Shaun Gladwell
Ahead of the launch of a new body of work entitled SPAZIO TAROCCHI, commissioned by the artist’s friend and collaborator, Rinaldo Di Stasio for a new site-specific moving-image piece for Di Stasio Citta, VAULT spoke with Shaun Gladwell about risk, respect and the lure of Venice.
Image credit: SHAUN GLADWELL, Spazio Tarocchi (Palazzo Ducale, detail), 2025. Production Still. Cinematography: Roberto pio Di Monte. Commissioner: Rinaldo Di Stasio Images © The Artist Courtesy PALAS, Sydney, Australia. Galleria Enrico Astuni, Bologna, Italy. Studio la Città, Verona, Italy and Analix Forever, Chêne-Bourg, Switzerland
Shaun Gladwell is an Australian contemporary artist known for interdisciplinary, movement-based work exploring the body, space and technology, exhibited internationally. Rinaldo Di Stasio is a Melbourne restaurateur, cultural patron and collector whose 4-decade career bridges Italian hospitality, art, architecture and cultural life in Australia. SPAZIO TAROCCHI is an immersive video installation shaped through extensive field research across Italy, blending performance and moving image to create a dialogue between Australian and Italian cultures. It reflects Di Stasio’s long-term commitment to artistic and architectural projects that extend beyond conventional gallery and museum frameworks, grounded in sustained exchange, trust and a belief in “Culture Not Fear.”
Ciao Shaun, thank you for making time to talk about this extraordinary new work. I’ve been looking at the stills, including an image of you hanging from the bridge in Venice – that’s you, yes?
Yes, I was hanging from underneath several bridges in Venice.
How hard was that to do?
It’s not too difficult in terms of climbing. In fact, it’s pretty easy just to jump off a bridge, and things only become complex when calculating whether you want to survive the landing or not – it’s injurious or suicidal. If it’s something you want to Photoshop, jumping off the facade of a building and then running it as fact in a newspaper, it’s more like Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void, from 1960. It’s more of the idea of the leap in that case. SPAZIO TAROCCHI is more interested in the physics of the leap itself and what it means. To be against simulation (or Photoshopping). SPAZIO TAROCCHI may use AI to enhance images, but does not simulate risk, which is directly represented (and proven) in the work itself, with the inclusion of the police response to my unauthorised performances in Italian civic space. The exchange between the performer and the authorities is friendly. The police in Italy were always congenial – they were concerned, first and foremost, with my own safety, which was truly awesome.
Let’s talk its genesis. You’ve had a long relationship with Rinaldo, and this new work has come out of time spent together in Italy.
Yes, it’s very much a lived experience with Rinaldo, who is a friend and collaborator as much as a traditional commissioner. He suggests locations right through to restaurants the crew eats at that night, including new explorations and institutions he has frequented for over 20 years with his partner, Mallory Wall. We visit parts of Italy that are really dear to him: sometimes rustic, beautiful and open, or significant cities. I’ve explored quite a lot of Italy before; however, I’ve seen it again, afresh, with Rinaldo and Mallory. It’s been great. Obviously, they are people who are interested in art and culture in general. It starts to feel like a big commitment between 2 countries, Australia and Italy. Almost like, if we’re going to talk about a bridge, it’s a bridge that’s being built through art and culture. Rinaldo calls
this bridge-building ‘Italianality’.
What was it like to go back now in a different capacity? You were a younger artist when you represented Australia at the Venice Biennale. I remember that show. It was just so expansive.
I was also in Robert Storr’s show with Rosemary Laing (2007), 2 years before I represented Australia. Having this continued relationship with the city was important to engage through production in the making of SPAZIO.
It’s the bridge building?
