Artist residencies in a variety of buildings scattered around the world, including those designed by Tadao Ando in Oaxaca and Alejandro Bustillo in Argentina, as well as the historic residences of a museum quarry in Cagliari and the Brownstone in New York. Performances stretched out over time and, at the same time, a fresh opportunity for creation, each residency marks a new stage in a journey exploring the intersection of geographies and cultures. The works arise in relation to their physical and cultural context, blending artistic languages and adopting ever-new approaches, shaped in part by the practical demands of living in these spaces.

The Cave I 2016

Designed for Cagliari’s City Museums, this project opens the new exhibition space Cartec (Contemporary Art Cave). Dug in the Middle Ages as a stone quarry, the cave served as an air-raid shelter during World War II and as makeshift housing in the post-war period. The project transforms this space into an underground construction site, an art studio, and a narrative workshop where installations, sound, performance, and visual art coexist. By turning both the cave and the surrounding neighborhood into a temporary living space, it reflects on key contemporary themes: reception, integration, and housing. The result of a four-month residency and an intense process of social excavation, the work draws on the memories of local seniors, workshops with local youth, and daily interaction with visitors. The exhibition unfolds across stations featuring works primarily created using a book-carving technique, alongside site-specific interventions and sound installations. Shaped books and Plexiglas fragments set into the rock walls bring to light geological strata, the ancient seabed, and the traces left by quarrymen. Cement centrepieces and crushed Ichnusa beer bottle tiles evoke family dining tables, the ruins of the 1943 air raids, and the protective symbols placed on historic buildings. Three large PVC panels recreate the cave’s division into living “units” for displaced families, tracing the physical and historical boundaries of the site. Four historic books dedicated to the Castello, Stampace, Villanova, and Marina districts are manipulated, folded, or shredded, echoing the shape of the Roman amphitheater, medieval battlements, and war ruins. An installation of 35 transparent La Marie chairs by Kartell, customized with blue film, evokes the motion of the sea and its permanent presence in the rock face. A record player plays the performance soundscapes created with musicians Francesco Serra and Francesco Brasini (featuring volcanic ash on the album cover), while a final video gathers poignant testimonies from the city’s collective memory.

Casa Wabi I 2017 is a retreat intended as a space for reflection and work in close contact with the natural environment offered by the Oaxaca coast and exchange with members of the different
local communities. It was designed by Japanese architect Tadao Ando and consists of studios and residential bedrooms, as well as various multipur- pose spaces. The name Casa Wabi
comes from the Japanese concept wabi sabi, which alludes to the art of seeking beauty in imperfection and the depths of naturalness. Chironi was invited by the Fundación Casa Wabi to
spend time in close contact with the beautiful natural surroundings. During his residency, the artist held a workshop for young architects that ended with a collective performance entitled
Nosotros somos el paisaje in which each of the participants wrote a leer of the title along the large wall bordering the beach. Inspired by the seing, Chironi has created this series of works.

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Casa Victoria Ocampo. Una maqueta con jirafas I 2019

Chironi has disembarked at the Casa Victoria Ocampo as part of the BIENALSUR initiative, and will be receiving the public on a weekly basis as he delves into the anecdotes and stories of the personalities who gave life to the first rationalist-style house in Buenos Aires. The disparaging description of the house, according to its own architect Alejandro Bustillo, as a “scale model with giraffes,” is the point of departure chosen by Chironi for his own contribution. Creating a dialogue between collage, videos and installation, he offers up an eccentric portrait of the city’s urban landscape with the house inserted into as some sort of alien element grafted into a district that is overpoweringly neoclassical in style.
Le Corbusier’s sketches of buildings in Buenos Aires are “intervened” with photographs taken by Chironi over the course of his daily commute from his apartment to the house: the anarchic dynamism of the city expressed through a hopeless urban jungle populated by animals struggling to withstand the invasion of the air-conditioning units which proliferate in the city. In the same way, what Victoria Ocampo commissioned of the legendary Swiss architect, which never came to fruition, is used as a vehicle to create a fragmentary reconstruction of the existing building. A “maculate giraffe” appears repeatedly as a motif in the form of a rug, triggering surreal associations which hint at the house’s origins. In spite of overseeing the building work. Bustillo never agreed with Victoria’s stubborn insistence on having the construction in the modernist style while the rest of the city was at the time fully under the sway of French neoclassicism. Thus, the architect is portrayed in this exhibition as a book, squashed under a table, while a radiant Victoria Ocampo invites people in to inhabit her house.
Curated by Benedetta Casini

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Brownstone building I 2023

Continuing a line of research developed through the exploration of important historical architecture, Chironi enriches it by living in an emblematic New York building: a brownstone dating from 1850 in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn. Imposing buildings constructed between the mid- and late nineteenth century, brownstones are distinguished by their high ceilings, elegant wooden floors, and elaborate decorations. The variety of forms and architectural styles used in their construction makes them among the most iconic buildings in New York, where they still represent the most widespread housing type today. The brownstones of Clinton Hill are considered among the best-preserved examples of nineteenth-century urban planning in the United States. This important piece of historical architecture was made available to Chironi by the Lacasapark Art Residency, a residency program based in Gardiner, in the Hudson Valley (New York).
Chironi spent a period of residency, study, and research inside the house, from March 22 to April 13, marked by moments of solitary work and exchange with visitors. On April 12, the residency hosted a collective gathering, during which the public could interact with the site-specific sound installation Musica da parquet, created in collaboration with the composer Francesco Serra. Through the sampling of sound elements from every floor of the house, a perceptual path was created that engages visitors as active participants in a process of redefining the acoustic identity of the place. The event concluded with a conversation with the curator Andrew Gardner on the theme of dwelling understood as a language.
For Chironi, the brownstone represents a privileged vantage point from which to understand a new part of the world and to explore the current conditions of our homes across different geographical contexts, reflecting on themes such as gentrification, post-pandemic living, the housing crisis, sociopolitical change, and climate change.