Elisa Caldana

Installation view at West Den Haag, Netherlands

Through a moving image artwork, Caldana attempts to trace the elusive identity of a singular falcon called the Laggar falcon, an endemic species in Pakistan, India, and Myanmar, which is slowly disappearing in the wild and has become a near threatened species. Often overlooked and seldom appearing in historical narratives and depictions, the Laggar has a reputation of being a minor falcon, an underdog, lacking the qualities of being a memorable or spectacular falcon, as well as the dramatic presence and performance of other falcons within the same family, like the Peregrine. Largely missing from the collective memory and imagination, the Laggar is becoming increasingly more popular in the moment of its looming disappearance, in connection with an international community of falconers and their endeavours in raising awareness and counteracting the threat of the falcon vanishing from the wild.

Installation view at SIC Space, Helsinki, Finland

Visual research for cinematography for a choreography of movements on how to hold a bird of prey during a health check.

[Photo: Installation view of Temporarily Closed at Villa delle Rose, MAMbo Mu- seum of Modern Art, Bologna, Italy (Nov. 2021)] During the lockdown periods in 2020 and 2021, I recorded hundreds of voicemails by calling temporarily closed businesses all over the world. Temporarily Closed gathers together a selection of these voices. The viewers can listen to the voicemails while leaning against boarded-up doors. The voicemails evoke an atmosphere, the memory of a place, a mood, and serve as records of a globally shared experience. Temporarily Closed originated in connection with Shutter- street, an ongoing installation first presented at Palazzo Carignano in Turin (2019). << Over the last year, Caldana has collected hundreds of voicemails from shops forced to close by the pandemic. Through shutters (Shutterstreet) and voice mails (Temporarily closed) she traces the obscure topography of a global crisis.>> AMANDA SARROFF, text for the Open Studios 2021, Jan Van Eyck Academie Maastricht

[Photo: work in progress at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, 2020-2021] <<Monument to Non-existing Streets draws from a little-known law that grants every Italian city, town, or even village the power to invent names for non-existent streets. These streets provide addresses for unsheltered or nomadic inhabitants so that they may access healthcare and voting rights. It is an infrastructure that replaces homelessness with placelessness. These fictional addresses, which are not included on any map, are also used to open real businesses seeking to evade state control and taxes. An installation titled Monu- ment to Non-existing Streets is dedicated to the ghost geographies that give rise to shadow economies. In it Caldana brings together the names of existing fictional streets to form an antimonument to placelessness. As the first chapter of an ongoing work, Monument to Non-existing Streets and its accompanying text are a provisional mapping of an expansive, yet unrealized atlas charting the failures of capitalist systems.>> AMANDA SARROFF, text for the Open Studios 2021, Jan Van Eyck Academie Maastricht

These moulds serve for reproducing different variations of a series of public sculptures titled Monuments to Non-existing Streets. The names correspond to a list of fictitious addresses invented by the Italian public administration as a bureaucratic stratagem. Every city, town, and village in Italy has the legal power to name a fictional street that does not exist in reality but serve as an address for homeless or nomadic inhabitants so that they can gain access to health care and the right to vote. In Italy, homeless people have their residence in streets that do not exist. These addresses are also used to start fictional companies with legal status as a way to avoid taxes. An entire shadow system arises from this loophole in the law. An atlas of sculptures (ongoing) will highlight all the dimensions of this shadow system, which is fictional and legal at the same time.

[Shutterstreet, installation view in the inner court of Palazzo Carignano, Turin, produced by Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation, Turin, Italy; (Nov. 2019 - Jan. 2020)] Shutterstreet is a corridor made of closed down shop-shutters. "Shutterstreet" comes from the Japanese word シャッター通り which refers to a shopping street of closed down shops, where small businesses appear to have ceased their activities due to failing competition against larger brands and the internet. As part of this ongoing installation, I gradually collect shop-shutters from different cities internationally, by offering shop-owners new shutters in exchange for their old ones. Taken as a symbol, the closed down shutters gathered together in this installation express the image of a global phenomenon.

The "Non-relational objects" series, started in 2010, originates from real episodes of relational spaces that have become inaccessible, such as benches denied to specific ethnic minorities by other citizens ("Piazza Tirana"). The series analyses the paradoxes and liminal spaces that emerge when the idea of relation and the need to create collective spaces clashes with issues of integration and social coexistence. This archive of personal stories hidden within the urban fabric unveils patterns of social exclusion, cultural appropriation, and concealed forms of violence. Texts by Elisa Caldana Design: Ted Hyunhak Yoon Silkscreens printed with Margriet Thissen at the Charles Nypels Lab, Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht

“Piazza Tirana” tells the story behind a bench that has been covered with stainless steel sheets by a group of native citizens in my hometown, in Northern Italy. This intervention was built as an obstruction to prevent a certain group of immigrants from sitting on the bench.

“The Headless Fountain” tells the story of a fountain which I have found in a predominantly Islamic neighborhood in Bordeaux, France. The original fountain was made of a statue portraying a three-headed goddess that is a symbol of religious syncretism and was an allusion to the city’s colonial past. The fountain was turned into a minimalist basin, after its three-heads were destroyed by anonymous citizens.

The performance In Another Country is based on a speech that I heard from a homeless businessman, who was talking to himself while on a bench at the Frankfurt Station. Starting from my memory of his speech, I wrote the script for this performance. A man talking alone in the exhibition space confronts the unaware public with intimate details about his life. The man is dressed in business attire and holds a daily newspaper open at the economy page. He reveals to have lost his job, his wife, and his house. Then he defines his identity as that of an immigrant striving to integrate into a new country while trying to make a living as a cleaning man. He recalls episodes of voyeurism and sexual obsessions, questioning his sexual orientation. Finally, he reveals to be a certified psychologist from California, now analysis his psychosis in another country.

Read the full script at this page: http://www.elisacaldana.info/in-another-country/