The historical and cultural parameters
of this bridge are considered in this work. And it’s an important one for Rinaldo as well, because he was so adamant that we (Australians) have a strong presence in Venice. We really think about, support and cultivate that presence right down to the architecture. And this is why, again with Rinaldo, thinking in terms of architecture, total structures, building practices, especially the construction and preservation of national pavilions. It’s the Pavilion that Hans Ulrich Obrist curates so wonderfully through the Serpentine program (in London), but also Rinaldo. Some people would call the pavilion an architectural folly if they were thinking in terms of utility architecture. But for me, the pavilion is really interesting. And the Philip Cox Pavilion (for Australia) was amazing as a structure. I was really happy to be part of that. And it was like a demountable, but more beautiful, like a beautiful weekender. It was so great. There were some derogatory remarks about it being a surf shop. I didn’t think so – besides, I love surf shops. That’s where I live. I could go get a surfboard and just…
It’s very Warholian in a sense. You’ve been talking and thinking about this for some time, you’ve done several trips to Italy with Rinaldo, and now it’s a body of work, a new moving image work?
A moving image presentation. Yes.
I enjoy interfacing with Rinaldo on our respective practices. In a severely reductive sense, Rinaldo engages hospitality, but it’s so much more than that. His practice is a Gesamtkunstwerk, in the Wagnerian sense; it’s a total immersive experience. It’s gastronomic, aesthetic and philosophical in equal measure. Rinaldo also collects artists with commitment, not just individual works: Peter Booth and Jenny Watson, for example. Rinaldo will collect over a career rather than just 1 or 2 works to put up merely as decor in his restaurants. It’s not art as ornamentation but he integrates art into a Gesamtkunstwerk. SPAZIO will contribute to this axiology and fully integrate into Citta’s interior architecture. It will be a radically different screen format, but I even like the fact that Rinaldo would just project onto rendered concrete, like video frescoes.
There’s always a sensitivity around space, which is why I title this project SPAZIO, but then politically and aesthetically, it is ‘anti-Seagram’, which is a reference to Mark Rothko’s withdrawal from a commission for the Four Seasons Hotel in New York (in the Seagram building in 1958). I understand this strategy too, withdrawing and withholding… making a space sacred for art that you can meditate in, but that does not interest me with regard to the Gesamtkunstwerk of SPAZIO.
SPAZIO is more like an epicurean philosophy, which holds that the company you keep is just as important as the food you eat. So, wouldn’t that mean everything, including the art? It would be the company in terms of art, aesthetics (including music). I’m just playing a little part in an orchestra, but then orchestrating probably more than I ever have in Citta before, and that’s exciting.
One of the most beautiful things about going to Citta, aside from the food of course, is the artwork. I’m sure people go there for both. It always feels incredibly decadent to me, actually, sitting in an art gallery and eating. That seems like an outrageous thing to do.
Yes, I mean, obviously it’s a luxury problem, economically, but it’s also a luxury to have so much time with artwork – luxury in the sense of actually spending all that time. Putting time into being with an artwork, knowing you’ve got an infinite amount of time as a resource left, whether in your work, your work meeting, your day, your lunch, or your life – to invest how you wish to live, and whether this is a clear choice or not. And I think Citta’s a pretty amazing space, so beautifully curated. I mean, I’m not going to aim to solve the Seagram problem with this work, but it is a consideration – it does inform the work to a degree.
I’d rather sit in a more monastic or controlled space at times, but mostly I’m interested in social interactions and life intersecting with art at every possible moment. I also like the din and noise. The lull of voices and life as part of a soundtrack, for instance – this makes museums perhaps too rarefied and controlled as zones of contact with art. And there is a wonderful precedent for artists in restaurants. Like Martin Kippenberger, who had a 35% stake in an Italian restaurant in Venice, Los Angeles, called Capri. Kippenberger would perform for customers and harangue them with speeches. It was quite impromptu.
Can you describe the virtual reality component of the commission for Citta? How will people experience that in Citta?
