ABRASFERA
Jacopo Rinaldi
Jacopo Rinaldi’s environmental installation further develops and investigates reflection on colonialism and twentieth-century Italian history introduced in the previous chapters. The key element of the project is a sheet of metal in which a pattern is engraved which the artist builds through repetition of a graphic element, a design Rinaldi produced from an image Luigi Daniele Crespi made for Pirelli in the twenties. The hands hold each other while at the same time holding a rubber eraser, made of course by Pirelli. Unlike the original design, the artist has the hands wear white gloves like Mickey Mouse’s (first worn by the cartoon character in 1929, in an episode in which his character acts as a “snake charmer”, definitely “non-western”). This graphic element is therefore not so much a historic document as a visual note, the result of historic speculation and a thinly veiled act of accusation combining colonialism, exploitation of primary resources (such as rubber in Africa) and representation of otherness, in a constant process of expansion and negation, like the pattern spreading over the ceiling of Casa Testori, seeking to erase itself with the hands holding erasers.
