She passed away from the affection of her loved ones and her many friends Laura Cionci (Rome, 1980 – Rome 2022). The relational artist, performer, had been battling a long illness for some time. In his life she had supported a courageous and fearless battle against cancer which had afflicted her on several occasions since 2015 and of which Laura had made no secret, so much so as to place him at the center of her artistic and philosophical research. The book is an example of this State of Gracepublished by Postmedia books in 2020, the story of a war, of a transcendence, of a transformation, of the “thoughts of a woman”, as stated in the synthesis printed in clear letters on the back cover.
THE BOOK THE STATE OF GRACE
“The illness”said the artist ad Artribunes, “such as the loss of a loved one or even a birth are triggering human factors that break the line of fast daily life and make us aware of existence for a few moments. It is impossible to always be “present”, but the important thing is to seize that moment in which you are “out” to be able to veer, climb a new level or change direction by experiencing different states of grace, feeling an awareness and thus managing to choose for ourselves the best. But let us not forget that the evolutionary process is not a merry ride through sunlit fields, it is always about one’s own darkness, trauma, chaos. The evolutionary process is the continuous reading and overcoming of our limits”. The theme of State of Grace, later merged into the book, it returns several times in the work of Laura Cionci. For example, in the projects in Montegemoli curated by Eleonora Raspiin the performance Seedswithin the project The Second Night of Quietpromoted by ArtVerona in Veronetta and curated by Christian Caliandro or in the homonymous action presented at the Biennolo in 2019, curated by John Romano, Rossana Cioccastreet companions of the artist, e Matthew Bergamini. In both performances the theme is that of the transmission of knowledge, of dreams, of the deepest instances and of what moves us inside. And everything happens in an ancient, anti-technological way, from “human being to human being”, in the first project through books and seeds of nature, in the second, with the voice of an intermediary, Sara Facchinotti.
THE WORK OF LAURA CIONCI
Nomadic, itinerant, in her short and intense life Laura Cionci has crossed and sometimes anticipated the times and geographical boundaries. With the architect Blue Muzzonigro and the philosopher Leonardo Caffo, lifelong friends and fellow travelers, founded Waiting Posthuman Studio, a multidisciplinary research project between art, architecture, urban planning and philosophy. We also saw her in 2018 in Colombia, Brazil and the Amazon looking for and investigating the magical rituals and talismans that inhabit these territories, looking for the energies of nature like a diviner, in a path of denunciation, including political ones, in the green lung of the world , against the senseless actions of man on the environment, which today finds fulfillment in the climate crisis we are all experiencing. Between 2019 and 2020, while her body was already in a serious and highly disciplined lockdown due to Cionci’s disease, she was in Australia. Here, at the end of the project Reciprocal, curated together with Domenico De Clario in Melbourne, “organize a trip to the desert, to Urulu and Olgas, in search of aboriginal healers and ancient ceremonial customs and ancestral wisdom. His research stems from the personal need to know and recognize alternative medicine as the way of salvation to cure his disease: cancer. Educate yourself and understand the development of diseases not only as a physical event but as an energetic and psychological breakdown, as a trauma”, continuing a path already begun in Colombia. Then the return to Italy, a country with which there has never been an effective detachment, with projects, performances, works and exhibitions (and collaborations and intersections with spaces such as Albumarte and artists, to name a few, such as Iginio DeLuca, Luana Perilli and Elena Bellantoni. With the last two, together with other female artists such as Lucia Veronesi, Roxy in the Box and many others had begun a project of intersection, understanding, solidarity and female collaboration called Wonderful thought)such as the exhibition in 2021 Evidence of (re)existence, edited by Ilaria Conti at the Baruchello Foundation in Romein which the artist, continuing his research on State of Gracepresented itself with a perfect multi-sensorial circle in which to get lost and find yourself guided by the essences and by the archaic and feminine imagery that flowed in the frieze of watercolors that surrounded it.
THE PERFORMANCE “TRINKING UP”
Or even the performance Squeezewhich earned her, together with the relational projects at the Adolfo Pini Foundation in Milan, at the Murate Art District in Florence (curated by Valentina Gensini), at the Museum of Ceramics in Montelupo Fiorentino, the recognition of Artribune as best artist of 2021, ex aecquo with Eugenio Tibaldi. The performance that she represented in a substantial, empathic and immediate way, generating thoughts and emotion, the sense of uncertainty and the need to embrace us in a pandemic, was presented as part of the exhibition Fragileat the Monitor gallery in Rome, in a project curated by Christian Caliandro, to which the artist had been linked since 2016 by a critical partnership that often had a voice on our pages. In fact, Cionci had writing ability and very clear ideas about life and art. “If artists really were needed”he said in an interview for the book How do artists live? (Castelvecchi, 2022), “for an internal change the public would be like electricians, plumbers and farmers. NECESSARY. I believe that a sort of automatic cleaning is already underway which certainly takes some time, but which leaves no way out for the superfluous. Artists will always find a way to manage their creativity, to develop it and put it into practice, it affects their mental life; therefore, I believe that the art system should increase sensitivity, always keep alive this curiosity towards those who seek to change an antiquated model to renew thinking. If this system becomes an integral part of the artist and finds true sensitivity to important themes and goes beyond the fashion of the moment and tries to force the old and the superfluous, we can begin to speak of an art system as a single body made up of artists, critics, historians, theorists, all those figures who contribute to fattening the content by making a fine distinction between living room/Fb/Instagram decorators and local workers, workers on the front line in contact with reality, i.e. the true system of art. An organ integrated into society that is used daily and in the most popular form possible to reach all social levels”. With Laura Cionci disappears one of the most brilliant minds of a generation that has not yet had the right recognition, in this annus horribilis that has already taken away the almost contemporary Salvatore Iaconesi (Livorno, 1973), artist, intellectual, designer, who shared ideas with Laura, excellent finesse of thought and the theme of treatment, associated with cancer, the scourge of the 21st century.
Holy Ribbon
