Castiglioni is pleased to present Beam Me Up, the first solo exhibition by artist Bianca Millan with the gallery. The title, inspired by one of the most famous phrases from sci-fi pop culture, serves as a pretext to explore the artist’s focus on movement, drifts, displacements, and traces. These elements are collected, analyzed, and reworked through a reappropriation that often modifies the reality from which they originate, engaging in a game of restoration, reinterpretation, and falsification.
The title is a clear reference to the famous phrase “Beam Me Up, Scotty!” used in Star Trek whenever the plot required teleportation. This solution originally served as a device for scene transitions that would otherwise have required more costly aesthetic and stylistic choices. In this case, there is no Scotty, or anyone to teleport (perhaps), but the gallery is transformed into an immersive environment, a space of anticipation for a hypothetical and metaphorical ‘teleportation’. However, it is not so much matter in its classical sense that is transported, but rather information, sound, collaborations, interactions, and their evolutions that, from passage to passage, transport to transport, become the central point of the exhibition and the artist’s work.
The first piece of information from which this chain of events originates is the audio track and the large white and blue installation/seating that greets the viewer upon entering. The audio track is the zero point of the Blue Traces project: an archive of the artist’s personal movements and displacements, which Bianca collects through GPS tracking. Since 2019, these lines of individual movement, in collaboration with musician Giovanni Di Giandomenico, have been encoded into musical compositions and audio tracks that over time have layered, continually giving new forms to the BT project. This is a work of personal and collective listening where the stratification of the listener’s experiences meets the artist’s biography.
The exhibition presents for the first time in Milan an audio track of 7 hours and 33 minutes that collects the artist’s movements from 2018 to 2019. Visitors are invited to listen while seated or lying on the installation at the center of the room: a device for waiting and contemplating the environment, where sensory planes begin to rarefy, and from which one can continue to follow the movement initiated by the sound. These lines ‘teleported’ into the environment create other versions of themselves—not the same object repeated or displaced in space, but a new and further version of themselves, maintaining all the initial information, reassembled differently, probably randomly, but definitively meaningfully.
The viewer can then begin to notice the objects on the walls, the sculptures surrounding this waiting room and completing it. These objects suggest ideas of navigation, measurement, or use in case of emergency. All elements inherent in travel. There are hourglasses, lanterns, cushions or life vests, wind socks or, more likely, memories of these. Their craftsmanship flirts with the sophistication typical of a sci-fi TV show; a taste that forces contemporaneity to serve a familiar and recognizable aesthetic with a ‘futuristic’ scent.
One can feel attracted by this familiarity and be led to make it one’s own, in an exchange of input and output with the information the artist presents to us. They are on one hand catalysts of experiences and on the other mechanisms of transmission. Just as in Blue Traces, the form changes state to transmit the information; in the same way, it changes the experience of those who encounter it, altering its form to preserve the message it carries.
During the exhibition, various moments of activation and stratification of the project will be presented. These different performances will take place inside and outside the gallery space. In collaboration with Sara Castiglioni, who curated the development of this musical and performative program, these events will be announced in the weeks following the opening and will involve the participation and collaboration of Elena Rivoltini and Nicola Ratti.
Bianca Millan, (1992, Milan)
Lives and works in Paris.
2022 Fine Arts, Gerrit Rietveld, Amsterdam
2018 LungA Art School, Iceland
2014 BA Politics and International Relationships, Università Cattolica, Milan
2013 Journalism and New Media UMASS International Program ISCTE, Lisbon
Solo:
2023 POUSH, Blue Traces Playlist From Paris to Paris, performance with Hector Cavallaro, Paris
2021 MINIERA, Blue Traces x Rome, Studio 33, live performance and presentation, Rome
DELAY #2, Spazio Mensa, Rome
Group:
2024 Areoporto, curated by Castiglioni e Thomaz Rosa, 2024, Sao Paulo, Brazil
2023 Ambientalism Without Politics is Gardening, curated by Erica Petrillo, ADI Design Museum, Milan
2021 La linea retta non appartiene a Dio, Contemporary Cluster, Rome
Portal 1l2021 U1 #01 – #05, curated by OMUAMUA Legacy, Milan
2020 DarkHawaii, curated by Omuamua Legacy, 2020, Milan
2019 5th Internet Pavilion, 57th Biennale di Venezia, curated by Miltos Manetas, Venice
Blue Traces for Miltos Manetas ‘Towards a Computational Existence’, MAXXI Museo, Rome