We are delighted to welcome Alex Cecchetti to Cove Park this spring. This is the final residency in our European Residency Programme, supported by British Council Scotland and Creative Scotland.
Alex Cecchetti is an artist, a poet, a gardener, a freediver and a choreographer. Difficult to classify, his work can be considered as the art of the un-representable: spiritual and tactile, poetic and aesthetic it creates mental and physical environments in which the spectators are often part of the work, engaged in a visionary journey beyond the spectrum of human experience.
Invited to walk backwards into a garden or dance like dervishes at the music of the planet frequencies, to sleep at the sound of a human choir who sings like whales, or taking dance class from stones and staircases, the spectators are no longer defined to the role of the beholder.
The artist died for the first time in 2014 for unknown reasons, though he keeps producing new works, presenting new performances, publishing new poems, and he gives talks.
SENTIERO, Cecchetti’s most recent walk-based project, takes audiences on one-on-one experiences along a mountain path that brings together spirituality, ecological sensitivity and more-than-human poetry. Moving between poem, love story, incantation and myth, SENTIERO accompanies audiences and their guides through encounters with non-human persons (plants, animals, minerals), their stories, their different forms of worldmaking and experiencing sensations. Part place-based intervention, part-community project, SENTIERO creates new paths among the mountains as an archetype for a journey towards the unknown, guided by human and non-human knowledge forms and accompanied by collaborators including plants, seasons and stars. For SENTIERO, a cohort of guides harking from different disciplines and harbouring different passions – from dance to music, speaking to birds, studying dreams – has been trained to accompany audience members along their journeys to a place of shelter at the end of the path, a specially- constructed architecture echoing that of a yurt, created through eco-printing techniques, where the sensory experiences of food, smell, sound and colour are all derived from the artist’s deep engagement with local communities and ecologies.
SENTIERO, Biennale Gherdeina 8 (winner of The Italian Council prize of the Italian Ministry of Culture, 2022), the project has been travelling and exposed throughout Europe as in Taxispalais Innsbruck, IASPIS Stockholm, Somalgors Switzerland, MAXXI Aquila, Italy. Recent exhibitions and incantations include: MAXXI, Rome (2021), SEMA Seoul Museum of Art (Seoul, KOR) and Netwerk Aalst with Laure Prouvost (2020), Serpentine Galleries London, and Castello di Rivoli (2019), Spike Island, Bristol, (2018). Palais de Tokyo, Paris; CCA Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, (all in 2017); Playground Festival, M Leuven & STUK, Leuven, (all in 2016); Serralves, Porto, (2014); South London Gallery (2013); MAXXI, Rome and Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Vilnius (2012).
As a poet and writer, Alex Cecchetti has published two novels: ‘A society that breath once a year’, Book Works, London, 2012; and ‘Tamam Shud’, Stenberg Press, Berlin 2017. Books of poetry include: Marie & William, a performance by Alex Cecchetti, MIDI & Mousse Publishing with Åbäke, 2015; and Manque D’imagination, Les Contemporains, Éditions P, Paris 2016. His texts and poems have appeared in different magazine and books. In 2023, Treccani Editore Italia will publish the book “The Teachings of the Snakes”
Alex Cecchetti speaks and writes in Italian, English and French: fluently. Whale and Plants language: communicative, Bird language: basic but progressing.
Image: Alex Cecchetti (photography by Chiara Pasqualini @kiapasqualini)
