APPUNTI PER UNA GUERRIGLIA
Andrea Mastrovito
In this room are collected three works (two videos and one installation) that continue backwards the walk of Testori family until Testori’s birth, alternating the levels of narration from my story to his one. This is the children room. Appunti per una guerriglia, made just with plastic tacks for children and with polystyrene, is a clear cross-reference, explicit even in the title and in choice of matierials, to the Arte Povera and its manifesto that Celant posted on Flash Art in novembre of ’67: the tautology is in the children (my grandchildren and one of their friends) who try, digging in the polystyrene, to find other tacks to reenact the “human-nature identification”, the primordial monster with a human skull, to “go back to that limited and ancillary planning, where the human was the centre and the spark of the reaserch, and not its instrument, not its vehicle”. The work was made in 2008 for L’origine delle specie at Biagiotti Art Project in Firenze, and it was completing a seven pieces cycle, all made by plastic tacks on polystyrene. On the wall in front of the installation there is a TV set offering two films with six years of difference between them but sharing the playful revisiting of classic tales for adults. In Nickelodeon, the Tim Burton’s Frankweenie (about a little Frankenstein that revives his dog) is photocopied frame by frame and reassembled by sliding, by hand, all the 10000 photocopies in front of the camera, obtaining again the original movie’s string in which both the assembly and the direction are actually entrusted to the artist’s visible hand. In Bawitdaba two toy animals, a monkey and a pig made by plastic, through a blob movie in which every scene is reconstructed with recycled materials and the sound is exaxctly the one of the original movie, they play the myths of the great cinema, from Dr. Strangelove to Shining, from The Blair Witch Project to Nosferatu and One Flew Over theCuckoo’s Nest, and so on. I always offer this video with heart: it’s the first work I showed in an actual exibition (Italian Boys at Analix Forever, in Geneva) and it was also the first one I sold for my happiness and Zizi’s (the director of the movie) one, because we got 125 euro, each!