The project I’m calling SPAZIO is being engineered and formulated now and will eventually have an XR component, developed over time. It will continue to grow in a way that is beautiful. It’s like a fractal L-system, as they call them in coding. It can develop – this aspect of SPAZIO is self-generative. But as far as the work itself goes, SPAZIO TAROCCHI or SPACE TAROT engages the Ludology, cartomancy and graphic language of Tarocchi, which emerged in northern Italy in the mid 15th century. At the same time, Italy is where scientists began mapping the planets and stars with greater accuracy than ever before – it is the emergence of modern astronomy. SPAZIO could be considered a meditation on the transitional space between astrology and astronomy – the transitions that occur during this dynamic period in Italian history – but the space is also above, in the stars, where these
2 fields gaze.
I engage these ideas simply through physics – my body against space. SPAZIO is also about the creative misuse of architecture and civic space, an ongoing theme in my practice that is pushed to new levels in this project.
I have always thought one of the most interesting things about what you’re making is that it is very much about you using your body in this incredibly physical way. The audience see the finished product, but the work is really the making of it – you in the moment making it – the performance.
Yes, I want to show the making of the work within the work itself – the work draws itself into existence. I am also attempting to describe the risk, if not the effort, in making it. But by slowing the images down, the tyranny of gravity is removed, and you start to observe the details and gesture grammar without it being a struggle against gravity. And sometimes, transfer or express something that happens when you’re doing it for real. The psychology of the performance. There’s a stillness to it, even for a single split second, or for a limited temporal window, before it starts to become a problem as you try to override other physical sensations, like fear, pain, spasms from lactic acid production… whatever. But it’s an interesting thing to do within performance art. And I really engage with this history of performance, especially from the 1960s.
I love the complete democracy of going into a restaurant and encountering something. And without a doubt, people would dine there and have no idea who you are, and then encounter your work.
Yeah. It’s a strange thing because it feels very natural for Rinaldo and me to do this in this way, but it’s rare to see in other spaces.
There are subtle, technical, and almost esoteric reasons why I’m doing this stuff, but it’s quite nice to situate that in a restaurant where simulated motion sickness is present or where there’s an interest in food type. I’m thinking of SPAZIO as a pure edit, because it changes once the work goes into a space, which is exciting.
Is the work, as you have conceived it,
a sequence, like a narrative?
It is a narrative of sorts, but then it gets re-sequenced through the strange and beautiful process of Tarot. I think of the work, and how I want to do it. In this last instance, I was making the work in Italy in 2025 and late 2024, and the performances were staged from the north, in Milan, to the south, in Rome and Naples. We started in Milano at the Fondazione Prada, where they installed a work I love: John Baldessari’s Blue Line (1988). And then we travelled to Venice.
It was great to be performing there (in the Fondazione Prada). I mean, they were really humble, just quick little sequences that meant a lot to me personally as a fan of both the Fondazione Prada and Baldessari, along with Hans Holbein the Younger, who features in John’s piece.
It’s like the risk of entering a museum to do this type of performance is again, balanced with respect. And so the respect is there. And then I was skateboarding in Milano’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (1877), which is a beautiful space. But also performed with respect, I’d only do it when there’s no one around and make sure that I’m doing the kind of skateboarding that doesn’t damage the marble floor.
Was it hard to get permission?
We didn’t get permission for that.
That’s a hit and run, like most of
the performances.
How exciting!
It’s still exciting, even when the risk is more to me than to the architecture or the space. And that’s where the respect comes in, because if I want to do something risky, I’d want to do it effervescently, like a sort of “physical graffiti”, as Led Zeppelin once said in an album title. You see it more as a kind of effervescent performance that doesn’t leave a trace, in contrast to the (semi) permanence of graffiti. And that’s why I have a trace recorded as video, and the memory of whoever else was there to see it, which is the real performance. It’s live, and it’s ephemeral. But to perform for a colleague with an iPhone or a team with a cinema camera changes the relationship to the performance, and it’s still those beautiful moments.
SPAZIO Viewings at Di Stasio Città
distasio.com.au
Shaun Gladwell is represented by PALAS,
Gadigal Country/Sydney
palas-inc.com
