4 boxing gyms in Northern Italy
Between the months of May and July 2002 Andrea Crociani visited four boxing gyms in Northern Italy and did a series of video shots and interviews with boxers in various categories, both amateur and professional. With the video material gathered he made a 40 minute film documenting the activity in the different gyms.
At borgovico 33 the video will be continuously projected in the entrance hall while in the principal space of the church, a 5 x 5 meter platform will be placed in the center serving as a sort of "ring" — "meeting" place — where the spectator can sit on the edge and read the magazine-paper the artist put together of the interviews he did with eight boxers. In this project Crociani focuses attention on the boxing world which is highly conditioned by stereotypes that are quite far from reality. Crociani makes a broader attempt to undermine preconceptions using investigation and a direct understanding of a specific situation.
Download the interviews


For Andrea Crociani, the artistic process is a privileged vantage point for analyzing reality and its products. Crociani’s reflections on the contemporary world are aimed at fettering out prejudice and clichés. The topic of violence and the relationship of force within society, takes priority as a subject for research. In his work, Crociani uses and re-elaborates images produced by mass media (newspapers, magazines, internet) on the computer and does in-depth investigation on themes that are particularly marked by widespread stereotypes.
The photographic series entitled Cocktails (1999-2000) is made up of various cocktail recipes illustrated with images pertaining to the Second World War; both images are taken from books. The combination between text and images generates an unusual reaction producing different sense elements. In the video L’archivazione è un’arte borghese /archiving is a bourgeois art (2000), 84 technical drawings of warplanes (viewed frontally, laterally and from above) are repeatedly projected for half a second.
The obsessive interaction transforms the initial formal beauty of the drawing into a signal of violence. Signor Errico Malatesta (2001), a one person show at the Juliane Wellerdiek Gallery in Berlin, is made up of a long text written by the artist on Errico Malatesta, the Italian anarchist. The text is available to the visitor at a symbolic price so that he can take it away with him for more in-depth reading. The text is accompanied by a video that shows the artist’s Berlin apartment with the objects that compose and define it, and five photographic portraits of Malatesta.


Andrea Crociani was born in Switzerland in 1970 and lives and works in Berlin and London.
He studied at the Brera Academy, Milan where he graduated in 1994.
In 1998 and 1999 he received a Swiss Fine Arts Scholarship and in 1999-2000 he was chosen for the Swiss Studio in Berlin program with residency for a year.



1997

1998
1999

2000
2001

2002


1995
1997


1998
1998
1998

1997-1999

2001

2001
2002
To cite some of his one person shows
Anonymous Collective,
Galerie Heinrich Schmidt, Grenzach-Wyhlen
Konsumbäckerei, Solothurn
Compleanno per i 18 anni della mia auto,
     azione, 16 giugno, Milano
Cocktails, Galerie im Parkhaus, Berlin
NB, (con Claudia e Julia Müller), Kunsthalle St.Gallen, St.Gallen
Signor Errico Malatesta, Galerie Juliane Wellerdiek, Berlin
4 palestre di pugilato del nord italia, borgovico 33, Como


A selection of group shows
Young Art, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern
Prix Fédéral des Beaux-Arts,
     Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Espace Arlaud,
     Lausanne
Fuori Uso, Pescara
Galerie ak programm K. Adamopoulos, Frankfurt/M
Eidgenössischer Preis für Freie Kunst,
     Museum zu Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen
Fragile, Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano,
     Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tourcoing,
     Liverpool biennial, Liverpool
Trading Spirit, TENT - Centrum Beeldende Kunst Rotterdam,      Rotterdam
If we were Kings, Kunst und Medienzentrum Adlershof, Berlin
L’immagine ritrovata.
     Pittura e fotografia dagli anni ’80 ad oggi,
     Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano,
E.N.E.R.G.I.E, site specific projects, with Anna Best, Brussels