Kick back, relax and binge on the Love Dream
by Alice Visentin

7 March 2025 – 28 April 2025
via Capo di Lucca, 34
Department of Business Sciences, University of Bologna

The project, conceived by Alice Visentin in collaboration with Magda Antoniazzi, is designed to occupy part of the surface of the building located on the corner of via Capo di Lucca and via Irnerio. The building was designed by architect Enzo Zacchiroli between 1968 and 1974 and today houses the Department of Business Sciences of the University of Bologna. The place is by nature a liminal space and plays multifaceted roles within the urban and social context of the city, which also change in relation to the different times of day.

The work was conceived with the theatre in mind, housing a multifaceted diorama of characters inspired by the distinctive elements of the context in which it is immersed. These are taken as aesthetic references: the pigeons and their plumage, the black rubbish bags, the rubbish itself, but also the festivals, the evolution and, in general, the extended idea of encounter that historically characterises this area of the city centre, with its more ambiguous and contradictory aspects.

The starting point of the project is to explore ways of being together, of experiencing urban space, alternative visions of family and the future, through the artist’s imagination. With Kick back, relax and binge on the Love Dream, Visentin explores alternative social visions, made up of non-hierarchical systems, based on unconventional relationships and the possibility of each entity to free itself from pre-imposed mechanisms.

The choice of creating a scenic and scenic scaffolding inspired by a play as a narrative and speculative tool, suggests an attempt to construct a place of freedom and aggregation, within which the protagonists, the little monsters who find refuge and union here, stage parties, meetings and moments of love, which will also lead to the birth of new members of the group.

The key element for the rendering of this story – lasting five chapters – is a sophisticated set design: advertising posters and hand-painted signs, phosphorescent eggs, sculptures and neon lights. Different materials such as fabric, paper, cardboard and coloured spray cans transform the building’s metal ventilation cage into a crossroads of reality and fiction, a horror movie complete with monster maker, as Magda Antoniazzi calls herself.

A handmade wallpaper, decorated with a pattern that recalls the plumage of pigeons, is the backdrop for a series of adventures that represent an experiment in the imagination of new worlds, capable of enlivening our cognitive potential and desires, aiming to reconfigure our experience of space into stimulating and imaginative possibilities. The work will invite the viewer to follow the vicissitudes of the little monsters to discover, with each act, the subversive potential of the narrative.

Reference texts:
Your Illustrated Guide to the Universe by Yumi Sakugawa – Feminist Press
On the Anarchic Organisation of Cinematic Spaces by Rosa Barba – Sternberg Press
The New Nihilism by Peter Lamborn Wilson – Autonomedia
I Miei Luoghi by Marguerite Duras – Einaudi
La Danza delle Grandi Madri by Clarissa Pinkola Estès – Frassinelli
Caccia alle Streghe, Guerra alle Donne by Silvia Federici – DeriveApprodi

Alice Visentin
Alice Visentin (Turin, Italy) uses video, sculpture and painting to explore reality as a mutable dimension, influenced by the interactions between bodies, words and narratives. Her work investigates the generative capacity of imagination and the possibility of accessing alternative levels of perception through shared intuition. Her research explores the cultural and political processes present in our bodies, reconsidering the ethics of existence and the connections between human beings. Drawing inspiration from words, literature and oral archives, she transforms images into stories and stories into images.

Visentin received a Visual Arts Fellowship for the year 2023 at the American Academy in Rome. In 2024, she was selected for a residency at Gasworks in London, supported by the Memmo Foundation. In addition, she won a scholarship from the 13th Italian Council, organised by the Directorate General for Contemporary Creativity.

Magda Antoniazzi
Magda Antoniazzi, (Milan, 1987) graduated in Communication Design from KEA University in Copenhagen and is currently pursuing a second degree in Visual Arts at the Brera Academy in Milan. She works at the intersection of design, art and making

The project is part of TANGLE – Visual Culture in Urban Art, curated by Parsec and Andrea Gianfanti in collaboration with the Department of Business Sciences of the University of Bologna.