The performance in Le Corbusier’s pavilion, which is 100 years old

Five costumes animate the structure designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret in Adelaide Cioni's performance at Arte Fiera.

Adelaide Cioni is the protagonist of this year's collaboration between the Furla Foundation and Arte Fiera, the annual event that enlivens Bologna with events and initiatives related to contemporary art. Her artistic practice explores abstraction, colour, the origin of form and the concept of pattern, themes that take shape in Five Geometric Songs, a performance work created especially for the event.

Adelaide Cioni, Ab ovo / On Patterns, 2023, Mimosa House, London, UK. Courtesy Mimosa House, London; P420, Bologna e The Approach, London. Foto Lewis Ronald

The performance has a double origin: on the one hand, it is the natural development of a work previously curated by Cioni, Song for a Square, a Circle, a Triangle, presented in 2023; on the other hand, it stems from the study of the extraordinary space in which it will be hosted, the L'Esprit Nouveau pavilion, designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret and presented in 1925 at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris. Faithfully reconstructed in Bologna in 1977, the pavilion perfectly embodies the poetics of the French master and is composed of two parts: a living cell and a circular space, the "Diorama", designed to display some of the projects presented during the exhibition.

Drawing a pattern is like intoning a song.

Adelaide Cioni

Adelaide Cioni, Song for a Square, a Circle, a Triangle, 2023, performance, Mimosa House, London, UK. Courtesy Mimosa House, London; P420, Bologna e The Approach, London. Foto Tim Smyth

The relationship between the pure forms, colours and characteristic elements of the Pavilion inspired Adelaide Cioni to create the 'signs' of her performance, which interpret architecture through a new level of meaning. Through five costumes, the work recalls the semantic vocabulary that has spanned the entire history of art: the line, the point, the square, the triangle and the circle. The relationship between these elements gives rise to visual patterns whose communicative power lies in their ability to speak directly to human perception through repetition and rhythm. A pattern is, in fact, the visualisation of a rhythm, a music transformed into an image; as Cioni says, "drawing a pattern is like intoning a song".

Adelaide Cioni, Bozzetto, 2023. Courtesy l'artista, P420, Bologna, and The Approach, London

With Dom Bouffard's original music and the dancers' movement, the patterns in which the dancers are dressed take on not only a spatial but also a temporal value. By reworking the pattern as a universal language, Cioni transforms these primordial forms into a living language capable of uniting body, music and space in a synaesthetic and participatory experience.

A prize for architecture between lights and volumes: LFA Award

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