The Tiger and the Leopard
This year, Federica Ricotti presents a playful installation at the Lucca Biennale Cartasia. She tackles the theme of the Biennale, "Here and Now: Tomorrow," inspired by a branch of applied psychology that suggests imagining oneself alongside entities with strong protective energy to face life. Significant and symbolic creatures, like shamanic animals.
Thus, the artist is accompanied by a life-sized Tiger and Leopard: Tiger and Leopard by my side. Imagination becomes reality through the artwork. The installation is situated in darkness, in an intimate room, almost a mental space, where the beasts light up alongside intense music as the public passes by. Powerful figures like thoughts, yet airy like imaginary animals that exist only in the mind of those who imagine them. Fragile but significant, like paper sculptures.
On set dates, Federica Ricotti will be in the room and will invite the public to play by stepping onto the platform with the beasts in her place, to experience the curious sensation of being accompanied on their journey by strongly protective, complicit, and friendly presences. There will be discussions about the qualities we need, starting from the meanings of the two animals in various cultures, illustrated on a sign displayed in the room.
Federica Ricotti has been a Paper Art artist since the 1980s. From Milan to Brazil to Switzerland, where she has won several awards. Her works are made of paper pulp and light: tactile, with reliefs, shadows and lights, transparencies, carpets of shadows. Often presented as performances in evocative settings, magical-theurgical, following her guiding thread that exalts the upward tension, the multidimensional nature of the human being.
In 2010, she participated in Cartasia with the performance "Cathedrals" in the Church of the Serviti in Lucca. On the door of her studio, it reads: "There is in every ascent a sense of conquest and achievement, even if it is only climbing a staircase."
She currently lives in Liguria, with a studio in Carrara.
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