Alex Cecchetti

SOLO SHOW

THE COUNCIL OF THE ABYSS 

CENTRE POMPIDOU, PARIS

From September 12 to November 26 2024

Forum -1 free entrance

Program of performances related to the show:

12 SEPTEMBER 2024 18H15 and 19H15
Sortilegio, enchantment for two voices, Lili Aymonino (soprano) and Alexandre Adra (baritone), based on a score written by Alex Cecchetti

14 SEPTEMBER 2024 16H00
The Stories of Ocean Currents, a poetic immersion and visit of the show in the presence of the artist duration 1H

15 SEPTEMBER 2024 15H30 and 17H00
Dance on My Forehead, Love, swirling dance with François Chaignaud, Alex Cecchetti, Uriel Barthelemi 

On the occasion of the Pompidou’s festival Extra! artist Alex Cecchetti invites us into the depths of the ocean. In this vast blue world that he loves to explore through free diving, the artist creates a reef-shaped scene, where the audience nestles into coral-shaped sofas and jellyfish hammocks. These cocoons and seats, made from natural fibres that mimic the forms and colours of a coral reef or jellyfish, have been hand-dyed by Alex Cecchetti and his team in different studios between Grasse and Italy, in collaboration with plants and other forms of non-human intelligence. To further express these vital themes, the artist’s skirt-poems are brought to life by dancer François Chaignaud, in a performance inspired by the transformative swirling movements of life and life forms. The whole exhibition forms a phantasmagorical space inhabited by mythology and literature, in which the challenges of today’s world, such as ecology and gender issues, are transfigured by Alex Cecchetti’s extravagantly fertile imagination and its poetic representation in the world. In this exhibition, poetry becomes a real place: here, as in the ocean, nothing begins and nothing ends, but everything is welcomed. Perhaps it is with this simple, fluid formula that life itself plays at reinventing itself and metamorphosing into millions of different artistic forms.

Alex Cecchetti is a French and Italian artist, poet, performer, gardener, storyteller and choreographer. He creates environments in which the public is fully part of the work; he considers his exhibitions to be celebrations of nature, and his performances incantations.

Curated by Jean-Max Collard in the frame of EXTRA festival of literature, the solo show is prolonged until November 26

With the valuable and precious support of the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation and of La Società delle Api.

The artist would like to thank all the plants that worked with him and his team for the  production of the new shapes and colours.

JULY 1 - DECEMBER 15 2023

The Museum of Contemporary Art of Haute-Vienne is pleased to invite Italian artist Alex Cecchetti to occupy the spaces of Rochechouart Castle for his first museum exhibition in France, starting from the summer.

As an artist-poet and choreographer, Alex Cecchetti employs performance, writing, sculpture, and installation. His practice is deeply imbued with a metaphysical approach, exploring major themes of time, the connection to nature, and the human experience.

Primarily known for his performances, in which he often uses his own body as a means of expression, Alex Cecchetti creates works that oscillate between reality and fiction, actively involving the participation of the audience.

His approach takes on a shamanic dimension, and his works act as incantations, offering profound sensory and emotional experiences.

In the context of the castle and its surrounding nature, Alex Cecchetti invites us on a dive into a dreamlike world, exploring metamorphosis and hybridity.

«Je suis un monstre marin (I am a sea monster)» invites us, in a celebration of nature, to return to a primordial dimension, «to become forest again, to become wave again,» in the artist’s own words.

Through a series of new works specially created for the museum, the exhibition creates a garden, a forest, an ocean, and traces a magical circle where our bodies become jellyfish and stars, our voices transform into birdsong or poems.

By playing with rituals, spells, and universal beliefs, Alex Cecchetti transports us to a poetic and enigmatic universe, where the boundaries between the human and the non-human blur

For its second season, from November 16, 2022 to April 15, 2023, FOROF presents Sortilegio, a site-specific solo exhibition by Alex Cecchetti, artist, poet, gardener and choreographer. The artist has conceived a shamanic environment where different elements lead the public to abandon itself and encounter Nature.

