BIOGRAPHY

The LABOTIV duo was born in 2016 from the artistic complicity between Claire Clelia Baldo and Piero Viti. They work together on several series that question belonging, memory and human identities. For the past six years, and for the FATICA and DIPTYCH series, they have been developing a dialectical diptych approach, bringing their respective visual worlds into dialogue, using for these projects the photographic medium as an extension of the pictorial material by which they are both influenced.

Claire Clelia Baldo

Claire Clelia Baldo’s educational path is divided between Italy and France. Living torn between two worlds always brings with it a certain feeling of instability and loneliness. One becomes a wanderer of the world. Reality is constantly shattered, no longer compact and solid, but transformed into ever-changing facets. The search for footholds that can recompose the mapping of a reinvented identity is transcribed externally in images, in the constant exploration of an ideal middle ground, where we can recognise ourselves.

Before graduating in visual arts and photography at the University of Paris-VIII, Claire Clelia Baldo attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome and studied performing arts at the Cours Florent in Paris. In 2016, she moved to Venice where she met photographer Piero Viti, with whom she founded LABOTIV.

In 2022, together with Paul di Felice and Massimo Stefanutti, she founded the Italian association Oculus Foto Festival (OFF), which aims to develop projects in various fields of contemporary art, particularly in the field of photography and image-related expressions.

In 2023, Claire Clelia Baldo & Paul di Felice curated the group exhibition RIPENSARE IL PAESAGGIO vs RIPENSARE L’IDENTITÀ, at the Museo Palazzo Fortuny and Gallery Bugno Art Gallery. 

Piero Viti

Piero Viti has inherited from his father Luciano, a well-known philatelist, not only the love for collecting, but also and above all the rigour and sense of detail, the meticulousness, the concentration of the gaze on things, the precise and in-depth observation of reality as well as of the image, where the eye loves to scrutinise, like a probe or a microscope, the innermost recesses of everything it encounters or discovers before it.

Piero Viti worked with Franco Giacometti at the Camuffo agency in Venice (1985-1989), then as an ad man in Brazil, invited by the DPZ agency (1989). Back in Venice, he founded the political and cultural news magazine Nexus with Giovanni di Stefano and Andrea Pagnes (1993).

In 1998, after meeting Pier Luigi Cerri, he collaborated on the design of the inaugural exhibition at Palazzo Grassi dedicated to the Phoenicians, thus contributing to the major architectural renovation project entrusted to Gae Aulenti. He continued his experience in the field of graphics and design in Verona, where he worked on numerous image projects for the promotion of events in the city, before devoting himself exclusively to photography and drawing.

Exhibitions

2024 – 09-13 October 2024, Group exhibition ARS GRATIA ARTIS, StART KX 2024, London.

2024 – 01.03.24/24.03.24, Group exhibition SILENT TRANSITIONS, curated by Nataša Radojević and Chunmeng Yang, Aria Art Gallery, Florence, Italy.

2023 – October 2023/January 2024, Group exhibition TÊTE – À – TÊTE, curated by Nataša Radojević, Drina Gallery, Belgrade.

2023 – 7.10.23/15.01.24, Group exhibition Ripensare il Paesaggio vs Ripensare l’identità, FATICA, curated by Claire Baldo & Paul di Felice, Museo Palazzo Fortuny, Venice.

2023 – July 2023 – Artwork by Fabrizio Plessi in collaboration with LABOTIV – Piero Viti portrait, for the UFFIZI Self-portraits exhibition in Florence.

2023 – July/August 2023, Group exhibition “Spotlight“, Verena’s Dance, curated by Natasa Radojevic, Aria Art Gallery, Firenze.

2023 – KDA The Apartment, Installation Bestiarium Minimum, Belgrade

2023 –  XII Edizione MIA Fair 2023, (23-26 March), Verena’s Dance, Drina
Gallery in collaboration with Aria Art Gallery and FL Gallery Wizard.

2021 – October/December 2021, Exhibition OverAndAbove organized by Drina Gallery, curated by Nataša Radojević and Jelena Ðakonović, Firenze

2019 – August/September 2019, Nos Muses – collectif Calliope, 59 rue de Rivoli, Paris

2018 – March/October 2018, Exhibition Bernard Dumerchez Editeur, museum MuDO (Musée du Département de l’Oise à Beauvais), Beauvais.

2017 – December 2017, Venice International Performance Art Week, “CO-CREATION LIVE FACTORY – Prologue 1”, European Cultural Centre | Palazzo Mora, Venice.

Pubblications

– RIPENSARE IL PAESAGGIO vs RIPENSARE L’IDENTITÀ, Oculus Foto Festival, FATICA.

– 10.2023 Artribune / Zarabazà / Art Martin Cid Magazine / Artsupp / itinerarinellarte/ Ottiche Parallele Magazine / The Mammoth Reflex

– POSH, Digital Inspire The Future : Fabrizio Plessi, Posh 106, 2023.

– Plessi, The Soul Of Stone. Pushkin Museum, Moscow, 2017.

– Guillermo Gómez-Peña: Mexican (in) Documentado, 2017/2018.

– Preach R Sun, New Street Action (Neo Emancipation), “When the black man screams, the entire world will stop”.

– Balitronica, Balitronica Gomez is at Colonia La Nueva Santa María, 2016.

– The arts&science piece Stelarc wrote for the V&A Digital Design Weekend & Virtual Futures salon event – Alternative Anatomies – London, “Inadequate / Ambivalent / Indifferent – Complicit And Contestable Bodies”.