palermo) 2016 Fotoarmonio: light-sound instrument/lamp; https://www.facebook.com/fotoarmonio; "La Porta" BIAS Biennale (Selinunte) 2017

Games in situation and situations created with games

Le Grand Jeu (2016 to present day) http://www.legrandjeu.net
Cinema Solubile, hybrid format between cinema, happening and performance (since 2006)
Happening for a movie Camera
- Cabaret Voltaire, 11 dancers for 11 artworks, performance in Daniel Spoerri Garden; example video https://vimeo.com/376314936
- The White people, Happening for a movie camera, RED digital camera, filato edit, 2011 https://vimeo.com/33310725
- Dante in Bergen, Cinematic performance, Bergen, Piksel festival 2011 https://vimeo.com/3275594

Sound art FM to Streaming (hybrid) radio station:

Radio Antidoto (2020). Community experimental radio See: www.radioantidoto.org 2020-2021

Project presented at the italian pavillion Venice Architecture Biennale 4 July 2021
Featured in the book "Quinto paesaggio. Concerti di idee in azione", D Editore 2021, ISBN 9788-89-4830613