THE MATTER OF THE WORLD

GEREMIA CARRARA • FRANCESCA MAGISTRO
5 February – 19 March 2017
Exhibition, Video Installation, and Sound Performance

Geremia Carrara (b. 1970 in Naples) studied Visual Art, Music, and Performing Arts at the University of Bologna. Since moving to Cologne, he has curated numerous film programmes (e.g. Filmforum NRW) in cooperation with, among others, the Goethe Institut in Turin and Milan, as well as the DEFA (German Film Academy) Foundation.
Parallel to this, he also active as a critic and published various texts on film theory.
He has worked as a filmmaker for, among others, the WDR (West German Broadcasting Company), and as an artist realised video installations in Gelsenkirchen as part of the programme of the European Capital of Culture Ruhr.2010.

Francesca Magistro (b. 1979 in Turin) earned her MA in Documentary Photography from the University of Wales, Newport/UK in 2014. Prior to this, she had written a diploma thesis on the theme of Italian emigration, completing her course of studies in Visual Anthropology at the University of Turin. During her studies there, she was awarded one-year scholarships for both the University of Extremadura in Cáceres/Spain and the University of Cologne.
For her next photographic project, she received a DAAD grant to study at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen in 2016.
Sinxce 2014, she has been an active member of the Fotoraum Köln e.V., a platform for projects and exhibitions revolving around contemporary photography.

For more than ten years now, the MenschenSinfonieOrchester (MSO) in Cologne has provided living proof for something that so many people in our contemporary society have doubted is possible: People of the most varied cultural and social backgrounds work together side-by-side and with a great deal of success on dedicated projects.
The heterogeneity of the musicians characterises the work of the MSO, which has performed for and constantly inspired audiences throughout Germany since 2001.
The Cologne-based saxophone player and jazz musician Alessandro Palmitessa channels the synergies of the orchestra rehearsals and holds the reins as director. The MSO is ‘certainly one of the most unusual symphony orchestra in Germany’ (WDR).
17 musicians, distributed in various groups, including percussion, bass, piano, wind instruments, and vocals, create their typical orchestral sound with verve.
In ‘The Matter of the World’, the MenschenSinfonieOrchester is simultaneously source of inspiration, subject, and actor. Fascinated by the power of synergy, as well as by the ambivalence of the cultural and social differences among the members of the orchestra, the photographer Francesca Magistro and the filmmaker Geremia Carrara immerse themselves during rehearsals into the world of the orchestra and its individual members. Gently observant and investigative, they thus create poetic fragments of this unique conglomerate, without attributions and value judgements.