Imitación Controlada

In October 2024, Fondazione Morra Greco presented Imitación Controlada, the first Italian exhibition by artist Fidel García (Cuba, 1981). The City of Naples promoted and funded the project as part of the Contemporary Art 2024 programming. The complete program can be found on the website www.comune.napoli.it at this link.

The exhibition run from the 10th to the 24th of October 2024 in the Church of San Severo al Pendino setting.

The exhibition

Imitación Controlada consisted of a sound installation of the same name designed by Fidel García for the Pendino Church. Conceived by the artist during his residency in Naples in 2023 and born from reflections on concepts of freedom and control, the work explored the thin line separating masses and collectivity as well as institutions and power by linking the city of Naples to that of Havana.

Imitación Controlada is a “simulator of communal behavior” whose physical and sonic space is enacted by recordings of the celebrations erupted in the city after the victory of the soccer championship – collected during his stay at Fondazione Morra Greco – and recordings of the streets of Havana during the COVID-19 pandemic, in early 2020. These repertoires of sounds have coalesced into an up-to-date database titled “Mass Hysteria”, formalized for the first time on this occasion.

The installation, bound to a sculptural space, acts as a traversable topography traced by the uncontrolled hysteria of the masses in celebration or turmoil. The sound carpet weaved by the recordings is then rewired into a hybrid “controlled” by the artist’s manipulative action. García emphasizes the perversion implicit in the concept of mass with a symbolic commotion, where boundaries of individuality dissolve into their own sum.

The impulse of the masses swarming indistinctly in moments of collective gathering prompts the artwork, later re-modulated by a sound technician within a reproducible environment. By reiterating and mirroring the paradoxical and subtle workings of regimes of control, Imitación Controlada raises questions on the role and concept of the individual within these contexts – all while recalling, with an “in vitro” reproduction of a system of control through artistic languages, García’s background and the specific context of the Island of Cuba.

The work’s placement in the Church’s central nave amplified the installation’s sonic impact, reiterating the architectural redundancy of the place that housed it as well as institutionalized power structures and dynamics of control.
Engaging in a dialogue with the Pendino Church, its now deconsecrated status and the architectural aspect of the work, Imitación Controlada reflected on the biopolitical structures that frame and regulate our conditions of existence.

Public Program

As part of the exhibition Imitación Controlada by Fidel García, Fondazione Morra Greco developed various in-depth activities to engage the audience.

Imitación Controlada offered unconventional opportunities to get to know and explore the sonic, kinaesthetic and relational aspect of the city of Naples and urban spaces as a whole, using the body as a research medium. The public programme, sorted by type of activity (guided tours, workshops and talks), language and audience, aimed to introduce and broaden how one reads the urban landscape using the relationship between collectivity and singularity, urban space and social phenomena as a starting point.

In continuous collaboration with local schools, universities, associations as well as educational and social institutions, the Foundation proposed experiential, community-based itineraries aimed at dissecting the exhibition and its themes – mainly conformism, control and collectivity – through a multidisciplinary and transversal approach.

The rooms of the Church of San Severo al Pendino became spaces for gathering and listening, where visitors delved into the contents of the exhibition through talks with experts, participatory workshops conceived by students of local Academies and Universities, ad hoc guided tours and sensory walks in the building and its surroundings to reread urban pathways in a poignant way.

Calendar

Monday – Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6.00 pm | Guided tours

10 October 2024 | 5:00 pm | Opening and guided tour with artist Fidel García

11 October 2024 | 12:00 pm | The artist meets students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples
What is the role of art in society? Can art be a space of plurality, inclusion and democracy? Fidel Garcia talks about his practice to the students of the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples.

Saturday 12, Tuesday 15, Thursday 17, Saturday 19 October | 4:00 – 6:00 | In ascolto. Suoni, corpi, spazi (Listening. Sounds, Bodies, Spaces)
Can the body be an instrument of action as well as a landscape that collects and paints itself based on perceptions, emotions, habits, encounters? The workshop, developed in collaboration with the Departments of Education and Art Mediation of the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, focuses on the body’s ability to detect and record information, using our senses as research tools.

Saturday 12 e Saturday 19 October | 10:00 am – 12:00 pm | La città diviene poesia. Percorso emozionale urbano (The city becomes poetry. Urban Emotional Path)
Workshop for kids (8 – 13) and families
The workshop presents pathways to explore, read and write stories where the city, its sounds, its inhabitants and urban incursions act as a background, to build a common perspective on the concept of citizenship. The project was developed in collaboration with the Departments of Education and Mediation of the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples.

