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Botto e Bruno

09.26.08 - 10.19.08
Exhibition — Château d'Eau

Botto & Bruno, Château d'eau, 2008, ©DR, Le Printemps de septembre - à Toulouse 

Botto & Bruno, Château d'eau, 2008, ©DR, Le Printemps de septembre - à Toulouse 

Botto e Bruno are also on view at the Fondation espace écureuil and at the Château d'eau.

Born respectively in 1963 and 1966, they live in Turin (Italy).

 

What does the dictum “Wherever I am going, I am already there” do for you?

When we discover a city for the first time we need to walk around its outskirts to understand its mood and its spirit: and it is there that we also find a sensation of familiarity. We were born in the suburbs of Turin, and that is where we found our poetics. For it is only on the edge of the city that you find real life, it's in the suburbs that the problems of contemporary life come to the fore.

 

A word about your project or artistic proposal?

We are transforming the round interior space of the Water Tower / Le Château d' Eau in such a way as to create a continuous surface, a panoramic image of city suburbs. Architecture of outskirts, cloudy skies, wasteland, it is a disconcerting space. The only human presence is the onlooker. There will also be fan magazines made with text and image collages, and sound, hard core punk, industrial music, and two new songs by our group Botto&Bruno + TheFamily. With the coldness of neon, and, on the floor, asphalt grey linoleum to lend this whole environment a more industrial atmosphere.

 

What does art enable you to do?

Art helps us to relearn how to see things, how to think about reality, how to react to things we don't accept, how to turn rage into creativity, how to try and understand the problems of contemporary city life, how to slip doubts into the very widespread cliché that suburbs are exclusively negative places, without any possibility of social rebirth. And it's only through art that we have finally managed to make music. 
 

 

Gianfranco Botto e Roberta Bruno

It is by making critical detours through the outskirts of cities that these two Italian photographers question, in return, the shattered heart of our contemporary society and its perforce “doubtful” representations. Because huge installations never document an existing suburb but rather put together a peri-urban fiction, their montages of images form “a real deconstruction of the photograph by way of its methods and its materials”.