Through sounds, narratives and scents, the show is an ode to nature and an invitation to identify with it reminding us that we owe our lives to other species, like the air we breathe is acquired from the oceans and forests. In this cohabitation and interdependence, however, we have forgotten love. Although we love this planet, habits have clouded us for too long. With this spell, the artist wants to draw the heart out of the chest of anyone who is involved.

ALEX CECCHETTI AND LAURE PROUVOST

08.02.2020 18.10.2020

EXHIBITION

"Come, come, come to paradise,” called the siren from the rooftop. Lonely and invisible, she longs for love and empathy. The world is presently cold, desolate and hard. "There is no space or time left, so come and occupy me," the institution shouts. Here representation soon becomes reality, fiction reveals itself as the life of the artists, as your life.

Occupie Paradit is a palate cleanser, taking away conventions and conformism and the bad taste this might leave. Instead you will be introduced to all the secret little passages of our paradise. Snakes will implore you to avoid the apple of knowledge: "don’t waste your time with it," they will say, "because far better is the joy of wine."

For the exhibition Occupie Paradit, artists Alex Cecchetti and Laure Prouvost transform the space of Netwerk Aalst into an immersive multivocal installation providing a space for discovery and social encounter, a "fantastical" yet occupied paradise. The artists lead you through secret passages and strange environments where you hear stories about the cosmos and love. There you can drink potions in the Love Bar and feel time stand still, albeit just for a while. A Community of Snakes conceived by Alex Cecchetti will on various occasions activate the paradise and its fruits, providing guidance, confusion and new insights to the brave visitors open to perdition.

Occupie Paradit is curated by Piet Mertens and Pieternel Vermoortel.

Frac Provence Alpes-Côte d'Azur (PACA), Marseille

From August 31 to October 14, 2018

Alex Cecchetti invites the spectator to live an unprecedented experience, a symphonic and immersive investigation at the crossroads of the visual arts and the performing arts. Its poetic and gestural language mysteriously brings the participants together to embark them in rituals or journeys where perception and the great existential questions are brought into play. At the same time visual artist, poet and choreographer, the artist of Italian origin Alex Cecchetti designs performances and unclassifiable objects that can take place in exhibitions or elsewhere. He draws his inspiration from literature, philosophy, science or music with a great sense of play and humour while reinventing his life. Visitors will be able to discover three recent works by the artist: The Erotic Cabinet, a collection of erotic drawings and paintings; Song of solitude, a series of drawings with calls; The Guardian, a large format watercolor.

The Hundred Thousand Eyes Chapel

"I try to create chapels in any art center or any exhibition I am invited to. These chapels function as spaces which concentrate and accentuate the character of the life to which they refer. In this case, it is eroticism and sexuality with its relation to memories and shared experiences. The erotic cabinet, with its revisited mythological love scenes and fantastic copulations, was inspired by flowers. It opens like a flower, petal after petal, inviting the viewer to enter more and more into its structure. Veil after veil, petal after petal, the reward is also a trap, and a view from the outside is revealed in the cabinet’s latest drawing. ". Alex Cecchetti

Saturday 5 May to Sunday 8 July 2018

Cecchetti’s exhibition at Spike Island, At the Gates of the Music Palace, brought together performance, drawing, painting, sculpture and sound installation, turning the gallery into an immersive concert in which visitors were invited to contribute to the musical score as they made their way through an unexpected sensory pathway.

“Three Tucans And A Black Bird”, is a community conceived by Alex Cecchetti. They will sing the secrets of the artworks, perform puzzling acts, and with the help of a nipple-key they will open hidden drawers where more stories are conceiled. Their games and plays will transform the visitors into visionaries, and the show will not be the same again.

Alex Cecchetti is an artist, poet and choreographer. Over the last decade, he has developed a unique practice which he characterises as the art of avoidance, where representation and concealment go hand in hand with the tactical and the poetic, the visual and the material.

His works often begin with a poem which is transformed into an object, a performance or a situation, focusing on how the construction of a narrative can be experienced both physically and emotionally. This emphasis in positioning the visitor’s experience as central to the work has led Cecchetti to introduce resources such as rhetoric, storytelling, music or dance, to establish a non-mediated relationship with the work, transforming the figure of the spectator into a visionary participant.

