Among the orally-transmitted stories about the origins of materials that survive today is that of aventurine. The name refers to both an ancient mineral and a mysterious process. In the early 17th century, a glass worker on the Venetian island of Murano mistakenly dropped copper filings into a liquid glass mixture.
This ‘accident’ created a fascinating new substance: its content resembled a multitude of tiny glistening stars.
Over time, artisans repeated the glass worker’s procedure, giving birth to a now-renowned glass-making technique, avventurina.

This technique derives its name from the Italian expression per avventura, meaning ‘by chance’, which denotes its fortuitous discovery. And so, a 2.5 million-year-old mineral, aventurine, which displayed a similar appearance to the glass, took the same name. Slabs of this precious crystalline quartz—which usually appears in green but also in orange, brown, yellow, red, or even blue—are used today in different contexts: from interiors and monuments, landscaping and aquaria, to jewellery and healing practices. Most green aventurine comes from India, where it is employed by prolific artisans near Mysore and Chennai. Its mutable nature and healing properties make it a remarkable substance and a ‘material agent’ that carries connections between worlds.

In his first solo show at Nature Morte, Lorenzo Vitturi delves into the histories and making-processes of aventurine. Vitturi employs the mineral physically as an object, and metaphorically as a token that connects seemingly diverging cultures and geographies. The stone appears frozen in time in the photographic works, and as microscopic fragments in the artist’s brightly-coloured, monumental tapestries. The latter stem both from a long-term research process into rug-making artisanal traditions in Peru and a three-year-long collaboration with artisans from the Jaipur Rug Foundation.

In Vitturi’s nimbly-balanced, recurring still lives, as in his tapestries, figures and shapes move towards abstraction as if attempting to evade meaning. Yet, each texture, motive, object is carefully sourced and displayed by Vitturi for its evocative qualities and references to particular cultural traditions and landscapes. Murano fused-glass and Indian rugs; rococo laces of Spanish colonial furniture; architectural motives from noble Venetian palaces; telluric powder from the ferrous earth of the Valle Sagrado; the hump of a sacred cow as photographed in Jaipur.

In staging unexpected encounters of materials, Vitturi suspends canonical meanings and hierarchies, reshuffling them into new, unfamiliar composites. The assemblage of clues from various traditions generates new imagery that has a vocabulary of its own, drawing aesthetic elements from diverse regions that inevitably contaminate one another.

All traces are carefully sourced and combined by Vitturi following a specific process—a mix of carefully measured elements and chance. This process is complemented by deep research into the artist’s places of origin: Venice and Peru, as well as their artisanal traditions, architectures and landscapes. Vitturi engages in rituals of collecting and assembling as a way to uncover the trajectories that shape his cultural identity. Crucially, the presented works also emerge from
moments of exchange with local communities of artisans in India.

It is in the process of collective creatorship, a recurring motif in Vitturi’s practice, and the act of community exchange—of knowledge, of information, of hands for making—that the artist sees the possibility of transformation. It is a way to capture overlapping identities, to form new cartographies, and to forge a dialogue between distant and yet interrelated worlds. In a choreography of hybrid bodies and shapes, Vitturi envisions materials across contrasting scales, revealing their various facets and narratives that may otherwise remain hidden.

Rather than abolishing differences and nuances by placing all elements on the same plane, the sculptures and photographs suggest the possibility of cohesion and synchronicity; of plurality among different forms of nature. To transcend limiting separation of nature/culture; human/non-human; same/other. Vitturi’s careful assemblages and funambulist sculptures perform a syncretic dance: an act of fleeting balance.

The storyteller Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us that before making killing tools, such as sticks and swords, our ancestors made containers for stories: nets made of hair, medicine bundles, homes, shrines. Similarly, Vitturi creates hybrid containers of artisanal narratives and ancient knowledge. He guides us through an open-ended journey on the role of materials as carriers of histories, syncretic encounters, and new meanings. These buoyant bodies spell patterns of constant change, conjuring dreams of common languages.

Words by Giulia Civardi
 

“Jugalbandi” was conceived from an invitation from the Jaipur Rugs Foundation to create a series of tapestries in Rajasthan. In Hindi, Jugalbandi means “intertwined twins”, a word used to indicate a musical performance between two soloists who play simultaneously”, and is here used to describe the creative dialogue that took place with the foundation and with the local weavers.

