Slight Agitation 4/4: Laura Lima

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"Slight Agitation" is a project in four chapters that includes site-specific works commissioned for the occasion and exhibited in the Cisterna spaces inside the Milanese headquarters of Fondazione Prada. The first three chapters featured Tobias Putrih (Slovenia, 1972), Pamela Rosenkranz (Switzerland, 1979) and the Austrian collective Gelitin.

With the project "Horse Takes King" (Laura mangia re) Laura Lima presents an eccentric experiment in which she tries to alter the senses that determine our perception, installing in the Cisterna spaces three large sculptures that constitute as many expressions of a taxonomic system to absurd appearance. 

The title of the intervention is a clear reference to the game of chess, able to create an illusory space in which the spectators can move freely even if they are not aware of a wider context that would explain the intent of the artist. The works on show, Bird (2016), Pendulum (2018) and Telescope(2018), invite the observer to elaborate what in astronomical terms is called "syzygy", a straight line configuration of three celestial bodies in a gravitational system. Pendulum (2018) 

is installed in the central hall of the Cistern , a mechanism that reproduces the movement of the Foucault pendulum and at whose end a painting is fixed. The public is invited to make assumptions about the origin of the canvas. In the space on the left there is Telescope

(2018), a vertical installation that houses a class of astronomy. The first level will be held every day at 12.30 and at 17 two astronomy seminars lasting half an hour, created by the scientists of LOfficina del Planetario, an association that deals with the planning of the Civic Planetarium in Milan. On the upper level, a telescope facing the sky is installed at a height of about 10 meters, accessible to the public under the guidance of an astronomer. 

The environment on the right of the Cisterna hosts Bird (2016), created in collaboration with the Brazilian artist Zé Carlos Garcia. The sculpture represents a huge animal that seems to have fallen from the sky and fallen into the exhibition space by chance.

The combination of these three works in the exhibition spaces calls into question the nature of the involvement of visitors in a space and in a place stimulating their perception: the artist explores the boundaries between imaginary and real to underline the poetic and absurd component intrinsic to what it is only real in appearance.