TIRANA, June 1 – Italian artist Nico Angiuli is exploring the relationship between agriculture, power and labour in a solo exhibition in Tirana. The 34-year-old contemporary artist is showcasing three video works, a sculpture installation as well as a selection of materials collected during his one-year research focused on the northern Albanian city of Shkodra.
In Shkodra, Nico Angiuli together with a group of local workers and artists, researched into the cultivation and production of tobacco. Taking the cultivation of tobacco in Albania and its historical, social, economical and cultural developments as a starting point enabled Angiuli to work with archive materials in Albania and Italy, meet with local experts, artists, historians that led him to the completion of this complex project, organizers say.
The research and the work produced during his residency at Tirana Art Lab is part of an ongoing project on the techniques and technologies of rural societies in post-industrial Mediterranean area in collaboration with local communities and farmers, artists, dancers, historians and experts of agricultural mechanization. The final aim is to create a video archive of gestures linked to the main agricultural crops in Western societies.
Nico Angiuli’s “Smoke. Biomechanics of Power” at the Tirana Art Lab exhibition remained open from May 30 to June 5.
