Bird’s-eye View

The project "Bird's-eye View" by Marinus Boezem, curated by Lorenzo Bruni, features a wide site- specific installation made with various birdseeds. The organic matter, animal nourishment and evocative of the natural life cycle, draws on the gallery floor the physical and conceptual space of the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi’s floor plan. The installation, which also includes tree branches on the walls and the work on paper evoking the performance L’Uomo Volante (1979), transforms the architectural interiors in a suggestive space where categories of exterior and interior, culture and nature, history and memory, reality and poetry, require to be reformulated. Boezem invites to reflect on the role of Art in re-establishing the present space and the time of sharing knowledge, focusing on the individual sense of responsibility in rethinking the community in a global and virtual world. Next to the installation Bird's-eye View (2019), the video A Volo d’Uccello (2010) documents a similar intervention made by the artist on the roof of his studio in Middelburg, and a selection of works (The Vanishing of the Artist (2019), God Bless You (1971/2013), Della Scultura e la Luce (1985), Cartografia (1980)) show how, in the course of his career and from different perspectives, Boezem dealt with the same themes evoked in the new project "Bird's-eye View".
"The title of the installation Bird's-eye View (2019) - explains curator Lorenzo Bruni - does not refer exclusively to the ideal condition of observation of the site-specific intervention: the perimeter of the Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi displayed in the gallery's white cube with various seeds on the floor, and the tree branches on the walls suggesting the imminent arrival of birds, as if there were no more separation between inside and outside. But it also refers to the artist's profound reflection on his long career, which led him to use the floor plans of Gothic cathedrals, such as those of Reims or Assisi, in various ways, decade after decade. In fact, the title of the exhibition “Bird's-eye View” focuses on Boezem’s research and compare between nature and culture started in the 1960s, with landscape’s interventions and reenactments of climate changes within the museums - an alternative proposal to the American Land Art of the same years –, continued during the 1980s with collages and environmental sculptures inspired by the “medieval perspective”. And it shows the interest of the artist, since the 1990s, for "landscape-sharing” at the time of global communications and social networks. It thus suggests the need to re-establish the concepts of observing and looking, since images are used not to communicate but to control reality. The artist has sought this specific topic since 2010 with landscape- works, adopting surveillance camera to make his videos, so that from every corner of the world and at any moment, night or day, people could follow the process of the work. The site-specific installation Bird's-eye View (2019) focuses on human being - through his absence, by representing nature and culture (the cathedral and the seeds) – inciting to take a position, both physical and conceptual, on how to observe and share not only the reality but also the stratifications of individual experiences and History."