Chiara Ambrosio (& friends)... RAFT: A FRAGILE DISPLAY

About

Part exhibition, part shrine, part alchemical laboratory, The Horse Hospital will be transformed into a raft, its walls covered in paper over which Chiara will evoke the spirit of the city with humble mediums to create a fragile display, a constellation, a monument, a temporary site-specific configuration of people, objects, practices, ideas, histories, dreams and visions.

An artist’s studio, a living archive, and an aerial- receiving and broadcasting at once- RAFT will constitute a temporary autonomous zone of convergence and exchange, a crossroads where people and ideas will meet in a constant state of emergency. 

Expect the unexpected: films, works on paper, amulets, performances, stories, books, incantations, song, sound and more, in an ever shifting and changing phantasmagoria of light and shadow.

To accompany the exhibition, Chiara has curated a RAFT festival; this programme emerges from a deep urge to celebrate alternative and eccentric narratives, voices, and bodies, tracing the lines of connection between them to create a vision of the city as a garden, where chance collisions, juxtaposition, collaboration and personal histories create a radical alchemy; a powerful and hopeful alternative communal space- a vessel- to hold our collective dreams and expectations together and afloat. 

RAFT is an ark, a garden and a temple.

RAFT is a vessel for home-grown and independent organizations, individuals, spaces, and members of the audience and of local communities. 

RAFT is an antidote to the rising tides of social and cultural erasure in the city. 

RAFT is a monument, an elegy to London- both its real and dream spaces.

RAFT is a shelter.

RAFT is an ongoing project by filmmaker and visual artist Chiara Ambrosio, which includes a feature film and a monthly radio show on Resonance 104.4fm.