During the course of the exhibition, scheduled performances took place within Music Hall involving dancer Tilly Webber, who activated the work by creating melodies through choreographed movement, and soprano Emma Huggett who sang a love song from within Singing Chandelier.

From 11 Nov 2017 to 25 Feb 2018

Come aboard for a fascinating journey into the heartland of the imagination. Inspired by strange news item, Alex Cecchetti invites you to help him investigate a mysterious disappearance in a symphonic exhibition activated by synesthetic musicians, classical and contemporary dancers, mediator-detectives – and the artist and the viewers themselves.

"I died identity-free. Clothes labels, fingerprints, shoe sizes were unstitched, eliminated, washed off, bleached out and consigned to oblivion. The sole clue, a small scrap of paper hidden in a secret pocket of the trousers. Written on it, the closing words of a Persian poem: Tamam Shud. This is the end. This is all I am." Drawing on a strange news item, and calling on music, literature and dance, Cecchetti probes the mysteries of identity and disappearance.

"Tamam Shud" means "This is the end" in Persian, yet here it is the starting point for an adventure intermingling performance and poetry. Cecchetti gives his imagination free rein in the art centre's various spaces, in installations intended as chapters in a narrative combining the lyrical and the zany.

Interacting with each other from room to room, his multiple languages immerse us in a world that puts all the senses to work. At once an intimate space and the framework for a mysterious story, the exhibition has been designed as a vast musical score and becomes a locus for the merging of the fictional and the real. During the exhibition dancers, singers and musicians move into the installations to add to the poet's narrative.

In order to create the Tamam Shud narrative Alex has devised a plan featuring five episodic performances and an exhibition that took place in 2016–2017. The two-year-long art project was curated and edited by The Book Lovers, and produced by the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw.

Tamam Shud isn‘t so much a concept as it is a story. Its proposal is structured and open at the same time. A processual work, such as an artist‘s novel, is not defined by a concept, but by whatever happens during the process of its creation, which may very well bring about an end result far removed from the artist‘s expectations. From the beginning Alex wanted to use mystery not only as a literary device, but also to define the relationship with everyone involved in the project. Each instalment, exhibition and performance, release clues that unveil aspects of the narrative like pieces of a puzzle, so that the audience is invited not only to unravel the secrets contained in the story (who the protagonist actually is, who killed him and why, and so on) but also to gradually discover the very mechanisms of the project they are part of.

To die without memories, this is the horror. You know, life is short, but death never ends. And now I have no one to love and no one to hate for the eternity.This is why I have decided to investigate over my own death myself.

In Tamam Shud, a murder mystery artist’s novel and exhibition, by Alex Cecchetti, the narrator realises he is dead and decides to investigate the causes of his own death. In order to create the narrative, Cecchetti devised a two-year-long art project in which the present exhibition constitutes a central device in producing the upcoming artist’s novel. Tamam Shud will be published in early 2018. In other words, by visiting this exhibition, you are witnessing the artist’s writing process at work!

The exhibition’s performative nature is three-fold. First, a series of rooms contains pieces (dance bars, doors and cabinets) that, like music scores, are activated by the spectators’ participation. So please, don’t feel shy about interacting with the pieces when prompted. Some additional events, such as a synaesthesia concert and a dance performance, will take place at different times during the exhibition. The third performative aspect focuses on a couple of detectives who carry out their investigation, observing the events unfolding during the show, and communicating these to the artist who will use them as fodder for the writing of his novel. It is said that the detectives are in possession of a special key that can open and disclose secret parts of the exhibition.

Detectives:

– This job is killing me.

– You mean waiting for something to happen?

– I mean following, shadowing, putting together pieces of a life which is not mine.

– No murder is perfect, we’ll end up finding the mistake.

– What if it’s just his game? See? If no one knows, it never happened. Look how desperately he wants us to know that he died. Otherwise how could we ever know that he lived . . .

