Sunday 19 July, 6-7pm at the Chelsea Physic Garden, 66 Royal Hospital Road, London SW3 4HS
ICI London presents The Fable of Mia, a performance by Alice Visentin
The Fable of Mia begins in Frassinetto, a village of 200 or so people in the mountains to the north of Turin. Friends of Visentin’s gathered there last year at the home of Vincenzina Collavo – the artist’s grandmother – to escape the worst of the summer heat. It was from that fleeting community that a collective drawing emerged. As the week unfolded, more than 90 metres of paper was coloured, cut, glued and re-arranged by Visentin and her casual collaborators into something resembling a narrative with Vincenzina’s dog, Mia, as protagonist. A stray from the south of Italy, Mia was transported north through a relay system known as the staffetta. A life largely undocumented, and now reconstructed on paper through collective imagination.
Visentin’s practice has long manipulated the mechanics of the moving image: how stories are assembled and disassembled. Working with a hand wound scroll, The Fable of Mia activates the drawing as a kind of cinema through the performance of winding and unwinding. Fragmented fantasies of Mia’s life surface and then disappear – a faltering non-linearity is built into the structure of the work – both in its making and in its showing.
For its presentation at Chelsea Physic Garden, Visentin is joined by performer Verity Coward and interdisciplinary artist Magda Antoniazzi whose original score, composed by Antoniazzi with only a synthesizer and tape deck, accompanies the unravelling. The score’s repetition divides the presentation into three chapters, functioning as a movie’s theme song might. The appearance of a larger than life Mia cutout signals the performance’s beginning and end – Visentin’s version of opening and closing credits – extending the filmic logic behind the performance.
Alice Visentin’s performance The Fable of Mia is a project produced by the Italian Cultural Institute in London, curated by Ben Broome, and presented in collaboration with Chelsea Physic Garden.
ICI London is pleased to offer you a free ticket for this event, please book your place HERE
Alice Visentin was born in 1993 in Castellamonte, Italy, and lives in Turin. She is currently a PhD student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, where her research explores gossip as a performative and relational form of storytelling, oral transmission and collective knowledge production. She is also a research resident at the Warburg Institute, London. Working across painting, installation, performance and storytelling, Visentin explores intimacy, fantasy and oral transmission as ways of constructing alternative narratives and emotional communities. Her practice often draws on vernacular traditions, childhood fantasies and theatrical languages, creating spaces where personal stories intertwine with gossip, rumour and collective mythologies. Recent projects include solo exhibitions at Peep Project, Philadelphia, and Gió Marconi, Milan. In 2024, she was awarded the Italian Council 13 grant for Gossip Divination. Recent and upcoming projects include Gasworks, London, the Warburg Institute, London, Fondazione Cerruti, Turin, and The Fable of Mia, curated by Ben Broome at Chelsea Physic Garden in collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute in London.
Ben Broome is an independent curator & writer based in London.
Chelsea Physic Garden. Since 1673, Chelsea Physic Garden has been evolving with the world around it. Today, as a four-acre green space in the heart of London, the Garden contributes to the city’s biodiversity and provides a place for people to connect with nature. Chelsea Physic Garden’s plant collection focuses on medicinal, herbal and useful plants, uniting people to plants that heal.