ZOÈ GRUNI		Biography
Le Americhe		Catalogs
curated by ANDREA ALIBRANDI
7 february – 18 april 2014

The Americas by Zoè Gruni is an exhibition that brings together the most significant moments of the last four years of her work. It ties a personal path between North and South America through the Metropolitan Legend, which started in Los Angeles from 2010 to 2011, and then two projects that came to life in Brazil between 2012 and 2013 in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, La Mérica and Boitatà.
The Cryptid, which are photographs that the artist had manipulated, are the characters that animate the Metropolitan Legend. They live in non-places and are part of the legends which were born within systems of media communication that is fast and schizophrenic, in which true and false, real and unreal loose their sense.
La Mérica – a split-screened video – focuses on one side, on a cave at the Parque Lage in Rio, like a piece of forest in the city center, a true paradise lost, and on the other, on a golden parrot, which refers to the Brazilian mines and carnival. The background melody, Italia bella mostrati gentile, was written in 1896 by an unknown author, during the great immigration wave of Italians to Brazil, re-discovered and sung by Tuscan ethnic musician Caterina Bueno.