«Venice is a unique city, full of innovative ideas, a metaphor for humanity. A city that I love deeply, so much so that within the year I will move to live there “, said Didier Guillon, president, owner and artistic director of the Valmont group, the Swiss maison that includes the brands Valmont, L’Elixir des Glacier and Storie Veneziane, explains his unconditional love for the Serenissima.
But Monsieur Guillon is a well-rounded artist, president of the Fondation Valmont, founded in 2015 to spread contemporary art. And right in Venice at Palazzo Bonvicini, on the occasion of the Architecture Biennale, the Fondation Valmont has set up the exhibition “Alice in Doomedland” (until February 27, 2022): a metaphor of life through the bizarre and fantastic fairy tale “Alice in the land of Wonders ”, written by Lewis Carroll in 1865.
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Alice is no longer in Wonderland
Carroll’s Victorian novel represents the struggle against time, where rationality and imagination constantly collide, a tortuous path to understand who we are, what we represent and what we want to be, in perfect harmony with the difficult times we have lived, and still are. living, due to Covid-19. “Alice in Doomedland”, whose meaning is “Alice in a condemned land”, establishes a powerful emotional dialogue with the visitor, bringing out important questions about the human condition.
«The exhibition, through the works of four artists, becomes an authentic circular and personalized path – explain the two curators Luca Berta and Francesca Giubilei -. As with Alice, everyone will be forced to open certain doors, to pause to grasp the meaning of the works which are all interpretations of Carroll’s story ».
It starts with “The Garden Dreamers” a choral work by Silvano Rubino, Isao & Stephanie Blake and Didier Guillon, a sort of garden with a grassy mantle to enter a sensorial, symbolic and visual level of the exhibition. The first room is “Crossing. With eyes closed ”by Silvano Rubino, where through a slide, just letting oneself slide, one enters the multimedia installation, an invitation to open one’s mind, without borders and to accept the unknown. In the second room “Drink me!” by Isao & Stephanie Blake, a giant Alice dominates, made of recycled pieces, sustainability is the common thread of the itinerary, where the visitor rethinks his relationship with space. Finally, the third room “The Room of Tears” set up by Didier Guillon, in which the blue cages, a theme dear to the artist, are re-proposed, which lend themselves to collecting Alice’s tears, which then pour into a series of boxes containing questions for the visitor and push him to reflect on important challenges of contemporary man.