Palais de Tokyo (Paris)Soirée perfor(m)ée23/02/2017 from 5 pm till midnight

For one evening, the artist Alex Cecchetti is offering an immersion into his very own interstellar, magical world. sheltered inside large “tent-curtains”, artists give tarot readings or dance to the sound of a piano. Further off, a glass harp accompanies a choir inspired by whale song, while Cécilia Bengolea dances amidst the audience on Alex Cecchetti’s poems.

New performances and collaborations with:Marino Formenti (piano)Milovan Farronato and Timothy Morton (Tarots)Cecilia Bengolea (dancer in Clitoris)Thomas Bloch (Glass Harmonica in Cetaceans) Aphrodite Mélodie and Perle Palombe (Le club Pour l’Emancipation du Hasard)

Curated by Vittoria Matarrese

Photos credit Aurélie Cenno

ALEX CECCHETTI

THE PRINTING HOUSE OF HELL

27 JUNE - 22 AUGUST 2015

Dear William,

The work at the printing house never stops.

When we have ink we find no paper, when we have paper we find no words, when we have words they have no meanings, when we find meanings they make no sense.

All the L’s turn out to be noses, all the M’s rise up as mountains, Q’s are cherries and olives and B’s are gorgeous and generous breasts.

We are good for nothing some say, we really are indeed. We cherish it and feed it, pet it and put it to sleep.

Vigil we keep on the working at the printworks of hell, for the mouth of the feral nothing shall not shut all over the earth.

Yours
Alex

—

The show opens to the visitors uninstalled, the public is invited to help us putting it up.

—

Alex Cecchetti is a storyteller whose work manifests itself as performance, writing and the creation of objects. Cecchetti creates situations to have the quality of surprising himself, experiencing them for the first time at the moment of performance. His practice often returns to the duality of representation and concealment; how objects can be rendered in speech, how speech itself is made visible, whether that which is visible can be seen by that which is not.

Cecchetti’s biography lists his date of death as 2014 – his subsequent projects begin with the premise that he is practicing beyond the grave. The printing house of hell’s title – inspired by William Blake’s description of a printworks in the underworld – encapsulates an idea of the world printing its own copy, the human drive to replicate through recursion. The printing house of hell opens with the artist leading a tour of heaven and hell – narrated through the private corridors and studios of the building where Kunstraum is located.

At the centre of the exhibition is a sculpture derived from Saint Marie l’egyptienne, a 14th Century statue from Eglise Collégiale Notre-Dame d’Ecouis, France – notable for the saint’s hair which covers almost her entire body. Made in collaboration with the technical departments of the Louvre, Cecchetti’s sculpture traces the physical process of making the cast and reveals the unseen abstracted form which lies within hollow statues.

Within the exhibition are drawings and works on paper including: Cecchetti’s Dancing with a teapot drawings, which inscribe a scenario in which the artist and his subject seem to dance for one- another; and ‘Mémoires’, a portfolio of erotic drawings which can be shown to each visitor only once, and only for a moment; finally for Song of Solitude the audience is invited to use the series of abstracted line drawings as a musical score for improvisation using different artificial birdcallers.

The works in The printing house of hell follow a number of threads in Cecchetti’s practice – copies, revisions, the threads of stories, choreographies of the artist and his audience. The final work

in the exhibition gathers together these ideas in a scultptural installation to be experienced by touch. A well worn balustrade handrail taken from a dilapidated house in the south of France rises and twists in the space. As the handrail rises, falls and twists, the viewer must enter into choreography of the exhibition, following Cecchetti’s call to action.

Photographer: Tim Bowditch

NATURE HAS NO PARTICULARLY GOOD IDEAS
Alex Cecchetti
SHANAYNAY, Paris
2013

This is something that may just not happen, and even if it does is at risk. I hope you can see it before the collapse.
Would the collapse be beautiful? He asked.
You wouldn’t realize it, she said.

