Performance: Lucia Pizzani

Artist Lucia Pizzani (b. 1975 in Caracas, Venezuela) creates a new performance work for one night only at Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art. Inspired by and responding to the works in the museum’s ongoing exhibition, Solar Mountains & Broken Hearts by Maya Attoun, the newly conceived performance joins sculptural, sound, and performative elements into one hybrid work for a live audience.

Titled Lava, Lucia Pizzani’s new performance work takes as its starting point the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815, the crucial inspiration even behind Attoun’s body of work. Relating to ideas of rebirth, transformation, and regeneration, Lava draws from black sand and movement, referencing the fertile soil resulting from a volcanic eruption and incorporates Pizzani’s series of ceramic Cuaima sculptures. Working furthermore with recordings from the Venezuelan sound archive Archivo Lares, Pizzani’s performance sets her own works and those of Maya Attoun in a shared continuum, while adopting the timing of Attoun’s video artwork Cry (Cybernetic Year) (2021).

Read an interview with Museum Director Tessa Praun about her thoughts on inviting artists to comment on other artistic practices here.

Hailing from Venezuela, Lucia Pizzani is a London-based artist whose expressive practice involves the body and self, always informed by materiality. One of Pizzani’s core concerns is the interrelationship between narratives of women in history and processes of metamorphosis in the natural world. She works across a variety of media, including photography, ceramics, videos, drawings, performance, and installations. Having worked as part of the environmental movement in Venezuela for many years, she has frequently incorporated ecological elements into her artwork. Her research and productions are often hybrid, syncretic and with no defined temporality, allowing the works to have multi-layered readings. Lava was conceived following an invitation by Magasin III Museum of Contemporary Art to the artist to artistically comment on and engage with key works in the Maya Attoun exhibition.