While travelling through rural communities and meeting local weavers in Rajasthan, Vitturi photographed the sculptural assemblages that the village life unconsciously creates, such as a hay bale precariously balancing on a gate pillar or a loom covered by a tarp, and abstracted them into a series of graphic fragments. These monochrome silhouettes are then merged creating a composition of multilayered colour fields.
In a second phase, the moment of dialogue with the weavers began and the abstract fragments, through the hands of the Indian artisans, took shape as tapestries. In some of the works, Vitturi decided to create areas in which the weavers could intervene, not only with their technique but also their own vision and ideas.
The result was a Jugalbandi, a digital dialogue of two authors carried out during the period of lockdown between London and Rajasthan, in which Vitturi’s graphic impressions, inspired by the shapes and textures collected during the time spent in the village, cohabit and coexist with the world sketched by the weaver.

The final passage of the process took place in the exhibition space in Italy at T293 gallery where the tapestries were sculpted by removing and cutting the excess material and were completed by adding materials from Vitturi’s Venetian studio: fragments of glass made in the Murano furnaces, scraps of Peruvian fabric, Nigerian nets.
In this promiscuity of material and narratives, the works took their final form.

The project could not have been realized without the collaborative work of Guddi, Shanti Devi, Manju Devi, Suman, Sonu Devi, weavers of Jaipur Rugs Foundation.
 

Caminantes (2017-) is an ongoing project which combines photographs and sculptures. With a physical approach that embraces the magic and the ritualistic, Vitturi explores questions of cultural hybridity through a personal lens.

The starting point of the series is Vitturi’s mixed heritage, and an event that belongs to the history of his family: a trip that allowed his parents to meet. In the 1960s, his father crossed the Atlantic Ocean to open a Murano glass factory in Peru, where he met Vitturi’s mother. In Caminantes, travel is not only a mean to rediscover personal roots. It is also the initiator of a process of personal exchanges through which different narratives can emerge. Images and sculptures comprise objects and materials that Vitturi selected during his travels between the two countries. These materials include Murano glass, Peruvian textiles, earth and landscape substances and shipping materials. Combined into sculptures and arrangements, these elements embody a symbolism that speaks of both personal stories and local cultures.

Vitturi also incorporates his own body in the compositions. Wrapped like a travelling parcel, it is present – yet it remains invisible. While some images recall familiar patterns and elements, others seem more sinister, strange, as if emerging from unknown realms. Combining familiar materials, hybrid bodies and invisible matters, Vitturi performs visibility; conjures the impure.

“Solo lo Stupore Conosce” (Only Amazement Knows) is a sculpture located in Gagliano del Capo, the first permanent public installation by Vitturi and the inaugural work of a series of artist commissions for the Capo d’Arte project in Italy.

The sculpture, located in the “Villetta” in Via Roma, is the result of the artist impressions gathered during his stay in Gagliano and is enriched by the contaminations of his experiences in Venice and Peru. The work came to life from the repurposing of a pre-existing metal pole, which was repainted and adorned with colourful metal shapes made by the local blacksmith and designed by Vitturi, including figurative elements and a basketball hoop. While reviving an object of no value for a new playful use, the work is an invitation to search for the exceptional in the ordinary.
The title – from a phrase of 4th-century theologian Gregorio di Nissa: “Concepts create idols. Only amazement knows” – is an invitation to be surprised, and to consider how a simple gesture or a glance can transform the most ordinary element into something magical and ethereal.

The project was commissioned by Curator Massimo Torrigiani as part of the 9th edition of Capo d’Arte, a non-profit programme for the promotion of contemporary art and culture in the region of Salento, Southern Italy.

Money Must Be Made is a multidisciplinary project which explores atypical patterns of urban change through the observation of two contrasting realities in Lagos, Nigeria: that of the Financial Trust House multistorey building and of the Balogun street Market. Until the 1990s, the Financial Trust House hosted banks, international airlines, and corporate firms. But after the formation of the Balogun Market – the second biggest street market in West Africa – the building now remains unoccupied. While in the rest of Lagos, as in most other cities around the world, the arrival of Western corporations often causes the displacement of local businesses – in this particular area of Lagos Island it happened quite the opposite. The street vendors forced the financial companies out of the area, providing the biggest source of business locally through the sale of products mostly coming from China.

After taking photographs, interviewing locals and the owner of the building, as well as collecting materials and objects, Vitturi returned to London and continued to work in his studio. Objects were altered with paint and pigments and assembled into still lives and sculptures that Vitturi photographed, printed, re-altered and then re-photographed. Through this continuous process, Vitturi observed the encounter and transformation of two local contrasting realities, which reveal the complexity of Lagos’ society and economy, and that of the geopolitical landscape at large.

Money Must Be Made was published in September 2017 by SPBH Editions with texts by Emmanuel Iduma.