The whole show and artworks appears everyday during a performance relay conceived by the artist:
SUMMER IS NOT THE PRIZE OF WINTER
With: Nicholas Matranga, Jennifer Teets, Cally Spooner, Sarina Basta, Sabrina Tarasoff, Alfredo Hubard, Yoann Gourmel, Vanessa Descalux, Julie Gouju, Théodore Fivel, Ioana Jarda, Astrid Defrance, Elodie Royer, Estelle Nabeyrat, Gregory Castera

Alex Cecchetti. Comrades of Fear and Wonder

2012.II.17 - III.18

One day is enough, dear William, if in the morning I could see some of your drawings and have lunch at the window with you. Then we could walk that walk and sit in the shade, watching the passersby without talk. And when I’ll be tired from all the light and the rain, and my head will no longer retain the shapes of faces, it will be nice to hear one of your stories while staring at the snow whirling or at the red evening sunset. One day is enough, if you give me the night as well. And I promise not to use a knife against the sky to mark constellations, but I will try, as much as you, to throw a net to accomplish my simple task. And our yesterday as any other tomorrow would be the gift of now.

This show is a long day out, a story in which the event changes as the light does or as your mood does sometimes too. And if no moment is better than the morning to see some drawings, the evening is good for tales. The exhibition is there but not in its entirety at the same time. It is like making an oil painting of an exotic bird; you cannot ask the bird to stand still, you would have to kill it first, or tangle it in a rope or follow its flight and retain some of its qualities in your memory. What kind of painters would be able to reproduce such a creature? Or else, imagine explaining what a cloud is to someone that has never seen one.

— Daily program —

12.00—13.00

A CHANCE FOR GEOMETRY
drawings

16.00—19.00

H
choreography for hidden nudes

18.30—19.00

SUMMER IS NOT THE PRIZE OF WINTER
performance relay

19.00—19.15

THEORY OF RISING
video produced with Caribic Residency

20.00

DISASTER IS A SHELTER
chorus

20.00—12.00

A SIMPLE TASK

— During the exhibition —

I GIOCATORI (THE PLAYERS)

Alex Cecchetti and Liudvikas Buklys

a game of conversation

February 29 at 6 PM

Contemporary Art Centre, cinema hall

More information: http://cac.lt/en/other/general/12/5623

COMRADES OF FEAR AND WONDER
performance/public filming

Part 1

Exercises for 4 singers and 5 dancers

March 10 at 3 PM

Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre (foyer), Vienuolio St. 1

More information: http://cac.lt/en/other/general/12/5619

Part 2

Exercises for 6 dancers

March 15 at 5.30 PM

A. Mickevičius Library (reading room), Trakų St. 10

More information: http://cac.lt/en/other/general/12/5621

Partner of the project: Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre.

The exhibition is supported by the French Institute in Lithuania.

The exhibition has been carried out within the framework of Survival Kit with the support of the Culture 2007–2013 programme of the European Union.

Curators: Virginija Januškevičiūtė, Monika Lipšic, Inesa Pavlovskaitė.

Alex Cecchetti and Mark Geffriaud

THE POLICE RETURN TO THE MAGIC SHOP

La Guerre, Le Théâtre, La Correspondance

SATELLITE PROGRAM 4

from 01 March 2011

until 08 May 2011

Jeu de Paume, Paris

Alex Cecchetti is an obsessive interrogator of the ways world comes to us. He cannot stop wondering why things emerge, why they strike us with a power of lighting and leave us blind in consequence, and why some of the images they make remain after we die. Many of his inspirations are coming from literature and philosophy.

It is in this library of Babel where his dialogue with Mark Geffriaud usually takes place. “Why sculptures need to breathe?” Alex could ask, and Mark, playing along the lines of geometry, music and history of chance, would approach the story. He often searches for overlaps and lapses, time-warps and grey-holes of history. Making art for him is similar to production of tools of thinking or perceiving space. Yet when I’ve proposed Mark Geffriaud and Alex Cecchetti to collaborate to Satellite presentation I didn’t expect that the two would decide to embark on adventure to bring a flame of fire from Yanarta Mountain to Jeu de Paume and animate a series of sculptures with it.

Curator: Raimundas Malašauskas

This exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Théâtre national de Chaillot