Italian artist Paola Pivi first gained international awareness for her striking and perplexing photographic work of a donkey floating on a small boat at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003. The work helped to form a reputation for the artist as someone working with an experimental and playful approach to objects, animals and materials in conjuring a variety of art forms. Although she had also been included in Harald Szeeman’s d’Apertutto, in the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, this was the image that captured the curiosity of the broad public, and established Pivi as an artist of multiple means, contriving works that disorientate and open up playful intrigue in adult viewers. Pivi began her studies in the Faculty of Engineering in Milan but soon changed to attend the Academy of Brera. It is perhaps this crossover from science to art that gives her an absurd and playful sense of reality. Pivi’s large-scale projects exhibit incongruous aspects of our everyday world, confronting the viewer with unexpected and fantastic situations. Her works place well-known objects in unusual contexts. As the familiar becomes unfamiliar, these unanticipated pairings impart modified meaning and function to Pivi’s everyday objects, thus exposing cultural and social conventions.

Cliostraat is a design group based in Torino, Italy. Since its birth, in 1991, Cliostraat intentionally aims to join multiple skills and different disciplinary approaches in name of a cultural and operative contamination, retained necessary to work across the indefinite boundaries of architecture, art and design. Cliostraat operates on the realm of contemporary urban territories, as part of a world-wide network of collaborations, experimenting different expressive forms with the purpose to enrich the procedures and techniques of the professional architectural practice. Today, various projects in the urban and architectural field for both public and private clients coexist with interior design works, exhibition design and temporary installations, in a very close dialogue with the world of art, as shown by several experiences of collaboration with cultural institutions as: La Biennale di Venezia, Triennale di Milano, Foundazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo per l’Arte Contemporanea (Torino), and Fondazione Pitti Immagine Discovery (Firenze). Cliostraat intends to explore new possibilities for design and architecture, and to trigger the production of new imageries for the inhabitants of today’s urban territories.