17 October 2024 | 5:00 – 6:30 pm | L’arte come agente di cambiamento collettivo
Inspired by the work of Fidel García, the conversation explores the relationship between art and community by presenting different artistic practices between digital art, theatre and performance. These experiences represent some possible relationships between artists and the community, creating new planes of expression and new modes of collaboration from the co-design to the management of the work, to the evolution of its value. Contemporary art intertwines with local communities, creating new planes of expression and new modes of collaboration from co-design to the management of the work itself and the evolution of its value.
Francesca Nicolais, Riot Studio
talks with
Oriana Persico, Cyberecologista and artist
Anna Gesualdi and Giovanni Trono, Teatringestazione

18 October 2024 | 11:00 – 12:30 | FeelingSpaceInStatuariaFormaPlastica
Workshop organised by Maria D’Ambrosio and the embodied education group as part of the Laboratorio MADRI
With its group of mothers and children from the Forcella neighbourhood, the Laboratorio MADRI, involved in the work on relational quality explored and extended through the tactile and kinetic sphere, opens up and meets Fidel García’s installation. An extraordinary occasion that confronts the monumentality and sacredness of the church and makes it a space of experience to become a performative part in statuesque, plastic form of the artist’s site-specific work.
Workshop hosted by Maria D’Ambrosio and Gennaro De Fabbio

18 October 2024 | 13:30 – 15:30 | TO LISTEN! d’UnAltroCantoPossibileCheMutaInCorpoPlastico
Workshop organised by Maria D’Ambrosio and the embodied education group
Event open to experience Fidel García’s installation as a forming space crossed by performative methodologies for those who wish to cross the threshold and inhabit the space, so that they may be enchanted to feel themselves resonating in those places, increasing their capacity for listening, thanks to Fidel García’s work of which they become a part.
Workshop hosted by Maria D’Ambrosio and Nicola Gabriele

22 October 2024 | 10:30 am – 6:00 pm | Musei al Centro (Centering the Museum)
Discover more on the dedicated page
A day of study and experiential practices to reflect on the role of the museum as a tool for well-being, whether it be social, physical and cognitive. Intended specifically for museum professionals, educators, curators and of course students. Taking place partly at the Church of San Severo al Pendino, as part of the public program of the exhibition “Imitación Controlada,” conceived as part of the call for contemporary art by the Municipality of Naples, and partly in the spaces of the Fondazione Morra Greco.

24 October 2024 | 12:00 pm | Visit with the Curator
For the last day of the exhibition a visit of Imitación Controlada by Fidel García with curator Giulia Pollicita will take place.

24 October 2024 | 5:00 – 6:30 pm | Democracy and Collectivity. Imaginaries, perspectives, narratives
The relationship between Democracy and Community is complex: while democracy is based on the existence of one or more communities that support it, an excess of community cohesion can undermine its balance. Into this space of tension comes art, which acts as a means of expression and communication, offering individuals and communities the chance to tell their stories, to share experiences of participation, identity and otherness. Although democracy does not need art to function, it does need art to reflect, represent and make visible the social and political dynamics, imaginaries and languages that run through it.
Art thus becomes a powerful tool of social mobilisation, capable of giving voice to those who often remain on the margins and inspiring profound changes in society. In this panel, organised as a round table, the intrinsic link between democracy, community and art will be discussed. It will be an opportunity for discussion in a circular and participatory manner, involving both the speakers and the audience in an open and inclusive dialogue.
Alessandro Arienzo, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
talks with
Marta Cariello, Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli
Alessandro Rocco, Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro

Artist bio

Fidel García, 1981. Lives and works in Havana, graduated at the National Academy of Fine Arts, San Alejandro, Havana, CU, in 2002, then at the Department of Art conduct (Directed by artist Tania Brugera), Havana, CU in 2005 and the Higher Institute of Art, Havana, CU, in 2008. From this date onwards García starts developing his work through residency programs as KulturKontakt Residency – Austrian Federal Chancellery, Vienna, AT in 2016, Rijksakademie van beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, NL in 2011, Residence Organhaus (Triangle Arts Trust), Chongqing, CN in 2009 or the Residence Learning Site (Group N 55), (Prince Claus Fund), Copenhagen, DK in 2006, meanwhile participating in collective and personal Exhibitions, Workshop, Biennials, among which are ’Liquid Sensibilities’ Grants & Commissions Program, ’CIFO (Cisneros – Fontanals Art Foundation)’, Art Center South Florida, Miami, Florida, US in 2016, ’XII Biennal of Havana’, Contemporary Center of Art Wilfredo Lam, Havana, CU and ’Global Control and Censorship’ ’Globale’, ZKM Media Museum (Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie), Karlsruhe, DE both in 2015 or 2023 ‘Outsider’, National Museum of Fine Arts, Havana, CU.
Fidel García conceives art as a medium or platform, using a wide range of tools, fields of knowledge, scientific phenomena: all agents that are external to art but still operate within structures of power and control. They help his work generate a discourse that in fact challenges their own resources, detonating the pillars of the same systems they respond to.
A few themes and strategies are central to his research, from which he has developed a variety of works, such as: territorial control; failures or mistakes in mechanisms of control, such as telecommunications; the nature of different fluxes of information, as media for building Reality and strategies used to destabilize systems.

Further information: www.fidelgarcia.net

Fidel García in Naples

Fidel García conceived the exhibition during his residency at Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples in 2023.

This residency is part of an exchange program promoted by Fondazione Morra Greco and funded by resources of the Global Forum – Contemporary Art Exhibitions EDI 2021 project, per an agreement signed in Havana between the same Foundation, the CNAP Consejo Nacional Artes Plásticas, the atelier Taller Chullima and the Institute of Cooperation and Development Italy Cuba, with the moral patronage of the Embassy of Cuba in Italy.